You need the Chronoforge workshop upgrade. It’s a few levels deep into particle/time research.
E: Also you are at your first few TCs. Maybe ignore your knowledge about being able to combust them eventually and just play the game for now to avoid spoilers. You’ll need at least 40 for science (+a handful of relics) if you beeline to unlock Chronoforge, but there are a few very nice upgrades along the way you might wanna pick up first. Spoilers ahead:
Making TC combustion useful takes in the order of several thousands of TCs to set up. Not going into detail now, you’ll figure it out in due time :)
Amazing. Your storage is ~20 times mine (because 20 times higher burned paragon) but your buildings are only ~20% higher because exponential costs. Overall your redmoon unob prod is ‘only’ around twice as high as mine. The largest advantage of your state is because of challenges, predominantly Black Sky, with which you basically get 4 times more through trading. Therefore, while I agree that OP needs some more Paragon to get things running, I wouldn’t underestimate the usefulness of challenges and Crypotheology, which in turn needs TT to unlock the juicy Blazars and Dark Novae. @OP: Before going deep, be smarter than me and do 1000 years once for the reduced heat. So get at least TT15 and aim for 5-10k (burned, once you hit year 40k) paragon before trying to go deep.
I mean, the source code is pretty clear that it is how it is written on the wiki. If you have more than 50 Karma you get 25 times your karmakittens or 25 times 25k, whichever is lower. Otherwise (i.e. less than or equal 50 Karma) you get 5k karmakittens.
Positive energy only really matters for Antimatter. Since you asked I’m assuming you are not far enough in Space/Challenge runs/Religion to have unlocked the ways to make energy management much easier.
For pollution, I like having it at 0, but realistically, I know that I’m heavily gimping my production by doing so.