Thank you, Michael, for sharing these proceedings; I commend your shared efforts to build out a comprehensive renewable infrastructure to replace carbon-emitting fossil fuel dependency with a mix of renewable energy technologies.

One “elephant in the room” that you are overlooking, however, is this: every time you use the verb “build,” it begs the following question: where will you get the concentrated net energy you will need to do this building, and how much energy must you expend to get that energy, and where will THAT energy come from, and at what cost to an already destabilized and overheated global climate? Unfortunately, the answer is clear: only fossil fuels—oil, gas, and coal—have the highly concentrated net energy you would need to build out a renewable industrial infrastructure! And the energy cost of extracting, processing, and transporting this energy continues to rise steadily. And all these building projects and the carbon pollution they generate will only accelerate the rising temperatures worldwide and the degradation of our biological support system—the living Earth.
I wish I had a solution to this dilemma; I don’t. In all biological systems, including our own, overshoot of our carrying capacity leads to collapse. We are no exception to this iron law of life. Our modern industrial civilization has become the cancer of the Earth, and that cancer is now terminal.