Particularly over the last 15-20 years, GDP growth has been driven by activities that consume little or no physical resources - information, banking, service sector etc.
As usual, there has to be - and there isn't - a distinction between intangible value creation, and intangible thievery and mendacious accounting.
And even the service sector has significant infrastructure costs. It would be interesting to compare the energy and raw material costs needed to produce and run a server and a car.
I suspect the total resource bill would be closer than many people realise.
