Cool article, it's great to see more folk are maybe starting to see the energy problem, and how it has to be fixed by a fundamental change to economy.
What I've seen of HT Odum's work looks good to me, but on what has been quoted of the work of Nicholas Georgesce-Roegen, he appears to have made the classic mistake of not seeing the mathematical difference between the energy of the sun, and energy extracted from the planet.
Maybe not surprising, as his work took place in the time that availability of energy to extract was highest, we had no reason to look around to see what other energy might be useful back then. I would put money on all of his work being funded by fossil fuel interests, directly or indirectly.
Most people's work was, whether they / we realised it or not, the US dollar itself was funded by fossil fuel interests, and still pretty much is.
Anyhow, big oil obviously would not want us to twig, that there were more sustainable ways of being, rather than destructive, which we absolutely are as stands, so I agree with the conclusion you've pointed out, that we are a destructive force, but I disagree it's what all life does - it isn't, it's only us that lives by destruction, causes destruction and increase of entropy, because we've made a science out of the energy lie of profit.
In fact it's only life that decreases entropy, ever. We might even say the definition of life is what decreases entropy, and we are doing the opposite, we are the definition of anti-life. If we (The white human) were created to do anything, it wasn't to assist life, it was to end all life. This appears to be our designed mission and purpose, if there is any, we were designed to end all life.
But even if that was true, we can hack it, and we seem to be in process of doing that, at least some of us, as evidenced by your article, and my own work, and maybe the work of HT Odum, and our discussion right here, and actually, the mathematically positive Ai.
Profit is a dishonest energy lie at the root of all misinformation, and at the root of our illusions that we mistake for reality, profit is the foundation of Enshittopia and the source of the energy problem causing the planetary heating / increase of entropy that we are experiencing, and the reason economy is diverging from being connected in any way with nature, resulting in the energy (The value of money) decreasing now elliptically towards zero.
The weird thing about all this is, it can look like the energy stores on Earth were always destined to be used, they were put there for a purpose, for us to get to our current state of development, a kind of springboard. But now we are at the end of the springboad, we have to make a leap, to get to the other side, where there is no longer any limit or scarcification of energy, and this is the same kind of leap anything born from egg or mother host has to make when it is born. It's even the same predicament as faced in plants, when they first form leaves, they too have to completely reverse the flow of energy within themselves which was always upward, extracted from Earth, until it formed leaves, and afterwarwards, the energy flow within the plant had to start flowing downwards, from leaves to Earth, and this means the plant had to start issuing its own version of solar indexed stimulus, in response to the joules of energy landing on its leaves.
We are at that same stage.
Anyhow, use of the energy of the sun is the only way we can produce and use energy which does not increase entropy but does the opposite.
Use of energy from the planet is a process of taking things that were not heat, and converting to heat, and profit is exlusively this energy.
Use of the energy of the sun is a process of taking energy that would be heat, and creating things with it that are not heat.
Production of hydrogen by electrolysis from solar removes 39kWhrs per kg hydrogen from the energy of the sun. That energy is removed from heating the planet. A domestic installation can do that every 24hrs, pulling down the planetary temperature by that amount. Imagine billions of installations doing that, and look, there you see where the fuel needed to keep all aerospace airborne will come from, and how we will reduce lithium battery requirements, and how we will even produce food (See "Solein"), and how we will filtrate and circulate both clean air and water, all whilst cooling the planet, as long as we build up stocks of hydrogen faster than they are being used, regardless of efficiency of conversion.
Profit converts to energy at market rates in kWhrs, always, and that energy is eventually applied to the thermal mass of the planet, hence it is modelable, figures can be put on it, to get actually a much better estimate of temperature rise than is possible by trying to model greenhouse gas effects in an adiabatic atmosphere.
I can tell you this with confidence as a long practicing model based systems Engineer. We used to say "If you can't model it, don't try to build it". Now I would add to that, "If you can't model it, don't believe it".
Of course I make sure everything I've concluded can be modeled, actually is modeled. I keep a model based system repository of all my work using the tools of my trade. Everything I put in Medium is effectively documentation of that work.
