HT Odum: reply regarding the USA's use of global annual emergy. In 1998 it was about 33%. (See Brown and Ulgiati 1999 article in AMBIO 28(6):486-493 for global budget = 30 E 24 sej/yr; USA budget from an extrapolation using Appendix D in my book: Environmental accounting = 10 E24 sej/yr.
In a message dated 12/13/01 10:49:07 AM, kdavies@igc.org writes:
We often see the statement that with 4% of the world's population, USA consumes 25% of the world's energy (or some variation of those numbers). My question is how much of the world's eMergy does USA consume? If you included the embodied energy in all the food and manufactured goods that USA imports, offset by the same for USA exports, how would this affect the 4%-25% calculation?
KD