https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qj4z9p/green-economic-gro...
It's possible that our inability to recycle (in an economically efficient way) will end up putting some limit on economic growth, but this is very different from the global thermodynamic argument being made by the article that I was responding to above.
It's an odd choice to use global accumulated wealth rather than the global equivalent of GDP (GWP). What are the error bars on the calculation for how much the entire planet is worth in dollars?
For reference, GWP growth rate has been between 3% - 6% in the period considered by that paper. If the net world wealth growth rate was 1.82% during that period, it would suggest that depreciation effects are significant in determining that figure.
No, it isn't. If you own a house that has already been build it does not influence GDP. Yet you need to finance repairs and maintenance (and therefore Energy).
The problem with most infrastructure is actually not to build it but to sustain it.
"According to US News and Freddie Mac, homebuyers should actually budget up to 4% of the property’s value in annual maintenance costs." [0]
"house price rises have averaged more than 5 percent over the last few years." [1]
[0] https://www.upnest.com/1/post/what-is-the-annual-cost-of-mai...
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/06/us-house-prices-are-going-to...
His argument is that sometime in the next 275 years we have to make some change to our economic system, unless economic growth decouples from energy use growth during that time.
What he doesn't say is that it has been decoupling for decades even before he wrote that post, and, by an equally valid extrapolation argument, economic growth will become completely decoupled from energy use globally in another 50 years:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-intensity-of-econo...