Kind of interesting, thanks for posting. The case of the "Engineer" who left is like ex physicists, they never were Engineers nor Physicists, they didn't really ever understand it.
Tney can't understand that stakeholder analysis is a very human analysis which winds in motivations with outcomes, and this also is a formal Engineering discipline, part of systems Engineering. Maybe if they had come across systems Engineering they would have taken to this and had a different, more true view of what real Engineering is, done by real Engineers rather than profiteers. Real Engineering is an endeavour to deliver human benefit by ingenuity. Profit should not come into that equation.
They claim Engineering, which is applied physics, which is applied maths, somehow devalues humanity when actually it's profit that devalues both humanity and all technical knowledge, in fact profit is destructive of everything. It's a very devious, live thing, and they don't realise they work for it, the real beast, by not calling it out.
On decoupling the environment from economic growth, indeed it's not possible, the two are physically linked by money being abstracted energy, and profit is the lie between the two, attempting to de-link them in order to hoodwink us into thinking they can be de-linked.
It is blindness to this, due to single discipline commodification of education that is taken advantage of by the live mathematically negative emergent property associated with us all working for it, ("the profit monster" for want of a better term) , that blinds us also to its presence, that makes us believe it's possible. Profit is the fundamental energy scam that it's all built on. Profit robs energy from the planet and presents it to us in a way that makes us think we created it, or even robbed it from folk we think deserved to have it robbed from them.
it's not possible to achieve economic growth in the for-profit economic system because profit is exclusively dependent on energy extracted from the planet, which ultimately becomes energy thrown to heat, which is applied to the thermal mass of the planet.
But the polarity of the input energy can be changed, from negative to positive by switching the energy source of humanity from negative to positive, therefore reversing the effect of the physical coupling between economy and environment.
The only energy that qualifies as mathematically positive is the energy of the sun.
Use of this does the opposite of what use of mathematically negative energy does. Use of this is taking energy that would be applied to the thermal mass of the planet if it was not used, and creating things with it other than heat.
An ideal thing to create with it is hydrogen, which effectively could be used to replace the historical heatsink that was created by nature producing fossil fuels, as well as keeping all aerospace in the air, and even adding more we never saw yet.
Do that, and it's win-win for all, finally everything becomes for free, the way it is in all of nature except us (we are the only thing in nature practicing the unsustainable energy lie of profit), and we absolutely do reverse the trend of temperature increase, to actually cooling the planet, the more we do, the more we create, and the more we pull down temperature.
This is all solid maths, physics, science, engineering, inarguable, above politics, but still everyone insists on arguing with it, even mainstream science, exposing how widespread the misunderstanding of how energy really works to enforce truth, is.
Energy is the currency of nature, there is one issuer and enforcer of it. We either use it or burn.
Using it, means monetising it.
This is what we have to conclude is the ultimatum of nature.
As long as we continue to ignore it, we are screwed.