This seems like it's a natural result of the US economy being concentrated in the finance, insurance and real estate sectors, i.e just shuffling money around rather than production.
> in the three years since the signing of the Paris climate accord, which was designed to help the world shift away from fossil fuels, the banks’ lending to the [fossil fuels] industry has increased every year, and much of the money goes toward the most extreme forms of energy development. [0]
Also I wonder how much of that "dematerialization" is due to outsourcing manufacturing to other countries.
[0] https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/money-is-the-ox...
In another industry, healthcare, people complain passionately about the costs but never about the fact that while technology, efficiencies have improved there has been a 100-fold increase in the number of healthcare administrators per capita. A lot of our economy is just shuffling people and money around -- not actually efficiently allocating resources to produce useful goods and services--oh about that abnormal growth in the people who are supposed to be responsible for that?
"Essentially, with access to a more granular data set than had been publicly available, the economists could see that growth in manufacturing over the decades was almost entirely a result of statistical adjustments for improvement in semiconductor performance."
[0] https://www.cassandracapital.net/post/manufacturing-job-loss...
Notable: Bullshit jobs still contribute to GDP.
The world produces and consumes vastly more than it did at other points in that period and as a percentage Im guessing the percentage of what we produce to what we consume (ie our self reliance and share of the global production pie) has been steadily decreasing.
Id be interested to see numbers which prove or disprove this.
In practice - last I checked, and I admit to not having followed them closely - I don't think carbon credit schemes have had a big payout just yet. I'm not ready to dismiss them, on the other hand. This might just be because more of the CO2 emissions get exported to the developing world, and so a true ROI has to wait until global economic goals start aligning.
And part of it is the article's point: there are now industries that produce information or services that can fully replace some physical goods: If Google Maps saves you from getting lost, you burn less fuel. If financial markets "shuffle around" smartly enough, those 50 metric tons of pork go into McRibs instead of spoiling, etc.