Compared to what?
Even the old technologies aren't nearly as good as they used to be. The energy return on investment for fossil fuels used to be around 100 units return for every unit of energy invested back in the early 1900s; today it is lucky to be 10. Wind and solar are quickly coming down in price per kwh and going up in efficiencies and there is no reason to think that this won't continue to be the case. As far as transportation, the cheap, powerful cars of the 70s and 80s also guzzled fuel and belched lots of pollutants into the air. I was recently in Lima, Peru, and this city of 7-8million people had remarkably clean air. This would not be the case at all if instead of the plentiful small cars, buses and trucks, they were driving what we used to drive 30 or 40 years ago.
