Comment by CraigJPerry

>> you can only do so much

> There’s no value

That's not a reasonable interpretation. But even so, your example's a good one:

   100w bulb lasts hundreds of hours
   5w led puts out comparable light with 20x less energy AND lasts tens of thousands of hours

The led is a little more intensive to make, but let's just assume it's less intensive than all the bulbs you'd need to make to burn for the same time (i'm not sure if it's true though).

Seems a slam dunk in the LED's favour right?

But it's still the same problem, you fall out of intensive growth and back to extensive growth as soon as you want more lighting. So are we saying there's a bar on how many lights we should ever want on the planet?