I could go on and on, but I'll just quote one thing, from the crux of his argument, Jevons' Paradox:
While these counter-examples may be true, they are also very misleading, especially if the subject is climate change. Through international trade the world shares and competes for collective resources. Quite plausibly, the only reason the USA appears to consume less energy is because it has become more efficient at outsourcing its more energy intensive manufacturing to China.
This is flat wrong.
People wildly overestimate the importance of China to the US. Just think about this one thing even before I give you the actual figure for the share of GDP that China's trade with us is: we're self-sufficient in food.
One more time, for emphasis and with emphasis:
We are self-sufficient in food.
There are three things an economy has to provide, at base, which are the necessities: food, clothing, and shelter. Of these three, the only one with a substantial import component is clothing.
Now on to the share of GDP China represents: China trade for 2013, imports and exports, in total amounted to 562 billion dollars. Sounds like a lot, right? That's the tipoff: it
sounds like a lot. US GDP in 2013 was 16.8 trillion dollars. So China's trade with the US, in total, amounted to 3.3% of the total output of the US.
But of course if we're going to claim that the US has outsourced so much of its "energy intensive manufacturing" to China that it actually alters any plausible measurement of the total energy consumed by the US to such an extent as to make looking at the energy efficiency of the US when considering its total energy efficiency irrelevant, which is what he is claiming in that passage, then what you're actually interested in is the net, because obviously you have to net out what we export to China.
Obviously, the net is smaller than the gross: 318.7 billion is the net. That's 1.9% of the US economy.
So, he's claiming that even though China represents less than 2% of the total output of the US economy, it so fundamentally alters the nature of the economy that using the US economy as a counter-example to his argument is invalid.
This is laughably absurd.
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