We did export significant amounts of production while reducing new infrastructure investment.
But even taking that into account it actually happened. Electronics, lighting, and appliances got vastly more efficient. Aircraft, AC, and automobiles improved though to a lesser extent. Even when you look a fossil fuel use per lb of food grown you see a huge impact. Further, many services like medicine are simply not major energy consumers.
PS: This is really a continuation of a long term trend. Humanity has always harnessed most of it’s energy extremely inefficiency via plant photosynthesis. However, the amount of food per acre has steadily grown across thousands of years.
> Humanity has always harnessed most of it’s energy extremely inefficiency via plant photosynthesis. However, the amount of food per acre has steadily grown across thousands of years.
A more interesting metric would be calories-harvested over calories-input.
Food per acre has certainly increased. A lot of the increase is through selective breeding, GM crops, and other technological efficiencies, but a lot of it is from increased fertilizer, which is just calories/energy in a different form (fertilizer is just a store of energy -- that's literally why you buy too much of it in bulk and you're put on a fertilizer-bomb watchlist).
You can grow more food per acre by throwing more energy at the problem, but that doesn't necessarily mean you're doing it more efficiently or sustainably. One way of looking at all the fertilizer runoff, for example, is it is quite literally leaking input energy out of your harvest, decreasing your efficiency.
From an energy standpoint we can extract nitrogen from the atmosphere using solar panels to split hydrogen from water rather than natural gas. Which is similar to how historically we used crop rotation, but requires little land. So while that’s an energy input it’s replaceable without sacrificing much in the way of yields.
IMO, a more interesting metric is nutrients like phosphorous which would be more difficult to acquire once current sources have mined out.
But even taking that into account it actually happened. Electronics, lighting, and appliances got vastly more efficient. Aircraft, AC, and automobiles improved though to a lesser extent. Even when you look a fossil fuel use per lb of food grown you see a huge impact. Further, many services like medicine are simply not major energy consumers.
PS: This is really a continuation of a long term trend. Humanity has always harnessed most of it’s energy extremely inefficiency via plant photosynthesis. However, the amount of food per acre has steadily grown across thousands of years.