First to the last point. Yes it is a very bad thing. And big capital is buried deep in all the regulatory agencies, conferences, papers, and a whole industry of energy R&D. The energy producer/supplier sector of the economy has been very busy for decades. They have very effectively steered policy or non-policy. And let's remember in this context, what makes capital bad is its systems only have one goal, make money, and that goal will very likely find itself in deep conflict with the necessary goals the society needs to adopt in order to survive and evolve in any reasonably habitable form.
Yesterday I blew off the day reading up on the carbon cycle. Go here if anybody is interested:
[WS:] You are making the same mistake as many if not most activistists, both on the left and on the right - that only them are in the know, whereas their adversaries are morons who cannot tell shit from shinola and substitute ideology for reason.
The truth is, however, that there is a lot of good science in the "unholy alliance" of capitalists, governments, trade unions, and other mainstream institutions. I would go as afar as saying that there is incomparably more good science in the mainstream institutions than in "alternative" movements, the latter being for the most part hot air, wishful thinking and just plain bullshit.
A case in point - the conceptualization of the ecosystem that you referred to in your posting is fundamentally similar to conceptualization of the economic production and distribution in macro-economics. And the latter is the theoretical foundation of the "unholy alliance" between government and industry.
A far more fruitful approach instead of us in the know vs. them ignoramuses approach is the realization that there is no single unique solution to any complex system (which in a way is a simplified version of the Gödel theorem). That is to say, every system can effectively function with different configurations of its component elements. These configurations may make huge differences for the component elements involved, but relatively little differences for the system as a whole.
To illustrate, let's consider a simple nose-ass system. To create such a system, you either put your nose into my ass, or I put my nose into your ass. From the systemic point of view, it does not matter who does what, the system functions either way, but for the individual elements of that system it makes all the difference in the world (I would definitely prefer the first solution :))
The bottom line is that instead rejecting the whole system (e.g. macroeconomics), a much better approach is to accept it and strive for reconfiguring its component elements. Stated differently: accept the system and reconfigure it, and dump radical millenary dreams of uprooting the world and rebuilding it from the scratch.
Wojtek