They don’t create elements, they create molecules. They don’t pull methane out of grass, grass doesn’t pull methane out of the air. Grass pulls CO2 out of the air and it is fermented by microbes into methane (CH4). Methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO2 although it stays in the atmosphere for a shorter time before it does break down back into carbon dioxide and hydrogen.

In a sense, yes, everything on earth is basically a closed loop and it all eventually balances out. The amount of each element remains stable. The problem is that things like mass farming of cows shifts the balance of those elements.

I think it’s partially innacurate to compare per capita energy consumption for the two nations.

The average American lives a vastly different lifestyle to someone in china, consider that per capita consumption of China is now higher than that of the EU. It’s not the whole picture. An average American uses almost four times as much energy as a Chinese or European person at home.

If you’re talking about standard of living, sure, per capita makes sense. There’s no argument that for the majority of people in the US their standard of living is probably objectively higher.

However, China’s industrial electricity usage per capita has overtaken that of the US long ago.

I think this is just blatantly wrong. China has vastly more energy capacity that the US and, 3-4x what the USA has. China has the entire USAs energy capacity purely as renewables. The entire time, the competition around energy has been a moot point for China. They don’t need more efficient or powerful chips because they had the energy spare to just use more. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang made a good statement on this point. The reason for this, whatever it is, could be entirely unrelated to energy.