Energy and Income

Jim Trow, our new technical spokesperson, draws our attention to gapminder.org.  This software enables us to create a graph that shows the stark connection between energy consumption and poverty.

Click on the graph to visit an interactive version of this chart. With the interactive version, you can hover over the dots to identify the countries, "play" the graph forward and backward through time, and change the parameters of the data.

Each circle represents a country, and the size of the circle represents the size of the population. Yellow countries are in the Americas. Dark blue countries are in Africa. China is the big red circle, India is the big turquoise circle. As you can see, most people on our planet earn less than $4000 per year, and consume less than 4000 kWh of electricity per year.

The USA is the large yellow dot hovering at 14,000 kWh per person, with an average income around 40K. As you can see, Americans consume a lot more energy than the rest of the world.

To our credit, we don't consume the most energy per person. That honor is held by Norway and Iceland, the two dots to the far right of the graph. These folks consume almost twice the energy per person that Americans do.

This graph is linear. It doesn't look as stark when you use a logarithmic scale.

Here's a look at income vs. oil consumption in barrels per year.


According to this graph, Americans drink up 25 barrels of oil per person per year. Folks in Singapore guzzle 74 barrels per person. Wow! The folks in India are at 0.9 barrels per person per year.

The data doesn't tell us what total energy consumption is for electricity and oil - as some of the oil may be used for electricity generation.