that is the existing status quo, afterall. if you look at what the financial interests, the old aristocracy, is doing, they're looking to mitigate losses, yes, but they're just as aggressively moving into the new municipal seawall market. that is the actual unofficial plan - to let catastrophic climate change happen, and profit tremendously from it.
of course, that's insane and destined for obvious collapse. but, that seriously seems to be what they're actually doing - they're just going to let everybody die and adjust to a smaller global human population.
of course, the basic class conflicts underlying the establishment of a permaculture system in a world that has already experienced catastrophic climate change will largely remain intact, so advocates of permaculture will sill have the corporate farming system to fight against. and, a corporate farming system that is legitimately engineered to minimize energy loss may be difficult to compete with in a world where renewable energy is a valuable resource. but, the concept would at least make sense, as the reduced number of people that need to be fed would better align with the realistic productive capacities of a permaculture based economy.
further, permaculture makes sense in the context of being a personalized means of feeding the elite in a highly stratified society, largely for the reason that it would separate the food distribution networks into one for the elite (permaculture) and one for everybody else (factory farms using dying oil-based farming techniques, and struggling to produce). the excessive use of land to produce a minimal amount of product at a high cost would be a typical display of aristocratic grandesse, as the masses struggle to find anything to eat at all in a faltering mass production system.
but, if we're not to lose hope of feeding the masses, of which i am a member of, and letting them die, which means letting me die, then we need to find scalable solutions that can actually feed billions of people and that's simply going to require more technology-driven solutions - leaving the permaculture option as the escape-hachet, designed for a future where building insular and isolated communities is once again a buffer for survival against the elements.
to me, then, embracing permaculture means giving up, and i'm not willing to do that when there are workable ideas on the table. perhaps the eagerness of others to give up says a little about how they view this society, but i need my misanthropy to remain rooted in analysis and potentially implementable solutions. and, i don't think that returning to agrarianism is much of an attractive solution, especially not when we're on the brink of potentially implementing the first reforms towards a communist system of distribution, but that may be my class biases speaking - and those pushing for permaculture may have their own class biases that give them impetus to seek a way to escape the oncoming redistributive communism of the urban cores.
i also need to remind you that if a bunch of yahoos go out in the woods and build permaculture farms then the inevitable result is that they're going to starve to death. then, everybody will say the system failed, even though what really failed were the farmers.
but, for me that's not the point. the point of stopping climate change is to stop everybody from dying. that's the struggle, that's the goal. tactics towards food production need to be designed for that purpose, not for the purpose of serving a vanguard seeking to flee from the starving masses, after the whole thing goes to hell.