You are right to a degree. In reality gas and oil get put into reserves which acts as buffers for the actually consumption of the fossil fuels. During periods of good wind/solar weather, the buffers start to fill up, and when demand for fossil fuel energy rises the buffers get emptied.
There is however the ability to increase/decrease imports when needed by adding more transport trucks or reduce the flow in the pipe lines.
A graph over CO2 emissions is thus more useful in this context since they follow the actually consumption of gas/oil/coal, and has a direct connection with the market price for which the above graphs represent.
well germany uses less gas for energy, but more for heating and overall way way more coal. of course france has less co2 emissions. coal is even worse than gas which favors france by a big margin.
in a best of case scenario we would not use either of coal,gas,nuclear oil or any other fossil technology, but we are far from it, but i'm pretty sure europe is closer than most other countries/states/etc.
To put some numbers on the table, in 2018 (I could not find more recent data) the values of CO2 emissions in metric tons per capita were as follows:[1]
France 5.0
Germany 9.1
For comparison:
India 1.9
EU 8.6
China 8.0
Japan 9.4
Russia 12.1
United States 16.1
Canada 16.1
Australia 16.8
Having a squiz at the first page of results on that question, seems like it’s a per capita thing of being a large country with few people. Also, “including exports”, which means all the coal etc and thing they export to China etc is being counted. I don’t want to say it’s an accounting trick but it feels like an accounting trick. 7% of global fossil fuel exports counted against 0.3% of the worlds population (8bill vs 27mill). Is it also counted against the importing country when they use it? Because that feels like double counting.
There is however the ability to increase/decrease imports when needed by adding more transport trucks or reduce the flow in the pipe lines.
A graph over CO2 emissions is thus more useful in this context since they follow the actually consumption of gas/oil/coal, and has a direct connection with the market price for which the above graphs represent.