The island in the wind

David Jordan | Image: BCBusiness Online | Published: July 14, 2008

How much energy do you consume a year? How does that compare to global averages, and how sustainable is it? Read on, and the image at left will make a little more sense.

In “The Island in the Wind,” a story in the July 7 issue of the New Yorker magazine, author Elizabeth Kolbert looks at the 2,000-Watt Society, a group that grew out of a research team at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. The group takes its name from what they calculate to be a sustainable level of energy consumption, per person, worldwide.

The 2,000-watt figure refers to continuous energy consumption; for example, it’s the equivalent to leaving 20, 100-watt light bulbs burning continuously. Here are the Swiss researchers’ estimates of worldwide per-capita energy consumption:

Sustainable level of per-capita continuous energy consumption, worldwide: 2,000 watts

Current average per-capita continuous energy consumption:
1—Bangladesh: 300 watts
2—Africa: 500 watts
3—India: 1,000 watts
4—China: 1,500 watts
5—Switzerland: 5,000 watts
6—U.S. and Canada (each): 12,000 watts

Here's the way the average per-capita energy consumption breaks down in Switzerland:
—1,500 watts: living and office space
—1,100 watts: food and consumer items
—600 watts: electricity
—500 watts: automobile
—250 watts: air travel
—150 watts: public transportation
—900 watts: public infrastructure

These researchers formed the 2,000-Watt Society, whose members strive to meet the 2,000-watt goal. Director Roland Stulz explains that reducing your personal consumption to 2,000 watts doesn’t sentence one to a life of hardship.

As New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert reports: “The 2,000-Watt Society is not a program of hard life,” the director of the project, Roland Stulz, told me when I went to speak to him at his office, in the Zurich suburb of Dübendorf. “It is not what we call Gürtel enger schnallen”—belt tightening—“it’s not starving, it’s not having less comfort or fun. It’s a creative approach to the future.”

Stulz tells Kolbert that many of the Swiss founders would be close to the 2,000-watt goal – if it weren’t for air travel. Stulz notes that one round-trip flight to Shanghai averages out to about 800 watts of continuous energy consumption over a year – or almost half the 2,000-watt ideal.

Stulz adds that trading in your gas-guzzler for a hybrid doesn’t help much: driving a Toyota Prius 10,000 miles in a year

averages out to about 1,000 watts of continuous energy consumption over a year: about half the 2,000-watt ideal.

Other highlights from the New Yorker story:

This year, the world is expected to burn through some thirty-one billion barrels of oil, six billion tons of coal, and a hundred trillion cubic feet of natural gas. The combustion of these fossil fuels will…yield around thirty billion tons of carbon dioxide. Next year, global consumption of fossil fuels is expected to grow by about two per cent, meaning that emissions will rise by more than half a billion tons, and the following year consumption is expected to grow by yet another two per cent.

When carbon dioxide is released into the air, about a third ends up… in the oceans… A quarter is absorbed by terrestrial ecosystems… and the rest remains in the atmosphere. If current trends in emissions continue, then sometime within the next four or five decades … many marine organisms—including reef-building corals—will be pushed toward extinction… atmospheric CO2 levels are projected to reach five hundred and fifty parts per million—twice pre-industrial levels—virtually guaranteeing an eventual global temperature increase of three or more degrees… even broad, conservative estimates are terrifying: at least fifteen and possibly as many as thirty per cent of the planet’s plant and animal species will be threatened; sea levels will rise by several feet; yields of crops like wheat and corn will decline significantly in a number of areas where they are now grown as staples; regions that depend on glacial runoff or seasonal snowmelt—currently home to more than a billion people—will face severe water shortages; and what now counts as a hundred-year drought will occur in some parts of the world as frequently as once a decade.