By all means, please enlighten me.

Pick some first world, industrialized nations here:

https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/

and compare the ratios of their GDP (total, and per capita) to various forms of energy (electricity, oil, natural gas ... too bad they don't have coal in there) consumed. I assume that the guys who wrote this are pretty good at what they're doing, as long as they're not getting their expected results dictated by politicians. I also assume that they don't have a negative bias against the USA.

You haven't established that what you are asserting is facts. Ridiculing others for not beleving things that haven't been established as fact is definitely a sign of religion. <p>

See above.

And I have no evidence that burning fossil fuels that release CO2 is wasteful or inefficient.

Of course you don't. Because no one actually claims that. However, how much of the energy gained is used for certain tasks, and how much of the energy is spent on habits and convenience instead of actual "economy", this is where you will find inefficiency if you look closely enough:

Air-conditioning (often poorly insulated) buildings to sub-70F's while it's 90F and above outside ? That's spending energy on a habit that has nothing to do with economy. It gets even better when some people start running space heaters in their office because they're not quite as cold-tolerant as their colleagues. I've seen it.
So, what would you call running a space heater in a sub-70F air-conditioned building ? I'd call that practiced waste of energy. I've seen it happen, too. And no one found anything wrong with it. Why, electricity comes out of the wall socket ?

Using gasoline engines for low rpm, high torque applications. They really suck at that efficiency-wise (since you need huge displacements to generate high torque), anyone vaguely familiar with engines (ask your local motorhead/ME person) will confirm that. But Americans like these applications, and what they know about diesel engines is that they're loud, dirty and inconvenient (all true, at least 30 years ago), and that the fuel is more expensive (never mind that you get 20+% more mpg). I've heard some rumors from a friend of mine (who works on diesel injection pumps) that this attitude is slowly starting to change, though.

If we're trying to socialize the world economy, let's at least have a useful goal... making sure everyone has food and water, for example. Heck, the humanitarian in me would certainly be willing to contribute 3% (the latest low-ball estimate of the impact on the world economy to address climate change) of my earnings if it could effectively stop starvation worldwide.

This might shock you when I say that, but most of the worlds hunger problems could be solved by rounding up all the two-bit politicians, dicators and warlords (I don't think I need to mention names) that keep people in their countries from actually producing enough food, and dumping them on a deserted island in the middle of the ocean, preferably together with a ton of guns and ammo. TV rights to this spectacle should be auctioned off and the proceeds go to their victims or their survivors.
Unfortunately, this would require all the usual nastiness associated with removing despots from power, and not really guarantee things are really going to get better afterwards. Despots rarely learn from the fate of their predecessors.