This statement "Traditionally that one's status would be a function of what one adds, not what one can extract.", seems particularly insightful to me.

It fits more or less with mathematically positive and negative energy use, the former being added to the planet, the latter being subtracted from the planet. Also that you see this has only been done for a few thousand years, it has to do with culture, mindset, and religion. To me the problematic part is profit. When we manage to get our heads out of the profit driven mindset for a few seconds, it seems outrageous we ever accepted it as a way of being, far less worship it, as seems normal now. What I guess we would all like, is a kind of meritocracy. I think we will have this, when we get the misalignment existing between money and energy sorted out. But god only knows what it is going to take to get those in power to start issuing the solar indexed stimulus required to monetise energy that comes one way, with nothing input to trade-off against energy yielded, so as to put the energy value back into money - it has to be issued for free, and we can no longer charge profit for solar energy received, otherwise the energy difference between the energy paid for, and the energy received has to come from the planet - again tying us into energy extraction. We have to get it into our thick skulls that if we want more from solar energy, we just scale up what we can receive from it, and what we create from it, rather than charge more for it, just produce more, all sold at the money market exchange rate of the energy content of the product, an example of which could be hydrogen by electrolysis (33KWhrs per kg), for sale to all of aerospace, thus immediately re-energising that incredibly profit-sensitive industry.