does his argument that Western countries' use of resource has started to inversely correlate with QoL improvement hold up in the face of those same countries outsourcing almost all manufacturing to other countries? It's all well and good that the US' use of metals is decreasing, but if that's just because China is using the raw materials and shipping the final products over then that's no better.
He also makes the argument that as non-industrialised countries begin to industrialise, they can just make use of non-material goods like we do. Is this not based on the assumption that other countries won't want similar standards of living to the US, ie car ownership, disposable and consumption goods, etc? We're talking about a multiplication of the production of goods.
From a systems standpoint, I think we need to be doing 2 things (for CO2 specifically, that's far from the only concern): reversing the increase of carbon in the carbon cycle (ie, reducing dependence on fossil fuels and sequestering carbon artificially if/where safe), and monitoring and increasing the bandwidth of the decarbonisation phase of the carbon cycle (soil, trees and the ocean playing the main role).