[megaman821]

It's hard to tell from the link, but this seems to be comparing the US' electricity consumption to the UK's electricity consumption. Most of the UK's energy use is from burning fuel for heat. Using energy and electricity as interchangeable is very confusing. That said, I would assume if you included all energy usage the US would still be a lot more because we drive so much more.

[leoedin]

It's looking at total energy consumption, not electricity consumption. The UK only generates about 4500 kWh per person each year - far off that 30,000 kWh number. In the UK (not sure about the US, but it's probably similar), about 25% of our energy consumption is space heating, 30% is road transport, 10% is air transport, 11% is domestic use and the remaining 24% or so is services and industrial. We don't really do AC here - I imagine that's a big chunk of use in southern US states.

The big thing that the article doesn't mention is that "developed" western countries outsource vast amounts of manufacturing energy usage to other countries. The UK is especially bad for this. We don't make most of our steel, aluminium, plastics or chemicals - so the many kWh required to make them isn't reported in our statistics. China does that for us.

[ZeroGravitas]

We have stats on that, from the same source as the article uses:

https://ourworldindata.org/energy-gdp-decoupling