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Description

Executive summary

The familiar ways proposed to avert climate change all define the problem as being a lack of clean energy.   They *seem* to be aimed at preventing climate change, but the common underlying motive is to enable endless multiplying use of energy to multiply our changes to the earth and use of other resources of all kinds...  to have limitless growing wealth.   

As popular as that is, it also displays a complete misunderstanding of the problem.   The threat of climate change is real, but is in no way responsible for the enormous wave of environmental crises around the world we are now experiencing.  Energy is what we use to power everything, including our disruption of the planet.   How that happens is quite traceable.   

If we stick with multiplying energy use as the purpose, all our environmental crises will become much worse, including climate change too.   It's digging up, paving over, and exhausting every accessible environmentally productive square inch of the earth that is the real problem.   That is directly caused by of our having ever more energy to burn, not cured by it.   It also brings all environmental protection efforts into conflict with each other and economic solvency, and making that universal conflict worse just assures all will fail. 

The minimum requirement for physical sustainability is for investment resources to no longer be devoted to increasing energy use, not the opposite.   We need to copy how natural system economies demonstrate how that can be done.  

Many natural free market growth systems smoothly transform in mid-stream to climax at their peak of vitality.  That's a way to avoid having growth reach a peak of exhaustion from internal conflicts due to relying on multiplying energy use as our economy does.

Team

Just me, except for all the people who taught me how to think rigorously, use physics, and become absorbed in how natural complex systems develop and behave.   I also got some essential pointers from J.M. Keynes (in his disguise as a systems ecologist) and  from Ken Boulding.

What: Actions and impacts

The physical system tautology it is based on is that:  At the physical limits of the economy the financial limits must result bu one of two means, either 1) net positive returns on investment are divested rather than invested to increase investment in the economy or 2) net positive returns on investment do not materialize (i.e. accumulation of savings stops by not adding returns or by not having them to add).    So, to have a sustainable investment environment it becomes necessary for all investment proceeds to be used for other purposes, and finding the best of purposes *other than* generating multiplying returns becomes the task.   In simple terms the "giant pool of money" becomes, of complete natural necessity "the endowment of the whole".    I'm quite sure we could all think of some good uses for it, in addition to directing it to stop multiplying our conflicting interests.

I have a specific proposal for how it could be done as a joint Presidential order, as a matter of natural emergency. but others with daring and common sense about our need to become partners with nature could initiate too.

Why: Rationale for the proposal

Present efforts intent on continuing to multiply our energy use are only serving to multiply our conflicting interests.    Learning how to be a good partner with nature is best learned by studying how natures growth systems do it.    It involves the natural point of free choice, selecting what to do with surpluses, and using that choice to adapt to your environment as it puts up resistance to your efforts to increasingly control it.  

How: Feasibility of proposal

It's highly feasible in a physical sense, in that there are any number of natural economic systems (free market systems operating in ecology, business and culture),  Growth systems that continually multiply their energy use are not among them.

In that sense it is also *more* feasible than any other much more popular and politically acceptable proposals being discussed.  All those seemingly more attractive ones (for sustaining our bad habits of the past) can be clearly shown to not address the real problem, and so are infeasible for natural cause.

Vision of the future under this proposal

Rediscovering our purpose in life, as finding a creative way to become a partner with nature, and seeing the error of going further in trying to remake nature in our own image,  will likely be the most exciting and satisfying thing our present generations could discover to do.

There is a learning curve, and if people adopt this approach, it is not likely to achieve as much as we want, or as much as we might have if we had started 10, 50 or 100 years ago.   Changing our approach to nature would be a big change.   Being force change and learn new things faster than people know how is fraught with hazard too, so deep consideration for others is paramount.     This approach, however, will achieve much more than any other.   It eliminates the certainty of forcing increasing conflicts of interest, and the wast of time breaking our backs on ineffective and conflicting purposes, that trying to eliminate problems as we multiply the causes automatically brings.