Energy Efficiency

The world pundits like to beat up the US as the world's biggest consumer of energy and point accusatory fingers at America for its per capita energy usage. The US per capita usage is rather high, but well below places like Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Iceland and Luxembourg. It's on par with Canada and Finland. But what to American get for their energy usage ? Americans energy use per unit GDP is rather good: many other nations perform more poorly by this measure.

Today the newspapers trumpet that China now consumes more energy in total per year than the US. Per today's WSJ reporting of IEA numbers, China consumption is 2.252 billion equivalent tons of oil equivalent in 2009, while the US consumed 2.170 billion tons of oil equivalent. US GDP for 2009 was $14.2 trillion. China GDP was $4.9 trillion. Thus Americans produced $6,540 GDP per ton of oil equivalent, while China produced only $2,170.

The US is 3x more efficient than China !!!

USA USA USA

Stop the Guilt-Mongering - we are doing a good job getting good value from our energy usage.

Word of the Day

"Ineffable" - adjective [$10]
Ineffable means 1. unutterable, too great for description in words; 2. that must not be uttered
Sentence: One ineffable fact of the energy debate is the high relative efficiency of US energy usage: it's three times better than China per unit GDP produced per ton of oil equivalent.