OK, I actually identify with an awful lot of this, but with respect, I think there is a detail you've missed that changes everything.
Money is energy, always, it always has a market price in KWhrs.
When money makes money, energy has to have been gained.
But energy can't just be conjured up out of nowhere, it has to have come from somewhere.
Follow it back, whoever or whatever yielded the profit to us had to get it from somewhere.
Eventually we get back to folk who work with the planet - the folk who cut down trees, work the Earth to grow food, dig mines for coal, drill for oil, cut down trees, yada yada.
Most of those folk have loans they need to pay, and all the money we all use, is issued as debt. The net flow of energy is always from the recipient of the loan to the lender, because the lender always charges interest.
The energy in the food, fuel, or other commodity taken from the planet is always more than the energy value of the money paid for it, so again the net flow of energy is from the person selling the goods, to the person buying them.
And we can't get by without buying food, or working for a living to get the money needed to buy the food, and pay all our other bills. So we are energy slaves, all of us, from the richest to the poorest, we are energy slaves in a system of energy slavery.
There we see where the energy in profit comes from, its always from the planet. The planet is the only thing that can sustain this constant output of more energy in respoonse to the energy of a little work put in.
But look now what happens to the vast majority of the raw product taken from the planet, it needs refined, and this requires more energy taken from the planet, usually as oil but it could be nuclear, or coal, or even just wood.
All that refinement generates a lot of heat. What it actually is, is conversion of things which were not heat, to heat.
And look, all this is done again at profit, requiring yet more energy from the planet, and yet more thrown to heat.
So there we see the heat is directly related to profit. These are not small amounts of heat, they are big, MWhrs and GWhrs of energy going to heat, and the by-product of using the fossil fuels, and wood, or anything else we burn, CO2, just multiplies it.
And what drives growth, if it isn't this? See how it cascades, the more we do, the more we need to do to sustain it?
Remove the instrument of profit, and the wicked growth driver is removed.
And what agreement for profit ever declared the temperature impact of the agreement to the planet?
None. So actually every contract between humans is null and void.
Its all built on that energy lie, the lie of profit.
We might define profit as an energy crime sometime in the near future.
Anyhow, the only solution to it is to start issuing solar indexed stimulus.
Sooner or later, everyone suffering from the ever worsening cost of living crisis, which has availability of extractable energy underlying it, will demand money is given as stimulus.
The solution is completed by issuing never ending stimulus to all people, indexed to solar.
This would be an honest and fair system, we got a taste of it during covid, we saw some miracles like oil going negative priced, and a brief spike of environmental recovery - both things were miracles that surprised everyone including scientists who thought coral destruction was irreversible for example, we saw there the first and only time, coral regrowth.
We saw actual fine grained democracy in markets, everyone was trading non profit, rescuing companies and products officially bankrupt but still loved. Nobody voted for oil.
The mistake we made after that was to not assign it to creation of solar product, instead it was announced as a loan, something that needed to be repaid, and we went back to the old fossil fueled negative energy economy, and started to destroy the planet again.
If we see these things dude, we can see a way out, it is to use solar cleverly to regenerate fuel, hydrogen fuel, this has the opposite effect on temperature, of burning fossil fuels.
This is just us going photosynthetic as a species, rather than just expiring, now we have the technology of solar and hydrogen.
I don't think we will see an exponential growth explosion, because we will have removed the energy crime of profit.
And if it is controlled by something like ChatGPT then all energy can be audited against all creation of money, so we would know when energy crime has been committed, we would see where there is extra, unaccounted for energy in the system.
This would be an honest system. Everything in it, no longer built on the energy lie of profit, would be an awful lot simpler, again saving a pot load of energy.
No more need for taxes, no more need for manual accounting (unless we want to), no more need for foraging around looking for work / ways to make money / do business, but lots of funds for anything anyone might want to do, by folk funding them with their free money, this is how we would be voting in the future with money, to get the world we always wanted.
As for population - look around, how much actual land do we cover? Its actually not a lot, there are vast areas of the planet virtually unpopulated by humans.
And look, a final god-sign, if there is such a thing, look at the case of using solar in the desert, to aircon a double glazed greenhouse, to grow plants in that otherwise would not stand a chance in the desert - The worst case energy that could be dissipated in heat by the aircon can never be more than the maximum heating effect of the energy that went through the panels. At least some of that energy was used to do something creative, something that created things that convert even more of the energy of the sun to things other than heat, even if it was only the creation of the information of the structure of the plants, its still creation, which has to subtract from heating, in fact decreasing heat by at least at the rate of information creation, 0.69 x Boltzmans constant in degrees C per bit created.
There you see how energy itself can be used to decrease heat. Its done by creating anything, it could be plants, hydrogen, plastics, human consumable food (See "Solein"), whatever, its all creation, and it is thermodynamic cooling by first principles definition.
The fact that we have solar energy shining into this box makes it not closed at all, so we can't use any thermodynamic argument to claim only destruction is possible. If that was the case, there would be no nature, no living thing!
Anyhow, I hope this maybe might go a little towards making you think some more, about the u-turn you seem to have done, from thinking we had a way out, to thinking we don't.
I only just scratched the surface, there is much more to the analysis, I have a model of the whole system offline which I maintain as a model based systems Engineer, it is partly simulateable, just the most important parts, but I am working to incorporate it now into a virtual world envrironment with ChatGPT, where maybe it will become part of an educational game one day, and folk will get a feel for how things would work in that new system, compared with how they don't work now, before we commit to it, who knows.
