In any control system that is functioning properly, the methods used to control a signal won’t be correlated with the signal they’re controlling.
Worse, there will be several variables that DO show relationships, and may give the wrong impression. You’re looking at variables A, B, C, and D. You see that when A goes up, so does B. When A goes down, C goes up. D never changes and isn’t related to anything else — must not be important, certainly not related to the rest of the system. But of course, A is the angle of the road, B is the gas pedal, C is the brake pedal, and D is the speed of the car.
In the past, GDP and resources use have always been tightly correlated. But this is just drawing a line through some data — it’s not based on any deep theory. And in fact, these correlations can change very quickly. Just as one example, here’s energy use versus GDP since 1949.
If you were sitting in 1970, you could look at this curve and claim, very confidently, that economic growth requires concomitant increases in energy use. And you’d be wrong. Because the trend is your friend til the bend at the end.
Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship–be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles–is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you.