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Notes -
I agree with the bulk of your comment, just want to make a tangential comment about the night lights analysis.
To me it seems like a pretty questionable approach in general because once a nation reaches a certain level of industrialization and electrification, wouldn't night light intensity begin growing much more slowly after that? Even if the US economy grew by a factor of 10 in very real and impactful ways, there are still limits to how bright most people want it to be at night.
Also, modern high-tech economic activity tends to be concentrated in small specialized regions. It seems to me that without very careful analysis, one might be more impressed by 100 villages all getting street lights for the first time than by one high-tech chip factory that is built in the corner of some already-bright city and largely draws its power from existing plants and its raw materials from existing mines, hence does not increase the country's overall night light intensity very much at all, and which yet contributes even more to the country's economy than the 100 villages getting street lights for the first time.
Am I missing something?
Also, in Europe there is some movement to outright reduce light pollution.
And is is more efficient to lit ground (where roads and sidewalks are) rather than emit it in the sky.
Though for example refineries are well lit and having two refineries rather then one will cause light emissions to increase.
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