American energy standards too high

A new analysis was published by two California-based think tanks: Searching for a miracle / "Net Energy" limits & the fate of industrial society. The report, written by Richard Heinberg, is a joint initiative by the International Forum on Globalization and the Post Carbon Institute.

For one, Heinberg believes it will be impossible to ever bring the entire world population up to the current American energy standards. Maintaining today’s world average energy use per capita is most probably the only thing we can hope to accomplish, and even that comes at a cost.

As to what the energy of the next generation will be, he sees significant potential for wind energy, solar photovoltaic energy (PV), Concentrated Solar Power (CSP), wave energy, and tidal energy, but even the potential of this 'energy mix of the future' is limited. Wind energy and CSP will have to make up the largest share in any viable future energy mix.

The report also looks at energy carriers and concludes that electricity has the best potential as of now. Hydrogen’s energy density per unit of volume is too low and too much energy is lost in the various conversion steps.

However energy conservation, mitigating population growth, and limiting economic growth are cited as indispensible if we are to develop a sustainable energy economy. Conservation interestingly includes, among other things, the internalisation of the full costs of energy to reflect its true price.

An interesting correlation between annual energy use per capita and the corresponding feeling of well-being shows the two are proportional up to about 100 GJ per capita per year. Above this figure, the feeling of well-being starts to go down again! So for all those quoting per capita figures, some rethink?

In another paper published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Sir Partha Dasgupta shows that the total wealth of a nation can decline even as its GDP is growing. In Pakistan, while GDP per capita grew by an average of 2.2% a year between 1970 and 2000, total wealth declined by 1.4%. All economic activity is accounted as if it were of positive value. Even a train crash – as it generates £1bn worth of track repairs, medical bills and funeral costs, which generate £1bn in ticket sales!

Are we measuring the wrong things? have we got the picture all wrong?