I agree with you completely, from a technical formal Systems Engineering point of view also, to me all of this comes down to energy, and where we get it from. Apologies lengthy reply needed here to explain.
The energy we all need, about 150 Joules per second per day, comes to us via money. Most of us have to get that by putting in some labor, or by profiting by sales of something, or if we are “criminals”, as are many businesses nowadays, just demanding it from others giving nothing in return.
All of this comes from energy extracted from Earth, profit is the instrument mutually dependent on energy requiring labor in return, even if that labor is only in the form of the energy needed to split atoms. If it comes from materials or stored energy fields on Earth, it is extracted from Earth.
But now we have the technology and are using it to receive the Joules of energy from the sun. These Joules are very different from those extracted from Earth, they are donated for nothing, the sun asks nothing in return. Further they are mathematically positive, adding to Earth, whereas the Joules from extracted energy are subtracted from Earth.
In terms of thermodynamics, more use of Joules from the sun has a cooling effect on Earth, whereas more use of extracted energy has a heating effect.
This is because energy converted to anything except heat, has to result in cooling. So it follows that converting things nature created from energy, to energy for our use has to result in temperature rise. This is beyond all arguments over climate, which we can all see is deteriorating rapdily.
The truth is in all our history, at least as long as we've had industry, all we've done is remove far more Joules put to use on Earth than than we put in.
Our financial debt translates more or less directly to an energy deficit, to our planet.
Life itself, is Joules put to use, and we've destroyed far more of that than we've created.
Hence the pickle we are in.
But the good news is that if we look around at how nature works, we can see how things can, and are being put right, by nature.
A plant does exactly the same thing as we've done, in its lifetime.
It starts by taking an energy overdraft from Earth, to form its first leaves. After that, the energy flow through its body flows from leaves to Earth, and it grows to many times the size it was as a shoot, to supply many thousands of times the energy back to Earth from the sun, than it took out, so the net effect to Earth, done by every plant, is a kind of energy profit. The Earth profits in terms of energy by all plants.
Humanity just formed its first leaves, in in the form of solar farms and communities all over Earth.
We have the technology via hydrogen to replace all fossil fuels with fuel created directly from that energy from the sun, and we are starting to do that also, noticing we can even create food directly from the same hydrogen, independently of the conventional food chain (See "Solein"), allowing the latter to recover.
The one thing standing in the way of us quickly changing over to this new truly sustainable, Earth beneficial, creative mode of existence, is money, issued only as debt.
Since the energy of the sun is for free, nothing asked in return, the only way money can transmit that energy, is for money to be issued for free, as a kind of UBI, issued in response to the Joules of energy received, issued to all people.
This is the part that banks and pretty much all profit driven industry, and profit driven people ourselves, have a big problem with.
Nobody wants to believe they spent a lifetime saving, just to have the value of what we saved trashed by availability of free money to everyone, even criminals, and other folk who we might believe never contributed.
But the truth is the less a person contributed, the less damage they were responsible for, so why should they not be rewarded for that?
Anyhow, digging deeper into motivations, we start to realise that everything "Evil" people do, is always in the interests of profit, which is only possible in a mathematically negatively fuelled world, as it is now.
After we make the required change as a species to mathematically positive energy, things change for the better in ways we can't even dream of yet.
Looking again at nature, and life, we might notice anything born undergoes a transition, from dependendence (And load), on the energy of its mother host or egg, to dependence on the environment of the mother host.
This is what we are doing right now, after thousands of years of being energy dependent on Earth.
The inflation we are seeing in money, is nature's way of devaluing it to nothing, until we start issuing it, for nothing.
To make it happen faster, minimising pain, whilst saving maximum "Hands to the pump", needed to put things right by using maximum solar energy, (regardless of efficiency!), after the transition, I would say to anyone and everyone; demand the free money. You/we, and the planet, are actually owed it.
We have nature (Including AI!) on our side in this argument, and she always wins.
For numerial proof, see the article below:
