You were there, kids, when It Happened.
China, powered by years of rapid economic growth, is now the world’s biggest energy consumer, knocking the U.S. off a perch it held for more than a century, according to new data from the International Energy Agency.
The US was by far the largest consumer of energy since the early 1900s. Ten years ago, US energy use was twice as large as China’s.
So what?
“The fact that China overtook the U.S. as the world’s largest energy consumer symbolizes the start of a new age in the history of energy,” IEA chief economist Fatih Birol said in an interview.
History of energy? It’s much larger than that, my influential friends. Energy drives economics and economics drives Power, National Power. And we understand Power and Persuasion, right?
Consider, too, what’s likely to happen in the near term.
The U.S. is still by far the biggest energy consumer per capita, with the average American burning five times as much energy annually as the average Chinese citizen, said Mr. Birol, who has been in his current role for six years.
China has just passed the US in total, but per capita the US uses five times as much. China, obviously, isn’t going to stop its energy demand simply because it consumes as much as a nation. It will keep going until its energy demand gets closer to the per capita US rate.
I believe that persuasion principles are universal and eternal; they apply for all faces and places, all times and rhymes. Cultural differences change only the interface, but not the process. Thus, the ELM works in Beijing, but it better speak with a Mandarin accent. Or . . .
Zhè shì duì lìng yīgè rén, yúchǔn de!