Do you have a source? How is that calculated? I suspect it's a rather complicated calculation. Questions like what defines a person in this context, what defines electricity usage, where did it go or come from if it did change, etc. seem like important ones to answer.

I don’t have the source where I read it, but it’s easy enough to calculate and the change is significant:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/201794/us-electricity-co... https://www.statista.com/statistics/183457/united-states--re...

  3887 TWH in 2010 / 309.3 million people = 12.57 MWH per person.
  3954 TWH in 2019 / 328.3 million people = 12.04 MWH per person.
  3930 TWH in 2021 / 331.9 million people = 11.84 MWH per person.

And that’s with over a million electric cars added.

Likewise if one looks at total energy consumption in the US:

    2000: 98.7 quadrillion BTU / 281.4 million people = 350 million BTU/person/year
    2019: 100.5 quadrillion BTU / 328.3 million people = 306 million BTU/person/year.

On the other hand, increased use of global manufacturing and reliance on ocean transport is concealed by this metric. Still, it doesn't look like overall things are getting worse.

For the CO2 metric:

    2000: 20.9 tonnes per capita
    2019: 15.7 tonnes per capita

https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/monthly/pdf/sec1_19.pdf

According to the below EIA article, things are getting worse worldwide.

> Global electricity consumption continues to increase faster than world population, leading to an increase in the average amount of electricity consumed per person

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=44095#:~:tex....

Well, sure. You have developing countries... developing, in addition to the (difficult to quantify) outsourcing effects that I mentioned above.

Note that I really want electricity usage to go up a lot, too. It's just overall primary energy usage that we want to stay level or go down. That's why I used the primary energy usage metric. After all, moving to an electric car or replacing natural gas heating with a heat pump "increases electricity usage."

See https://ourworldindata.org/energy-gdp-decoupling and https://ourworldindata.org/energy-offshoring

Don't feel it's really valid to calculate this by nation state. The system here is the entire planet, not individual nations.

But that energy also serves way more people than before. Chinas energy use went up a lot, but their standard of living also went up a lot and is now comparable to cold war USA/Europe. You can't leave that out.

You really believe their standard of living is like Cold War times US/Europe? Wtf is with these misconceptions.

I really hate flames like this, especially since I can't guess which side you're arguing on:

- "China's modern cities far outshine Cold War Europe-- Wtf is with these misconceptions?"

- "A whole lot of China is rural and undeveloped. You think it's like Cold War Europe-- Wtf is with these misconceptions"

Maybe make an argument instead of just being unkind to other commenters.

I apologize for that. It was really an impulsive, useless comment.

Is that because the US exported manufacturing to Asia?

We've had basic heating, insulation, and lighting efficiency improvements. Also, population has moved from colder to warmer climates. You can probably count up your personal energy usage and see that it's reduced. LED lighting, CRT televisions obsolete, vehicle efficiency, and so on.

Residential usage is about 1/5th of total consumption in the US

https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/use-of-energy/

The same facts apply to commercial usage.

Yes but where were all these things made? And is the energy that was used to make them accounted for?

Meanwhile, people mostly use a couple devices with high energy efficiency that are used for basically everything, instead of twenty lower quality devices...