You framed a correlation like a requirement. Human development involves a lot of things, many of which don't have a strong causal relationship with energy usage

You framed a correlation like a requirement. Human development involves a lot of things, many of which don't have a strong causal relationship with energy usage. That chart has major outliers on the top right. Most countries toward the top are clustered close to the left. Yes, the top left is rounded off and everyone at the top uses more resources than everyone at the bottom, but the outliers are enough to skew an average and make the effect appear larger than it is. My reading is that several energy intensive countries can significantly reduce their energy expenditure while maintaining a high level of human development.