(TED Talk) Amory Lovins: A 50-year plan for energy

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13. Because it seems to be.

Especially when you look outside the boundaries of the energy system itself, out to the wider system in which the energy use is embedded.

To start within the energy system itself, energy use has never declined, no matter how efficient its use has become. There may be a number of reasons for that, chief among them that we're dealing with a global system made up of sovereign nations who get to chart their own energy/industrial courses independent of what "we" might choose to do.

More importantly though, lowering the effective cost of energy (which is what efficiency improvements do) has reverberations throughout the global economy. This is because money that would otherwise would be put into energy is now free to be applied in other areas of the economy. This expands the economy and increases human activity levels, with all of the deleterious effects that implies - effects that may appear far from the original source of the cost savings.

This is the point that Lovins doesn't get, as far as I can tell. He fails to see any danger signals inherent in "improved energy productivity".