Daniel Nocera, Henry Dreyfus Professor of Energy at MIT and international spokesman on sustainable energy, is giving a talk here at U.Va. today. I thought I'd share some of the stats that he's pulled together in prior publications. Readers of this blog will already know that I question a commonly taken-for-granted assumption in energy predictions -- which is the steady and predictable rise in consumption patterns, a rise that is purported to be intractable and inevitable -- but nevertheless, those predictions are offered below the fold and summarized here: "Within our lifetimes, energy consumption will increase at least two-fold, from our current burn rate of 12.8 TW to 28 - 35 TW by 2050 (TW = 10^12 watts)."
Anything above stand out as worthy of discussion?
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Comments
That 10-to-1 US to China ratio is more than I thought. I'd been carrying around a 6-to-1 figure, but now that I think about it some more I really don't know where I got that and it's not really all that much better anyway.
Posted by: JJDub | February 15, 2008 3:22 PM
I had no idea that Africa was an individual country. I guess American foreign policy is spilling over to the DoE...
Posted by: HgMan | February 15, 2008 4:22 PM
I don't think this is a very good analysis. It doesn't seem to take into account the increasing industrialization of China. It won't be the case that their per-capita use won't increase, probably dramatically.
Still, when global warming deniers get all huffy about renewable energy investment because "it doesn't matter since China will never do it", it's worth noting that despite their recently increased industry and huge population, they still can't waste energy the way Americans can. Not to mention that half of their energy is probably used to make plastic crap for us.
Posted by: jeffk | February 15, 2008 4:40 PM
Posted by: Fernando Magyar | February 18, 2008 6:26 AM