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A human society can be viewed as a macro-organism, a far-from-equilibrium creature that exists by pumping energy through it. The more complicated the society is, the more energy per unit time it needs to pump through to keep itself going.
What you see above is a plot of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in US dollars per day per person, versus the total rate of hydrocarbon use in Barrels of Oil Equivalent (BOE) per day per person. The plot is doubly logarithmic, so a straight line here is a power law curve in Cartesian coordinates. The source of data is CIA, and all 200 countries on the Earth are plotted in different colors by their continents.
The three poorest countries with the least use of hydrocarbons are Congo, Burundi, and Chad. On the other extreme, I show Qatar, Gibraltar, Luxembourg, and US. China and Brazil are in the middle of the cloud of points that clearly form a linear trend.
The two solid lines are the power law sca…
A human society can be viewed as a macro-organism, a far-from-equilibrium creature that exists by pumping energy through it. The more complicated the society is, the more energy per unit time it needs to pump through to keep itself going.
What you see above is a plot of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in US dollars per day per person, versus the total rate of hydrocarbon use in Barrels of Oil Equivalent (BOE) per day per person. The plot is doubly logarithmic, so a straight line here is a power law curve in Cartesian coordinates. The source of data is CIA, and all 200 countries on the Earth are plotted in different colors by their continents.
The three poorest countries with the least use of hydrocarbons are Congo, Burundi, and Chad. On the other extreme, I show Qatar, Gibraltar, Luxembourg, and US. China and Brazil are in the middle of the cloud of points that clearly form a linear trend.
The two solid lines are the power law sca…