Keith the depth of your knowledge on this stuff is obviously huge, your responses are very valuable, and never cease to impress me.

But, compared with previous financial upsets, this one is fundamentally different, this time something physical is happening which I don't think pure economists are seeing how it has to work yet.

If I interpret correctly, you believe the old zero sum system is going to be maintained, whilst to me that looks physically impossible. This inflation will rip all bounds off any seen previously, if it is not reacted to in the way nature demands. The forces at work here are far bigger than any government can try to hold off.

If I could liken it to something in nature, humanity seems like the shoot of a tree, which has spent all its time do date, drawing its energy up from Earth, so as to get itself to its current stature of just starting to sprout its first leaves.

Inside the tree shoot, the flow of energy has always been upwards, in the form of nutrients, being physically hauled up into the shoot, out of the Earth, to fuel its growth.

But now the shoot is sprouting its first leaves, with solar energy coming into those, the flow of nutrients upwards is already starting to slow, as more and more energy comes from the leaves multiplying and growing, themselves almost fully powered only by sunlight.

The rate the leaves are growing at, relative to the rest of the shoot, is much faster than the shoot itself. (We saw Vietnam, for example, go from almost zero solar, to more than eight times the capacity of its grid, in about 18 months.)

That experience of hauling nutrients upwards to feed itself, is like the experience we've had to date, doing the work of extraction to obtain all of the energy we used before solar.

But solar comes in with no work, it is delivered to us on a plate, no work per Joule has to be expended to receive that energy, after the interface to receive it is put in place. Therefore it can't be represented by money as debt. Continuing to issue money as debt, is like the tree shoot trying to signal to the nutrients to keep hauling energy upwards, when all the while the work needed to do that becomes more and more, against the flow of nutrients being pushed in the opposite direction, driven by solar energy.

Ironically, we are not even counting the magnitude of that reverse flow, as long as we only issue money as debt, all we see is it becoming less and less useful, therefore it loses value in markets.

It is physically unsustainable.

The only way we can quantify the reverse flow, is to issue money on it, and that money has to be for free, because the energy is coming in for free.

We see it manifesting as costs rising to values previouely unimagined. The negative oil prices we saw was when the 4Tn stimulus was being issued. That being for free, did actually represent the reverse flow. We only saw that once, but I am certain we will see it much, much more, after we formally acknowledge the real power of solar.

That will be pretty soon now, within a few monthis at most, I believe, though it could stagger on for a another year or so, I can't imagine it being much longer than that.

Going with the flow, by issuing money on it, will actually be pretty cool, I think. There are many signs from nature that this is what is going on, I see them everywhere I look now.

I noticed you wrote a story about water supply. It turns out we have an automatic solution for that also, when we go to a solar powered hydrogen fuel economy. All hydrogen vehicles produce a constant output of clean water as a function of their exhausts. So just having lots of transportation running around burning hydrogen, which essentially was created for free, at least partially solves the drinking water issue. It doesn't take much to put a requirement on vehicle and fuel cell manufacturers to ensure that water is drinkable.

Also did you know that Earth has a natural motor effect, as a result of the biomass on Earth absorbing solar energy? In the morning plants are hungrier for solar energy than in the evening, so the side of earth approaching the sun constantly has less solar pressure on it than the side receding. That has to manifest as a rotational motor force, a force literally encouraging the planet to turn faster.

Compare that with solar collection systems, and we see exactly the same. They also have a motor force in the same direction, for the same reason, they are hungrier for energy in the mornings than in the evenings, when they are fully charged up, it can be by hydrogen fuel cells or batteries, the same effect is there, but only fuel cells produce valuable water at point of consumption.

All of these things should indicate to us what is the right thing to do, it seems to me, that is nature telling us what we should be doing, when we see things like that.

Responding to those kinds of things correctly or wrongly, is what we will live or die on, as a species, it seems to me.