The 'polycrisis' / our global predicament

Industrialization and our current globalized economy has brought a lot of wealth and increase in living standard for many. Flat economies have direct positive and negative feedbackloops, which prevents excessive imbalances, just like in natural ecosystems. The globalized economy, however, is not at all flat anymore and allows for excessive imbalances resuling in malign systemic effect on the long run.

Overpollution, resource exhaustion, increasing social and geographic wealth inequality, decreasing overall human physical and mental health-levels, desertification, deforestation, wide and severe ecosystem-degradation, likely effects on climatological and thermohaline macrodynamics etc etc are negative consequences of an economic system in overdrive. The ubiquitous availability of cheap energy has resulted in an economic system that relies on overproduction/overconsumption. Negative feedbackloops are now 'systemic' (like the systemic financial crisis of 2007/08 and spanning many more 'systems') and are pushing things to a crisis-level. Because it concerns so many social-economic and natural domains, many people call it a poly-crisis. Because this obviously classifies as a 'wicked problem' (so complicated that it does not have a single/simple solution) others prefer the term '(human) global predicament'.

Reports like 'Limits to Growth' (1972) by the Club of Rome and the UN 'Brundtland Report' (1987) have gained a lot of traction in both academia and civil initiatives. They rightfully argue that a globalized economy that relies on economic growth cannot be sustainable indefinitely. A global systemic kind of 'collapse' is increasingly recognized, and has led to several new disciplines and frameworks to address this. The degrowth-movement is perhaps best known, and heterodox economic disciplines like 'complexity economics' and 'econophysics' are gaining traction, albeit remain academic. Also practical initiatives like bioregionalism are spawning (as an undoing of globalized food/resource production chains). Both huge political and civilian efforts are required to turn things around, but the inertia of the current system is notoriously hard to defy.

Position of EntropoMetrics

The EntropoMetrics approach even states that we do not even have a proper fundamental understanding of the 'drivers' of the global system, and tries to provide a more complex-systems based, energy-aware 'diagnosis' of the thermodynamic undercurrents present, recognizing the global system as a metabolic superorganism.
It presumes specifically that this physical momentum outperforms any political or grassroots momentum, so this has to be addressed first and foremost. We want to frame the polycrisis not as economic or political or moral crisis, but as an autonomous, emergent physical systems aspect. As such it seeks to provide a thermodynamics and complexity-sciences based diagnosis and approach to the polycrisis, where interventions are done in the deepest transactional market-infrastructure rather than through regulatory behavior-targeting policies.

Roughly speaking, it seeks to provide a natural-sciences approach, as it regards this as an inevitable but currently missing complement to the established social-sciences approach to the polycrisis.