My response to Tim Garrett and Rachel Donald on negative growth requirement for sustainability

 Hi Rachel: I looked at Tim's paper he was referring to - "Lotka's wheel and the long arm of history: how does the distant past determine today's global rate of energy consumption?" It seems like the snowball metaphor is the easiest to grasp - the "total past history of wealth accumulation" is the size of the snowball - as it gets bigger then it takes more energy to roll the snowball to make it grow more (do what the economy is meant to do).
Your counterclaim of a nonwestern or circular economy - the hunter-gatherer model is our true past history from 225,000 years ago (and some still around today, struggling) - obviously we can not "return" to the past but a negative growth model requires a deeper philosophical change of the mathematics itself.
The final metaphor you mention, "energy without materials is just hot air" - is something that should be looked at closer. Physics Today published "Thermodynamics of the Climate System" 2022 Thermodynamics of the climate system | Physics Today
Jul 1, 2022 - pointing out that: 

"Most studies of the second law applied to Earth, however, consider only matter (atoms and molecules) to be a part of the climate system, whereas radiation (photons) is considered a part of the surroundings. In that view, radiation is treated as an external"

So this is a deeply wrong bias in Western thinking from Platonic philosophy based on logarithms (with the inverse exponential function as the built in growth for the elite wealth). Garrett writes, "It is only by collapsing the historic accumulation of wealth we enjoy today, effectively by shrinking and slowing Lotka's wheel, that our resource demands and waste production will decline."
All of Western science has been based on "commutative geometry" with this materialistic assumption of spacetime as a symmetric geometric external measurement, whereas the energy of photon is a biological "active information" guiding us from the future - as now emphasized by Sir Roger Penrose and his colleague Professor Basil J. Hiley (the physics collaborator of David Bohm). This is called noncommutativity in contrast to commutative geometry. So the nonwestern cultures that were sustainable - as hunter-gatherers - actually relied on noncommutativity as quantum nonlocality or what Penrose calls "protoconsciousness" of the Universe. This is a newly discovered quality of energy or a new type of active force before classical amplitude is measured but since it is noncommutative it can also be amplified or resonate to the macroscale. This is the secret of what in traditional Chinese medicine is called "neigong" or internal martial arts training as meditation and yoga - in India it is their oldest philosophy three gunas of no guna. I call this "noncommutative quantum biology" and it's best understood through music theory analysis as Fields Medal math professor Alain Connes has explained in his "Music of Shapes" lecture (with several versions on youtube).
So as you experienced from your strong plant-based DMT ingestion - our body is made up of biophotons as laser coherent information but in actually all matter is made up of photons (this is analyzed brilliantly in Nobel physicist Gerard 't Hooft's paper, "Light is Heavy" co-written with Martin van der Mark). Noncommutativity then points out that light actually has gravitational mass - as the "Light is Heavy" paper points out as well - from the de Broglie Law of Phase Harmony. Another way to express this as Penrose does, is that mass originates from frequency!!
So to get to my point on practical terms - oil and coal are from algae and algae is 50% of photosynthesis on Earth while algae is only 1% of land biomass equivalent! This means algae is by far the most efficient energy sequestration means on Earth. So Sir David King is now emphasizing restoring the whale fertilization of the deep oceans to grow algae, thereby sequestrating 30 gigatons of CO2 per year (if wave pumps are added to also mimic the circulation of oxygen and nutrients). Eventually this would bring back the actual whale population to restore the lost millions killed off for whale oil. Meanwhile the double Ph.D. marine biologist Raffael Jovine has set up his "Brilliant Planet" business of near-ocean algae farms that can potentially sequester 10 gigatons per year of CO2 - if they are funded and spread around the locations he has planned. He has one now in Morocco. Algae is by far the best biofuel and algae from red seaweed also neutralizes over 90% of methane emissions from ruminants - Australia has a new commercial supplement business selling this red seaweed (macroalgae). Algae is also by far the most productive food and fertilizer source for humans.
Now will we return back to the oldest life form on Earth - 4.6 billions year old - in time? If we don't then I think algae will survive our "biological annihilation" of life on Earth. Algae is an extremophile as well - from our ancient evolution. I did an algae activism talk on Environmental Coffeehouse youtube channel - just search that for algae "drew hempel" - thanks

  That means Earth Overshoot "day" is negative 68.5. The ecological footprint analysis has been underestimating the problem because as Tim points out economics does not rely on all our past accumulated wealth creation (nature destruction). There has been regrowth of forests though - not sure Tim is taking that into account. Of course trees can't compete with oil that is from algae. Hence our need to grow algae at scale - mainly in the oceans but also on land. 

 the wave metaphor is visual but entropy is really based on time as having inherent force to it. So negative frequency is from the future as negentropy and this part of the "wave" is the flow that is nonlocal (the future and past overlapping faster than the speed of light). Life does rely on negentropy as Schroedinger realized in his 1945 book, "What is Life?" but Schroedinger wrongly described life as based on an asymmetric crystal (hence the wrong genetics DNA model promulgated by Richard Dawkins). Professor Denis Noble (who was Dawkins advisor) has been going around to correct the error of his student! Noble points out life relies on water for the cell - and also biophoton signals that are coherent. 

So the quantum biology analysis of Roger Penrose, Stuart Hameroff and others has now emphasized the microtubules of the cells - just as Denis Noble also emphasizes the microtubules. The tubulin inside the microtubules have what is called "superradiance" or what Penrose calls "negative resonance" - meaning the deep structure of life is the negentropy from negative frequency as nonlocality. We can not visualize this "flow" of the wave but we can LISTEN to it through meditation. Our original human culture - the hunter-gather San Bushmen (whom the Pygmies split from in 225,000 BCE) - the core of our original culture is this listening meditation spiritual biophoton healing energy training - what they call N/om.