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. T

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. For example, take this (from https://www.energuide.be/en/questions-answers/do-i-emit-co2-when-i-surf-the-internet/69/ https://www.energuide.be/en/questions-answers/do-i-emit-co2-...) >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.