To me you are missing the physical connection between money and energy. Put these two together and you get something that looks like a cross between Engineering and Economics, and this finally ties economics down to physical reality. But what you have to lose is capitalism, all value of capital disappears when we put free flowing energy like the energy of the sun, into the equation.
I've written a lot more about this, researching it for a long time now, coming from a Systems Engineering background myself. It does open a very large can of worms, but it's necessary to sort out a physical energy problem that is existential if not fixed.