Frank Patton alluded to Jevons Paradox which states that energy efficiency leads to lower energy prices which then in turn drives more consumption. In other words, it’s the price of energy that’s important. If everyone drives a hybrid and the cost of gasoline drops 50%, guess what happens? People buy and drive more cars because gas is cheaper which then brings energy consumption — and the price of a gallon of gas — back to where we started before the efficiency gains were made.

What the developed world is fundamentally confronted with is the reality there can be only so much growth. At some point the environment is overburdened by the number of people and their consumption of energy.

So unless humanity can find a way to extract more and more work from an energy source like oil or natural gas, the world is in BIG TROUBLE.

Size has nothing to do with health or well-being. If size is your most important metric, then obviously America, Land of Obesity – must be superior. US GDP is riddled with cellulite, adipose tissue and huge pockets of toxic crap.

GDP does include every activity under the sun, but that does not make it a useless metric. If it were, I suppose one would feel no difference living in a $1000 GDP / capita country! For all its flaws, GDP (GDP per capita is better) is still the measure we have of our economy’s size.

Also, any way you cut it, energy intensity in the US economy has been dropping. The pc boom in the 80′s, and the internet boom have both contributed hugely to that, by making manual/paper processes more efficient.