To me as a long term systems Engineer working on it now since starting as PhD candidate studies in 2017, the whole thing is definitely systemic, I would argue that without appropriate skills and tools, it is very difficult if not impossible to see how it all connects. But with those formal techniques, many things start to become clear. We should be especially careful to ensure that whatever we deduce fits perfectly with historically anomalous events. The big one with oil was when its price went negative. What did you make of that at the time?

To me it made no sense until I dug into the market forces that drove it. Warren Buffet and other big traditional investors quit the markets claiming "Something had gone wrong with money". The main market force was people who had never traded in markets previously. They were mostly using the "Robinhood" app, and they were mostly trading with money issued for free. These are folk who were never driven by any urge to amass capital, so never had any, all they wanted to do with excess money, which they got for free, was blow it in markets, on things they thought needed it more than they did themselves. Shares in bankrupt companies of all descriptions were soaring, as long as folk had heard of their products and still dreamt one day they would be able to afford them, things like cruises on ships, and even just nice cars for hire, like from Hertz. The courts in the US changed some laws to allow that trading to continue, because in the absence of traditional investors, that was the only trading going on. Also, we noticed the environment take the only positive spike of recovery seen in history, just then. They didn't buy oil, so it went negatively priced, and throughout the whole time, the dollar went up in value, not down, confusing pretty much all conventional economists.

To me, that was folk exercising true fine-grained democracy, the first time ever, and they did it by something traditional anti-capitalists swear is a bad thing; the markets.

I find myself now anti-capitalist also, seeing it now in terms of energy as not a good thing at all, in fact as far as I can tell now, nature is forcing it to become valueless. Inflation now is linked to the same thing flooding into our economy rendering capital valueless; solar energy, and the devaluation of capital is a very good thing.

We can see how this devaluation works by a simple mathematical consideration: The conventional economic capital, the capital of of Earth, is C. Solar energy coming in uniquely adds to that capital, since it is from a source not on Earth, it is additional to the existing capital, given that energy readily converts to hydrogen fuel, for example.

So now the base of all capital is C plus a time dependent term, where the time dependent term is scaling up all of the time, with the scaling up of solar energy.

Of course the time dependent part has to heavily outweigh the constant part with time, so there is the mathematical proof that capital is ending.

In a way, looking at the system from an Engineering point of view, we might recognise that it looks like an Engine, that we built over thousands of years as a hive, without none of us realising what was really happening systemically. That engine is now about complete. All that remains is to turn on the energy supply to it, and it will start to generate value we can scarcely imagine. Every bank balance, every figure of capital, every system of accounting for all things as static balances, every computation of profit, all things based on static measures of stored energy become pretty much irrelevant, in an engine, which has all of those kinds of storage elements. When the engine is running, we become less interested in what sits in various registers and resorvoirs, more interested in the effects of energy flowing, that is what gives us value from the engine. By engine I mean any system designed with many components all working systemically in process to do a job, like an electrical circuit, or a fuel processing works, the mechanical engine in a car, or a plant in nature. The plant is an engine that exists to do a purpose, which appears to be simply to add value to Earth and all of life, standing as an interface, between the energies of sun and Earth. The sun supplies all energy, the Earth consumes it by converting it into life.

That engine of humanity exists right now, and the flow of energy to drive it is in process of being switched on.

The purpose of the engine appears to be just like the plant, to add value to Earth, from the sun.

In the time taken to develop the engine, the resources taken from Earth form an energy deficit, like the deficit owed by the plant, which drew all its energy from Earth to grow itself to the point it started to form leaves, and took all its energy from the sun above from that point on, passing most of it onto the Earth below.

Our engine is no different, it drew all its energy to form itself from Earth, by the processes we recognise as extraction, we did work to extract every Joule of energy forming the engine, until we started to sprout our human equivalent of leaves in the form of solar farms all over Earth.

Now, the energy is flowing from those still few farms, it is still not being reflected by the mechanism we used to haul all our energy forming the engine up from Earth, money.

Money is the thing functioning in the engine of humanity, like the nutrients in the engine of the plant.

What has to happen next, is money has to be issued reflecting the energy being received by the leaves of the engine of humanity, to begin taking energy to Earth, and all of life on Earth, from the sun.

What we saw when oil prices went negative was just a test run, it seems to me, a demonstration of how the engine would function, when the energy supply is turned on, and left on.

There is obviously much more I could write on this, but hopefully now you are getting the picture. It is formed systemically in now more than 280 stories I have in Medium, since 2017, and is partially captured in a formal system model, which shows things from all aspects I've found useful, including a stakeholder model with all actors traced to their wants and desires, the things we consider as value.

I think we need to see it as such, to be able to understand it systemically at all, really.