A lot of energy is spent on things like transportation and heating though.
At some point, the rooms you occupy and the time you occupy them hits a ceiling. I'm not going to heat my room above room temperature, I'm not going to be in my room more than 24 hours in a day, even if energy efficiency made it as cheap as my current pattern of heating.
Similarly, there is a ceiling as to the amount of time I spend traveling in a certain day, I wouldn't drive to another country on a 5 hour trip on a daily basis for a better job, even if energy efficiency made it as cheap as my current travel pattern (1 hour a day).
That probably wasn't always the case, but there are indeed diminishing returns to spending money. Just look at Bill Gates' energy expenditure. It's waaaay higher than any of us in absolute terms, but relatively speaking a fraction of ours.
So I think the intuition you responded to is probably pretty solid. The other intuition I have, which is very much related, is that our gdp growth is increasingly service-oriented. i.e. it's not just that industries get more efficient, thereby seeing gdp growth and energy consumption decouple. It's also that the relative share of our gdp is possibly moving away from energy-intensive industries, which aren't really growing much at all, to low-energy intensive industries. With agriculture and manufacturing being quite energy-intensive compared to services industries like education, legal services, finance (ignoring proof of work) etc, a deindustrializing economy should also fuel a decoupling of energy consumption and gdp growth.
At some point, the rooms you occupy and the time you occupy them hits a ceiling. I'm not going to heat my room above room temperature, I'm not going to be in my room more than 24 hours in a day, even if energy efficiency made it as cheap as my current pattern of heating.
Similarly, there is a ceiling as to the amount of time I spend traveling in a certain day, I wouldn't drive to another country on a 5 hour trip on a daily basis for a better job, even if energy efficiency made it as cheap as my current travel pattern (1 hour a day).
That probably wasn't always the case, but there are indeed diminishing returns to spending money. Just look at Bill Gates' energy expenditure. It's waaaay higher than any of us in absolute terms, but relatively speaking a fraction of ours.
So I think the intuition you responded to is probably pretty solid. The other intuition I have, which is very much related, is that our gdp growth is increasingly service-oriented. i.e. it's not just that industries get more efficient, thereby seeing gdp growth and energy consumption decouple. It's also that the relative share of our gdp is possibly moving away from energy-intensive industries, which aren't really growing much at all, to low-energy intensive industries. With agriculture and manufacturing being quite energy-intensive compared to services industries like education, legal services, finance (ignoring proof of work) etc, a deindustrializing economy should also fuel a decoupling of energy consumption and gdp growth.