Check Your Facts, Blogger

So a few days ago I breezily wrote "If we're really lucky, then maybe we can reverse the decades-long trend of declining per capita energy consumption that has correlated with stagnating standards of living in the west, combined with disastrous declines in the poorest parts of the world." This is one of those things I read somewhere, and stupidly (it turns out) assumed was true. It isn't. A post at The Oil Drum provides a useful corrective:



So per-capita energy consumption has actually increased, after a bit of waving between peaks and valleys. As the Oil Drum post mentions, the recent increase is due almost entirely to increased coal consumption. This presumably means India and China, which both get the vast majority of their electricity from coal (75%+.)

So let that be a lesson to us all - I cannot be trusted.