Brilliant article, thanks for posting. There are so many things about trees which are not appreciated, we have a lot to learn from them.

Another thing not appreciated is that we can work with them by copying their function.

It seems to be little accepted, as yet, but when we do the systems analysis, there is undeniable evidence that trees transfer energy from the sun, to Earth.

Look at the power absorbed by the leaves of a tree, it is many kilowatts, for the duration of every sunny day, for the lifetime of the tree. Use that to compute the Joules absorbed over the lifetime of the tree; it comes to a lot, far more than we can argue is kept within the tree.

So it contributes energy to Earth, presumably via nutrients emitted from its roots.

All of the energy that we can't account for in the final analysis of the energy content of the carcass of the tree at the end of its life, is conducted to Earth during its lifetime.

When we look at what other mechanisms transfer the energy of the sun to the landmass of Earth which is not underwater, there are none. Trees, and all its extended family with leaves, are the only one.

So the function of the tree in the grand energy System, is that it is the interface between all of life, and the energy of the sun.

This is incredibly important, because not knowing about it is part of the illusion we have about what energy means, how it really works.

And the reason we don't know about that, is because we don't know how trees work.

When we see this, we get a much better feel for how energy works.

It comes from the sun, to Earth, always, forever, via trees.

So when we remove significant amounts of trees, we are reducing the energy received by Earth, by removing its means to absorb energy.

There are no magical sources within Earth, from which we can extract unlimited energy, or even any kind of energy without destruction of things created by nature, replacing those with toxic pollution.

So there is only one acceptable source of energy for humanity, that is the sun.

When we use that like trees do, we create no pollution, because we destroyed no materials created by nature.

Now when we look at the earliest stage of the life of a tree, before it forms leaves, we might notice it has to draw its energy exclusively from Earth, just like us.

After it sprouts its first leaves, is when the energy flow from Earth changes direction, to the opposite, flowing from leaves to Earth, conducting the energy of sunlight to Earth.

We might describe the energy needed to grow the tree shoot to the point it sprouts leaves as negative, and the energy flow in the other direction, from sun to Earth, as positive.

Then we might notice that the energy use of humanity, until very recently, is exclusively negative.

There, we see a kind of deficit, something we've used forever, but never really put any back.

The real Grand Ponzi is an energy Ponzi.

But now we might notice we are sprouting our human equivalent of leaves, in the form of solar farms, all over Earth.

When we look at our human economy, with this in mind, we realise every promise to pay is a promise to extract.

But the sun pushes energy to us, and all of life for free.

So we don't recognise the value in sunlight.

Yet we see it converts directly to hydrogen fuel which we can burn/consume with no pollution, and money via proof-of-work tokens, and even food (See "Solein"), all incredibly valuable products.

Then we notice we are not monetising those, by reflecting their product with issue of money.

This breaks the Austrian Economics principle of all money being backed by product, therefore manifests as the value of currency dropping.

The only way it can be maintained, is by issue of money reflecting the product produced.

So we see here the real reason for inflation.

Energy is being brought into the human economy, despite money not being issued to reflect it, and since it is the energy which is the real thing of value, not the money, of course the money has to drop in value.

The corollary of all of this is not that we will find solar farms something we create to compete with trees, but something we creete to work in harmony with trees.

With the energy from solar farms, we will no longer need to remove trees, in general, as we will be getting our energy independently of them, though there might be some displacement in local cases, we won't need to replace any area like the Amzon rainforests, effective collection of solar energy is done in a distributed form, that is the nature of solar energy, it is distributed.

Hey-ho, sorry if my rambling distracts in any way from your story, I mean it to be something that complements.