It isn't a finite planet! This is the flawed argument encouraged by thermodynamics text books for modern education no longer making it clear that energy from an external source, when used, reduces entropy. What we are seeing is all the evidence that we are living in a perpetual self fulfilling prophecy being removed, simply by it all being for profit. Profit requires that we lose all concept of what creation even means!
The sun is from an external source. An example of things we can create from it is hydrogen, at the rate of 1kg per 39kWhrs, and this is energy removed from heating the thermal mass of the planet - creation cools, whilst destruction heats - it's an artficially created illusion that the planet is finite, at least since we have solar hydrogen technology.
Convert solar energy captured by billions of people to hydrogen and you get far more fuel than we could ever use to keep all aerospace and all industry not only doing what it does now but orders of magnitude more.
The systems Engineering I mean is the techniques of model based systems Engineering (MBSE), described in the model based supplement of DO-178C (DO-331) where we use graphical modeling languages to describe and analyse systems graphically. In those there are model transform techniques needed to transform models from platform to platform, such as needed, to transform a model from the virtual domain, to the physical domain, in the case of using a virtual world to represent the real world, for example, this was the subject of my PhD, and there was a struggle to find academic staff who could appraise my model based work. DO-178C standard was updated in 2012 from what it had been for the thirty years previously, DO-178B, which would have been when you were in industry titled "Systems Engineer", and all software for airborne applications had to be done by hand until the standard was updated in 2012, which enabled airborne software to go model based, but the techniques, toolsets, and modeling languages have continued to develop since 2012.
There is a simple way to find out if the folk you recommend are doing the full analysis. It requires the mathematical signing of energy. If you talk to them about the mathematical signing of energy, and they don't know about that, then they are not doing the full analysis, and technically this means they will not know the difference actually between what energy use adds to temperature, and what energy use subtracts.
Sorry if I didn't make that clear. Here is the full Energy Polarity Multiplier Framework that results, and has to be applied to the global energy problem, to see the full picture. I am sure your colleagues won't have it, because it has only sold one copy to my knowledge so far, after releasing the book some time ago, after the information laid unread in Medium:
