^Corporate interests and their Tea Party pals are determined to paint all voices for caution, reform, conservation or moderation as Luddite lunatics (you know, "who want to go back to a pastoral 18th century lifestyle"), who are opposed to all progress and technology because they are evil socialist traitors.^

"Caution, reform, conservation and moderation" went by the wayside a long time ago. You think we'd have gotten a clue when they started attacking solar farms in the desert, wind farms out on the ocean, geothermal, and hydroelectric power.

This chart is not that current, but it should give a rough idea of the situation. It shows 1.71 x 10^10 MWh/y for a world population of 6.46 billion. Not sure exactly how the units are calculated, but since they're consistent, I don't have to worry that much about it.

That's 2.65 MWh/y per person on average. China's population averages out at 3.18. If you look at U.S. consumption, it averages out to 12. Before anyone gets all guilty, some other developed nations come out with a higher per capita average, including Canada, Sweden, and Norway (24.6!).

The Earth's population isn't going to be getting smaller, and everyone is going to want to live the good life we have here in the U.S. There are a few choices here:

- Create one hell of a lot more energy from something or other. From just the math, we'd need almost five times what we're producing now on a worldwide scale. We're not going to get it by burning carbon. Even if you don't think CO2 is a problem, there may not be that much carbon out there, and if there was, how long will it last?

- Create some magic that allows us to have our present standard of living on a fifth of the power. At this point, magic would probably be required. Keep in mind we're beginning to convert our cars to electricity. This will not help.

- Create a planetary regime that "evens things out," and reduces our living standards to the "fair share" level. This is what many in the current environmental movement would like, although I'm not sure most of them actually have thought it through. Historically, this kind of resource management ends up with most of the population scraping by and somehow the leadership still living in well-lit palaces.

- Decide that some of us are going to live well in our enclave nations, and that a few billion "Brutals" are just going to have to pound sand. This is not a good long-term solution, but ironically this was pretty much the situation until recently. We in the West enjoyed a lot of prosperity and easy abundance not just because we had developed an advanced technological society, but also because a vast majority of the world was still herding goats for a living. China's oil consumption, as just one example, has gone up by a factor of four in just the past thirty years. The world is a smaller place than it was when I was a kid, and everybody wants that dishwasher now.