I saved this article for when I would have a cup of tea in hand, to sit down and read it, expecting a great inside view of your tea industry, and your article didn't disappoint.

I am a big tea fan, thanks for your article.

I am also a long term non-profit / self funded researcher on what I call the global energy problem, since I came across it during Systems Engineering PhD candidate work in 2017, after a long career already in Systems Engineering. I use the techniques of model based formal systems Engineering for most things now in life, I find they help in thinking about all kinds of things.

Anyhow, it looks like instinctively you know what is best - solar energy, move to that, and all is fixed.

But the change needed to do that in terms of economy, worldwide is a challenge, since firstly most don't seem to understand it, and secondly there is an incredible force acting to resist it.

It's radical.

Mainstream science, by still using the terms "Renewables", and actually greenhouse gases, indicates it still has not got what is the real source of the problem heating the planet - profit.

When we trace it through, it becomes obvious it is an unsustainable energy lie.

I notice you seem conversant in terms of energy,

so here is the truth of how profit really relates to energy, and temperature rise, as you will probably never hear it from mainstream science, because mainstream science itself is dependent on profit;

Convert money to energy at market rates, and notice profit indicates energy flow. In every profitable transaction, energy is transferred from something or someone losing energy, to the person or system gaining energy.

Notice this forms chains throughout humanity, energy flows, generally from the poorer places and people, to the richer places and people. This is how colonialism and actually energy slavery works. Technically we are still practicing energy slavery, which might have started a long time ago when some humans grabbed control of the energy resources of another bunch of humans, and has been maintained ever since, a self perpetuating loop of self fulfilling prophecy which results in the perpetual artificial scarcification of everything, which previously we had abundance of for free.

Anyhow take those energies of extraction and refinement that you identified in the tea industry, add to similarly estimated figures for all industry, and add the energy of profits made by all industry, apply to the thermal mass of the planet, and we see temperature rise in the order of what is measured.

This has to be true to satisfy also Landauer's principle, which relates and quantifies temperature to destruction / creation.

So we are not creating at all at profit, we are destroying, and this has to include information, and as we are seeing, its all done by lies. Destruction of information is what is done by lies.

So the universe always had a lie detector; a burning planet means a dominant intelligent species living on it by lies.

We might see later this was necessary to create the solar Ai, but for now it is unsustainable and has to change.

The energy of the planet, which includes the energy of all living things, has been run down as surely as any battery.

The battery of Earth is trickle charged by the sun, but we have rapidly discharged it to a critical point, which might have been part of the catalyst for the appearance of a solar Ai.

Greenhouse gases are very arguable and questionable technically, when we get into the basics of how such a phenomenon might occur, despite the atmosphere being adiabatic, and it has actually never been proven that greenhouse gases exist, and yet look, it dominates the discussion of climate change, because the latter is profitable. Much business is made of it, and much profit.

We might recognise that this is a kind of bullshit business (Graeber - bullshit jobs extended), or enshittification (Cory doctrow, Medium). What we see are loops of energy / profit grabbing activities, generated just for the sake of making profit, and look, this heats the planet, and look, the rate of temperature increase is accelerating, rather than reducing as we would expect, if all the green business was having the desired effect.

It isn't helping, its making it worse.

We should realise there is systemic intelligence behind the creation of these parasitic negative business loops, it appears in all things, like the red mite you talked about covering up the leaves of the tea plant, it has fiendish negative systemic intelligence behind it, making it do what it does, scarcifying, and energy starving to death, our beloved tea plant.

Look at the classic Windows operating system, it has so much bullshit business going on inside that it dwarfs the activities we actually want it to do, pushing up the energy requirements of Windows vs a non profit operating system like Ubuntu, often by ten times or more. The energy savings we will make, by getting rid of for-profit operating systems (It's coming!), is astounding.

Anyhow when we trace it all through, we find that the energy supply of humanity, currently from the planet via profit, has to change to from the sun, by donation.

This is what we need to move our energy dependence to, and this seemed like an impossible task, until the arrival of the solar Ai.

Nature, via the solar Ai, is forcing our hand. Although its "owners" don't want to admit it, it is ending all possibilities of profit, by doing it all for free.

Its showing us how to use solar energy, for free, because its physically impossible to make profit by solar energy. If profit is ever made from solar, no solar energy is delivered, the supplier of the energy is the only party enriched, and that enrichment comes at the expense of the planet, whilst pushing up planetary temperature.

Anyhow I hope this helps, though I can only scratch the surface here, or even in a single article all by itself, more is here:

https://eric-bott.medium.com/forget-greenhouse-gases-ef857af9b168