As I've said before: if you just extrapolate the rate of growth of wind and solar here in the US for a mere 10 years out, they replace ALL fossil fuels in electricity generation.
China is growing their renewables sector faster than we are. The EU is much farther along than us. CFC's, which were responsible for quite a bit of the warming up through the nineties, are banned. Methane has been increasing at a much slower rate.
Your position amounts to throwing up your arms and saying it's hopeless. Your, and his, argument, depend on their not being any counterexamples. But if the US, which hasn't exactly been a paragon to follow, counts as a counterexample, your argument falls apart.
Given that food, which is extremely energy intensive, has not at all been affected by China's rise, except to actually increase demand for its products, the argument that the most energy intensive industries having been exported to China explains the decrease in energy use in this country falls flat on its face.
With that, so does all the rest of your (and his) argument. Because if it can happen once, then it's NOT a law like the Law of Thermodynamics, but just a description of the past with the usual invalid extrapolation into the future that all doomsday arguments make and have depended on since Malthus.
Expansion demonstrably doesn't mean greater energy use, because that has not been the case for the past decade at least here in the US. Per capita energy use has declined. The same has been true for the EU. The actual evidence shows that past a certain point of development, you turn a corner and can continue to grow without continuing to expand your use of energy, on top of which of course the sources of that energy are being converted from "renting", where you take stuff out of the ground and consume it, to "investing", where you build something - a solar panel, a wind turbine, a heat pump - and use it to exploit the energy that is already present in the air, the Earth, and the sky.
Once you stop renting, the problem - this one, the energy problem - is solved. That solution at most is going to take another fifteen years to push fossil fuels out of the way.
In the meantime, we have a host of other problems that need addressing and that aren't going to go away, like saving, just to take one small example, the monarch butterflies. That problem doesn't get solved by people who throw up their hands and say it's useless.
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