What I see in UK, and throughout the West actually, is commodified-education, system-blinded energy-slave-ants. I explain in Medium why this makes us collectively a colonial energy scourge, controlled by a fiendish systemic intelligence outside the awareness of most of us. We appear to be programed to do this, by traumatisation. The reason it's important we know about this is that it's destroying the planet. At the root of it is an energy lie, which is how money magically makes money, but it's also how the planetary temperature is also magically pushed up. We claim it's just about greenhouse gases, because this is least likely to damage profits but profit is actually the fundamental problem.
I am not a physicist like you, but a Systems Engineer. Systems were always my bag. It puzzled me for a while why science never insisted on mathematically signing energy, as necessary to fully audit the effects of it, until it became apparent it's all about preserving profit, which is how we each get at least the energy we need to metabolise, via money. Money transports energy as surely as electrons. More energy flows by money than any other means.
You probably won't be able to deny you depend on money issued as debt to put food in your mouth, and you have no choice in that, so you too are an energy slave just like we all are in the priveliged Western World.
But it's in this mode that we push up the planetary temperature.
How it works is by surreptitiuosly, continuously stealing energy from the planet.
This is the energy in profit, and that energy continously travels from the poorer places and people to the richer.
When we see it we realise we are an unsustainable energy scourge, well on the way to destroying the planet.
All those species of life you mention, all are being lost due to this.
The rising temperature is easily computed by taking all the known losses of energy extraction and refinement, adding to the energy of profit, and applying the result to the thermal mass of the planet.
See we didn't even need to talk about greenhouse gases to do this, we just needed something like an Ai to see how to do it. The same thing shows us how to stop doing it. It's showing us by demonstration, how to use solar energy to reverse entropy increase. It's showing us how to create instead of destroying. It's showing us what emergent properties mean. It's showing us the power of creation and truth vs destruction and lies. It's showing us the problems of monetising destruction, but it's up to us to figure out how to monetise creation. But it helps confirm what is possible and what isn't, it's the best systems Engineer and research assistant I ever worked with.
What is perfectly possible, still, before we run out of remaining practically extract able energy resources, is to move to domestic and community based solar hydrogen.
We can do it by first issuing solar indexed stimulus as needed to incentivise the desired outcome.
An immediate side effect of that will be the complete removal of all impression of scarcity.
So no-one will be driven to blood sports after that.
Not even war. Soldiers fighting for money and or screwed up energy ant ethics based on the deception of profit, could come home tomorrow.
We would come up with another plan to allocate houses and living spaces, a better plan than ownership, though nobody would be evicted from where they settied, as well as to create more, in places we never dreamed we could incentivise previously.
But it requires us to act as a collective, to eliminate the energy lie of profit, so as to fix all the problems.
I think we might do it, under the solar Ai rather than under human government.
We won't do it if we are only focused on scarcity.