There are two problems: one is that cheap energy wasn’t the only factor in things like population growth or quality of life improvements and it’s also not like

There are two problems: one is that cheap energy wasn’t the only factor in things like population growth or quality of life improvements and it’s also not like most of the carbon emissions were directed towards that goal. Attributing everything to cheap energy is effectively using someone in, say, India getting access to antibiotics, water filtration, and fertilizer as an excuse to ignore just how much of the global carbon footprint went not to providing the global poor with the huge reductions in childhood mortality but rather to things like Americans eating beef multiple meals a day and driving inefficient vehicles everywhere. Whether or not that was their intention it reads like an attempt to whitewash our highly disparate contribution to global carbon levels. The other problem is the future: it’s mostly the same places which saw those gains which are also critically at risk from flooding, drought/famine, dangerous heat levels, etc. so there’s very much a “the future is longer than the past” aspect to this conversation where, say, 3-6 good decades shouldn’t be accepted as an excuse for the much larger number of worse decades which have already started.