Casaubon's Book

Seeing is Believing: World Energy Consumption

Posted by Sharon Astyk on March 19, 2012
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The always-thoughtful Gail Tverberg has a great post that simply shows in visual terms the history of world energy consumption – well worth a look. I’ve reproduced one of her graphs here, but please read the whole thing.

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One graph not in her post (not suggesting it should be, but I like the contrast) is world discovery of oil over about the same period – anyone who implicitly believes we are discovering vast reserves should contrast the two:

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(Source, Colin Campbell)

Gail goes on to write about how an economist might be misled by past trends to disregard “facts in the ground” – lack of understanding of geology or scientific reality is an ongoing problem for our society, sadly.

Sharon

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Comments

  1. #1 Neil Craig
    March 27, 2012

    An interestiong first graph. It shws that the natural rate of increase of energy use & thus world GNP was stopped about 1970. I assume the “world” energy growth post 2000 is as entirely among the non US/EU countries as the GNP growth has been.

    Clear visual evidence of the effect of political Luddism coming to power.

    Your graph is less meaningful since it specifically refers to “regular conventional oil” which, presumably deliberately, excludes tar and shale oil, shale gas which can be converted into oil & algae grown oil. One might as well “prove” that we ran out of oil in 1860 by producing a graph of production of “regular” whale oil.