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• 8 December 2007, 3:13 AM John Gillett wrote:
  Please help a newbie here. What are the scales on these graphs? Tx John
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• 8 December 2007, 5:18 AM CCW wrote:
  Sorry John - studying for finals has made my posts a bit quick and sloppy lately. The scale is this:
  
  Horizontal Axis: Tons of Oil Equivalent Per Capita Per Year. A "TOE" is a unit of energy equivalent to 40 Million BTU, and 1 TOE/year is equivalent to about 1,330 Watts of power, and so dividing national use by the population, the average Chinese citizen at present uses 1,810 Watts, Britons 5,050, Americans 10,400, and the average Canadian - 12,800 Watts.
  
  Vertical Axis: Real GDP Per Capita measured by Purchasing Power Parity (in year-2000 international dollars"). This is a decent proxy for "wealth" or "development" or "quality of life" or whatever you want to call it. Despite those who go on about poverty getting worse in the world - you can see that in fact there has just been an explosion in living standards across the globe in almost every country over the last 43 years. The rich have gotten richer but the poor have not gotten poorer - they have also gotten richer and at a much faster pace, and so the "wealth gap" has diminished significantly - not expanded as some would have you believe.
  
  Every single country's "time series" flows from 1965 to 2006 and without exception they flow from lower left to upper right over time. You can see that from October 1973, The Yom Kippur War and the first oil embargo - all the "developed" countries took a sharp turn upwards in their trend, while developing countries have a more more direct relationship between wealth and energy consumption in the last 35 years.
  
  The thing to keep in mind about the "developing countries" chart though, is that even though the per capita wealth and energy use is low, the populations are so high that the aggregate economy and energy use is truly enormous. China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, Pakistan, and Bangladesh collectively contain HALF the world's population in only six developing countries, and except for poor Bangladesh, their recent and projected rapid increases in wealth and energy consumption inevitably will have major effects on the world.
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• 8 December 2007, 1:48 PM John wrote:
  Many thanks for clarification, and good luck with your studies - John
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