Micro, Macro and Me

20 Second Summary: Three out of five of the worlds largest economies (EU, Japan and India) have almost no oil reserves. China are currently importing most of its oil, and USA will need to import most of its oil very soon. The demand of oil is rising and the supply will eventually fall.  I expect price shocks  and shortage of oil and oil-related products. Price shocks for oil will not save the climate - there is enough of oil, natural gas and coal to reach 450 ppm and above.  Peak-oil is a second strong reason to stop wasting our resources and to stop heating our planet. Oil Reserves, Consumption and  Production  Recovery In this post, I will investigate the supply and demand of oil for different regions of the world. I'll start with listing the countries with the biggest  GDP, reserves, production and consumption respectively. GTOE is a billion tonnes of oil equivalents and MTOE is a million of oil equivalent. The five largest  economies ...

In this blog post, I'll try to visualize how much energy we handle in our everyday lives. It's not rocket science but it's important to be able to relate quantities of energy to ones everyday life. The SI unit for energy is 1 Joule. Lifting an apple of 100 grams one meter corresponds to one Joule. One kilowatt hour corresponds to 3,6 megajoules. Like a 1 kW heater running for one hour. Comparing One Day of Manual Work with Buying Energy An adult of good fitness can sustain some 50-150 watts when biking one hour. 100 watts for one hour corresponds to 0,1 kWh. The efficiency of human muscles is some 20% , so the input energy of 0,5 kWh will give an output mechanical energy/work of 0,1 kWh. Eight hours of manual work consumes four kWh of input and generate 0,8 kWh of mechanical work. If one would instead choose to work at an office for 8 hours, that person would be able to earn some 1300 SEK after taxes (140 USD or 130 EUR). That money will buy almost 83 liters of di...