Thanks for this response, I can’t deny that I see the same things and it’s incredibly worrying. Ultimately my optimism stems from my belief that the global system will “de-complexify” before we can do terminal damage.

Right now around 70% of our energy usage is fossil fuels, by 2040 that’s just going to go away. As we creep towards that date, the kind of production and industry that we currently have is going to get stripped away with it.

Every single process -the extraction of raw materials, their refinement and manufacturing, the logistics of moving stuff from place to place uses energy. As we run out it’s going to make every single step of every process more and more expensive, so that our current level of consumption will be available to only to the most affluent.

This is the softest of soft landings, and involves billions living in poverty. As you rightly point out this is dependent on the timelines being correct and no black swans like the Siberian methane release occurring.