Yes, in current and recent economic regimes, the primary way of providing more value is simply by doing more of the similar valuable work. Instead of manual production of a shirt, a factory worker makes orders of magnitude more.
Increasingly though, modern economies are shifting away from this sort of work. Instead of the energy-constrained primary and secondary sectors, more things are being done on the knowledge and attention-constrained tertiary sectors.
Like, economic growth through giving people better advice is much less energy constrained than you're suggesting. There's still some limits, but overall it's not something that needs anything as drastic as economic growth limits for their own sake.
Yes, it is true that providing a service or an information consumes less energy than materials.
The real issue though is not about absolute amount of energy. The author is talking about exponential growth - the one where every year economy must grow as a percentage of existing base. At any base, even with a majority service based economy, exponential growth will hit a bottle neck.
>In 2018, Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) account for 6 to 10% of global electricity consumption, or 4% of our greenhouse gas emissions. And this figure increases by 5 to 7% each year!
This year-on-year growth is unsustainable, no matter how small the base. At 7% growth, the greenhouse emissions will double every 10 years. We're really bad at wrapping our heads around exponential growth.
The argument that we will find more energy efficient ways to do a certain activity misses the point because for a growing economy, even that efficiency gains will get outstripped by scale. And there's Jevon's paradox too whereby efficiency actually increases resource consumption. So as Internet bandwidth expands, it's not like per-capita Internet usage remained the same. We simply increased our hunger to consume the available bandwidth.
I'm well aware of exponential growth, and I'm not talking about energy efficiency. I'm talking about how economic growth is not fundamentally coupled with the material resources we consume. Like, for a long time, food production was pretty well coupled with population - if you figured out how to grow more food in your country, you'd increase its population but not its living standards. That got disconnected in the industrial revolution, and the link between your standard of living and energy consumption is increasingly getting disconnected today in modern economies.
Increasingly though, modern economies are shifting away from this sort of work. Instead of the energy-constrained primary and secondary sectors, more things are being done on the knowledge and attention-constrained tertiary sectors.
Like, economic growth through giving people better advice is much less energy constrained than you're suggesting. There's still some limits, but overall it's not something that needs anything as drastic as economic growth limits for their own sake.