Category Archives: Global energy supply and use

The distribution of energy wealth

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At the end of last week’s post, I pointed out that while breaking down aggregate global energy use by source starts to give us a more nuanced view of what it takes to enable our collective economic activity in physical terms, this still treats humanity as a single “giga-individual”. We’ll have a much better sense of the global picture if we look at how the collective view is made up in terms of energy use distribution across different groups of individuals. This is the contextual dimension that we’ll focus on in this post. Continue reading →

Energy and the biophysical view of economic activity: from joules to fuels

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The view of humanity’s energy supply and use presented last week painted a picture in the most abstract terms. The aggregate figures discussed there can be viewed as an attempt to describe all significant economic activity by means of a single quantitative measure. Such efforts may well have a familiar tone—in a sense, the data that the IEA provides in energy terms is a physical-world analogue to the financial-world perspective provided by bodies such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)—the IEA’s parent inter-governmental body—when it measures global economic activity in terms of Gross Domestic Product, or GDP. In this sense, we could view the 510 EJ total primary energy supply (TPES), and 350 EJ total final consumption (TFC) in 2009 as the energetic equivalent of saying that in 2009, global aggregate GDP was around US$60 trillion. Continue reading →