What is "excess"? Are you just devaluing people's wants as not being authentic, just because you don't think they should want them? People in Dubai, Tokyo, Beijing etc who are buying status or luxury goods are not "acting American." People just like that stuff.

Sumptuary laws have a long history, long predating capitalism. People have always passed judgment on desires of the rabble for luxury, status goods, and the like. So much that they sometimes passed laws trying to regulate it.

Regarding 'optimism,' I wasn't speculating about the future. I was pointing out something that has already happened in many rich countries. There's no reason that China would be exempt from this longstanding trend.

• Total primary energy use
• Energy Use per Person (Note the decline in most of these countries. That's not my naive optimism, rather that's empirical reality.)

I think it's astounding that the US is using almost 20% less energy per person than when I was born. With BEVs and ongoing greening of the grid, that will improve yet further.

>Otherwise we're just living on a finite planet pretending we have infinite resources.

Resource use was never going to scale to infinity. Energy use plateaus. No one buys infinite blue jeans or eats infinite steaks. People like wealth, yes, but consumption does not keep spiraling upward forever. No one was under the impression that we were going to have infinite people using infinite energy per person, no more than we were going to be eating infinite gyros or infinite M&Ms.

Humans won't even last for infinite years. The sun and all the stars in the galaxy will not last for infinite years. "We can't scale x to infinity" is a given, but also not a rebuttal of anything anyone actually believes. Plus it's generally just a proxy for degrowth now, which is a different argument altogether. You don't forego building a house now just because of the truism that we can't build infinite houses.