Keep going Indi. If I was to try to offer any kind of "Guidance" imho, we need a tiny bit of faith that there is a way out. I was a big David Greaber fan also, unitl he sadly was taken from us, prematurely imho, and also still of Michael Hudson who I trust is still with us, alive and well.
The worst thing we can do right now, is start thinking it is all over, when it absolutely doesn't have to be, but will be if we don't have enough faith to leap out of the fatal loop of extracting energy from Earth.
I have a lot of respect for people who thought enough to study the Sumerians. Of course we can learn from them, but we should be able to see they didn't have it right, otherwise they would still be here,. We would be them, rather than something different. So their model is not the one to copy.
Specifically, they seem to have missed how to use the sun effectively.
This has to be the test of every "Intelligent" species on Earth in history to date. So far none have passed it. The test is how to live truly sustainably.
I don't know if they all made the same mistakes, all I see is right now we could be making the same mistake as the Sumerians, and definitely the Romans.
Our mistake is to keep taking the Joules of energy from Earth, that the sun put there over millions of years, with no intention or understanding that they have to be paid back, and the only energy source we can do that with is the sun.
I think continuing down the trace like you do, working out all of the things that had to contribute to our lives to date, should take you to the same conclusion as me; we are stealing energy from the planet, which was all put there in the first place by the sun, over millions of years, and we take that energy at a rate much higher than the sun can put it there.
Our economy of money-as-debt ties us into this, since money issued as debt can't reflect the Joules of energy from the sun that we are nonetheless putting to use, because the Joules received from the sun are donated to us, rather than the product of any work of extraction, and money-as-debt can only translate to promises to do work (Of extraction, when all else is said and done).
So it is a pretty fiendish problem, but there is a quick short-circuit that can be done, and probably will be done, if we have that little bit of faith needed to make it work.
It is to issue massive free money to all people as needed for all to install sufficient community solar infrastructure with hydrogen backup, relieving our burden from centralised energy grids, and renderng those redundant.
We saw the kind of money needed already, and some of the beneficial effects, when 4Tn was issued per month, in the US, oil prices went negative priced, and the environment took the only positive spike of recovery seen to date. People were voting in markets with free money, not interested in profit, but to support bankrupt companies offering products they still loved, like Hertz, amongs others, and they voted categorically against oil.
A world without oil might seem to petrol-heads like hell, but to be honest, I am a former petrol head myself, even working directly in Aerospace as a Systems Engineer, on systems including fuel transfer systems, and to me, the world we could have with hydrogen sourced from solar is infinitely better than anything we've seen to date.
I look forward one day to driving my own hydrogen converted Bugatti, that would make the shit I've had to take from folk skeptical of my line in Medium all worthwhile. Well not really, but it would be a cool sweetener :)
