If you want to tell the story of worldwide energy consumption over the past 200 years, you need three chapters. Chapter 1: The Coal Age. Chapter 2: The Oil Age. Chapter 3: The China Age.
In the early days of industrialization, the use of biofuels such as wood declined as the West learned to live and breath coal. Even with the introduction of the automobile — the Model-T Ford debuted in 1908 — it took the onset of World War II to turn oil, and to a lesser extent natural gas, into the next great energy resource. Notice though, the world’s per capita growth seemed to level off in the 1980s.
