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Comment by NeoTar | Hacker News Reader

Not really.

Let's use the UNCTAD definition of developing countries - there are a number of countries which exceed Canada's per-capita energy usage (the highest of those I mention above) - Qatar, UAE, Trinidad and Tobago and Kuwait.

But those are all small countries, the highest per-capita energy usage by a larger nation is Turkmenistan (exceeding all of the European countries mentioned in the parent - UK, France, Germany - and Japan).

But that's not really the point. Doubtless there is a correlation between energy usage and standard of living. But it's not a 1:1, and there are some huge benefits to be gained - e.g. the US (77,028 kWh / person / year) has triple the usage per capital of the UK (28,501 kWh / person / year). Even in Europe, France and Germany could reduce their usage by a quarter to bring it to the UK level.

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Where are you getting your data?

For instance, I’m showing about 2.6 MWh/ye per capita for Turkmenistan [https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.USE.ELEC.KH.PC?locat...], below the world median of 3.1MWh/yr.

Also, those high usage small countries (including Trinidad and Turkmenistan) are huge oil producing countries where energy is subsidized to an absurd degree to ‘buy’ population compliance. That energy is coming straight from burning hydrocarbons.

They still are way below the big developed countries, near as I can tell. Sorting by ‘most recent value’, the list is pretty much either ‘huge petrokingdom’, or ‘highly developed nation’ until Estonia/Slovenia/Netherlands at 6.something MWh/yr.

The data does seem to be old though!

I am impressed by Spain’s low usage, but they culturally also minimize things like HVAC - since they were ‘civilized’ long before AC was a thing. They still are about 2x the median.

I’m using „our world in data“ - the link in my first post.

A difference may be that my figures are not just electricity, but „primary energy“, defined as:

„Primary energy includes energy that the end user needs, in the form of electricity, transport and heating, plus inefficiencies and energy that is lost when raw resources are transformed into a usable form.”

Ah, that makes sense - it’s doing the ‘tons of oil energy equivalent’, which those countries are petrostates/petrokingdoms which typically have things like free (or nearly so) gasoline, natural gas, electricity, etc. as part of the gov’t popularity equation.

Which those states need to do that typically because they don’t really care about any actual quality of life improvements, or developing any other parts of the economy.

Because why bother, when you can do those other things more easily, it makes folks dependent on the gov’t, and it avoids things like people being more educated and independent and asking tough questions about those in power.

So I guess I should amend my comment - ‘except for countries where the gov’t is incentivizing free unlimited petro energy due to gov’t policy, quality of life still roughly tracks energy consumption and availability’.

Though then we’d need to argue about what quality of life really means - most Spaniards would top most Americans in physical and mental health in my experience, for example. But Americans definitely have more stuff.

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