Six lensed quasars gave H0LiCOW H₀ = 73.3 (+1.7/-1.8), ladder-free agreement with SH0ES at 3σ from Planck, until TDCOSMO showed the mass-sheet degeneracy lets the same delays support anything from the mid-60s to the mid-70s depending on profile assumptions. A method with no ladder and no CMB still cannot escape the tension; it can only re-stage it inside its own modeling choices.
The inference assumes one global H₀ and a line of sight whose environment is a statistical correction: every lens, whatever its surroundings, must return the same number. The degeneracy debate is conducted as if the spread were purely methodological, because the model has no room for the answer to genuinely depend on where the lens sits.
SCT reads the time-delay record as environmental data. The delay distance integrates the expansion along a specific path through a genuinely inhomogeneous Λ_eff field (P17, P19), so lenses behind underdense corridors return higher effective H₀ than lenses behind overdense ones, and the anchored analyses landing near 73 reflect the same local-volume enhancement that lifts the ladder, the megamasers, and Pantheon+. The mass-sheet degeneracy then has physical content the methodological debate misses: the external-convergence freedom that relaxes H₀ is exactly where line-of-sight mesh structure (P51) enters the lens equation, so profile-freed analyses spreading across the tension's full range are sampling real path-to-path variation, not just prior sensitivity. The registered expectation is concrete: with Rubin and Euclid delivering hundreds of systems, inferred H₀ should correlate with line-of-sight environment classification at the few-percent level, structure a single global number cannot show.
The mechanism spends nothing new: the same three or four premises that resolve the Hubble family predict that its cleanest independent method would land high locally and dissolve into environment-dependence when its absolute scale is freed, which is the observed history. Foundations in Paper 1 (P17, P19) with the mesh-lensing structure of Paper 6, From Chaos to Cosmic Collisions.
The population test decides: hundreds of time-delay systems with resolved kinematics (Rubin, Euclid, JWST) finding H₀ statistically independent of line-of-sight environment, converging to one value with the historical spread fully traced to priors, would remove the path-sampling reading and return the method to the single-number framework. SCT requires the environmental correlation to emerge as the statistics grow.