The assertion that economic growth can occur without an increase in resource consumption is one that's been made repeatedly, but that flies in the face of all evidence.

The story is somewhat complicated by the fact that primary consumption of energy and materials can be outsourced, giving the appearance of decoupling of growth from resource use. Once net imports and resource consumption at point-of-origin are accounted for, the connection is resumed.

Global GDP growth to date has occurred in lockstep with increased material and energy resource use.

I've looked at the relations myself simply using national GDP and energy use through about 2010, see: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1vlksg/economi...

And more robustly:

"The material footprint of nations ", Thomas O. Wiedmanna, Heinz Schandl, Manfred Lenzenc, Daniel Moranc, Sangwon Suhf, James Westb, and Keiichiro Kanemotoc. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1220362110. PubMed ID24003158. http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/08/28/1220362110

"The true raw material footprint of nations ", September 3, 2013. "The study, involving researchers from UNSW, CSIRO, the University of Sydney, and the University of California, Santa Barbara, was published today in the US journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It reveals that the decoupling of natural resources from economic growth has been exaggerated." https://web.archive.org/web/20130906063246/https://newsroom....