You are taking a very narrow view on the energy use here. In modern economy you can think of pretty much any thing as made of energy. You are comparing how much your new tv is pulling out of a socket to your old tv, but did you figure the energy cost of producing that new tv into your calculations? I'd look at an even bigger picture. Like to travel? Now compare how much more energy must be used to go in an airplane fast compared to traveling on foot slow. You mention the car, now the radical thing to do would be to ditch the car completely, but then your life quality invariable would go down. It is great that waste goes down and we can argue that the fact that your old car consumed more fuel tells us that it was wasteful compared to the new one, but note even to cut that waste required energy expenditure in the form of people working on it, computer power for sims, etc, and, of course, manufacture.

And I disagree that higher energy expenditure overall will mean lower quality of life later on. We are swimming in energy even though we currently might not know how to convert some forms of it into productive use. That'll change.

By the way, don't get me wrong, I am totally for cutting waste on the local level just because it frees some of the money (and that is proxy for resources) for other, more productive uses.