I'm saying that GDP used to measure energy growth. Now it has decoupled. That brings GDP in to question, not energy growth.
We know consuming energy leads to higher living standards. It is now quite possible for GDP to rise and living standards to fall - that used to be an impossible scenario when it was a measure of fossil fuel use.
Ok, you've confirmed to me you don't know what you're talking about.
Living standards may be correlated with energy consumption, in a narrow sense, in some cases, but we don't consume energy, we consume things we can produce with energy. If we do that more efficiently, then our living standard increases even as our energy use decreases.
You seem to be saying a 60W incandescent bulb indicates a higher standard of living than a 10W LED bulb -- even though the latter produces more light. You seem to think a house with less insulation indicates a higher standard of living than one with more insulation, since the former requires more energy use. And on and on.
You've made two mistakes in your reasoning. One is explained as Jevon's paradox [0]. If there is a move from 60W light-bulbs to 10W then people usually end up finding a new use for the 50W. It would be unusual for them to use less energy overall - indeed, as they get more productive they could end up demanding more energy (if it made sense to win X kW for Y production, it often makes sense to win X++ kW for Y++++ production). Ditto home insulation. If less energy needs to go to warming a home, more can go to fabricating goods to put in the home. Energy use wouldn't decrease, it'd hold steady.
The other mistake you've made is, those changes won't cause GDP to go up. The 10W LED probably costs the same/less than the 60W one, and the insulation causes reduced spending too. That is one of the arguments I sometimes trot out to explain that GDP isn't a useful measure if it is divorced from energy.
I reject your Jevons argument. No, it would not be unusual for them to use less energy overall. Whether they do or not is dependent on specifics of the situation.
I think you are misled by historical contingency. When moving from "not mechanized" to "mechanized", energy use increases. People didn't have air conditioning, or refrigeration, or TVs, etc. and then they did. Energy use went up because new use cases were being created. But once they have them, at some point the satisfaction those produce saturates, and the natural progression of efficiency pulls the energy use back down again. We don't eat ever increasing quantities of food just because agriculture has become more efficient. We don't scale the number of TVs we watch because their power use has declined.
Your argument is depending on the existence of ever increasing numbers of new activities to consume the energy, that produce sufficient value to justify them. I am skeptical that such exist, or could exist.
> Your argument is depending on the existence of ever increasing numbers of new activities to consume the energy
There are literally an infinite number of useful activities that consume energy. The only limit is at some point we transform so much energy that the earth becomes unlivable because we can't vent it fast enough. At that point we'd have to give up and ... oh wait, no. We'd use the energy to move off the planet. Energy solves that problem too!
If we could work with them cost effectively humanity could probably find a use for every joule of energy in the universe. Every single one. Because in the limit, energy can basically fabricate new mass out of nothing and make a universe perfectly hospitable to a very large number of humans - a race that grows exponentially. Whatever the limits are we're nowhere near reaching them with what we have right now.
> No, it would not be unusual for them to use less energy overall
In that case we'd see a country somewhere with steady electricity prices and shrinking demand. I don't think that country exists. Do you have some examples in mind? Because the countries I've seen that use less energy tend to have massively spiking energy prices, usually because they just ran out of available fossil fuels.
You are taking a bold stance. Jevon came up with the paradox after observing that this specific effect applies in energy markets. They observed the effect contemporary to the Watt being named the Watt. You're going to need a stronger argument than "I reject..." and "I think...". Because the Jevons' argument is an "Economists have observed and come up with a theory to explain...".
We know consuming energy leads to higher living standards. It is now quite possible for GDP to rise and living standards to fall - that used to be an impossible scenario when it was a measure of fossil fuel use.