[-] jhm on March 15 2012
I’m sorry if this is irrelevant or redundant (I did not read the whole post carefully) but shouldn’t food—both human and animal—be counted as ‘energy’ when human and animal power were doing work subsequently replaced by some of the other sources? I assume that some of this is swamped by low populations in these early years but is it negligible?
[-] BobE on March 15 2012
Gail
Many thanks for this.
One problem with long term energy/population analysis is the lack of hard figures for traditional biomass (fortunately included in Figure 1).
BP stats don’t mention it so it often gets left out of ‘economic’ analyses – another way that economists might be misled.
In 1980 Chinese traditional biomass consumption was probably at a level of about half of their coal consumption so leaving it out of Figure 7 creates a false impression of Chinese per capita rushing up from almost zero.
Also current world traditional biomass consumption is of a similar total magnitude to that of ‘new’ renewables. This has been included in Figure 1 but not in Figure 6 (again potentially confusing passing economists).
It is difficult to find historical figures but recent IEA reports have made an effort to include credible figures for traditional biomass in a way that they wouldn’t have done 20 years ago.
Given that it is usually used with appallingly bad efficiency means that the current traditional biomass quantities could go a lot further in supplying energy services with better technology.
If anyone out there has got decent country by country historical traditional biomass figures I’d be interested.
BobE