Energy and Life

Vaclav Smil’s Energy at the Crossroads, MIT 2003, is one of the best – and most comprehensive - books on current issues around energy and climate change.

One of the most striking points he makes is about energy and how we live. Reviewing evidence about life expectancy at birth, child mortality, educational attainment etc he points out that all these improve with energy use until it reaches 50-70 GJ a person for a year (don’t mind the units, just notice the numbers). (Smil pp 351-55) Now if you take the total amount of energy that’s traded (ie oil, gas, coal, electricity, wood etc) and divide by the world’s population, the answer is about 58 GJ a person a year. So the implication is that everyone on the planet could have enough energy for a long and healthy life and benefit from a good education. And CO₂ emissions would be exactly the same as they are now.

In fact, according to Smil, this is the level of energy use that people living in France and Japan had in the 1960s. So it’s really very acceptable.

The huge catch, of course, is that to make this happen, energy use in countries such as Japan or France today would have to reduce by ²/₃ and in the US and Canada by ⁴/₅.

So food for thought.