What most people dont' understand, i live in a part of germany, where eating of self collected mushrooms will radiate you, where boars in the forest are radioactive because of chernobyl 30 years ago...
by insulating the roof of my house better i cut my useage of oil by more than 50%, next time i'll insulate the outer walls, and after that i'll switch to electric heating that would need just 20% of the original energy.
you forget that the energy consumption not neccesarily always rises. All appliances get better and better in efficiency, for example.