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High Energy, your love is lifting me.....
Total USA Primary Energy Consumption is of the order of 100 Quadrillion Btu per annum, and growing.
100 Quadrillion = 100,000,000,000,000,000 Btu per annum.
Given a population of 300,000,000 this works out at 333,333,333 or one third of a billion Btu per capita per annum.
The Btu, or British Thermal Unit, is the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of one pound of (fresh) water by one degree Fahrenheit.
The Fahrenheit scale has 180 degree from freezing to boiling, so, excluding latent heats of vapourisation and solidification that gives us 333,333,333 / 180 = 1,851,851.85 pounds of water raised from just above freezing to just below boiling, per capita, per annum.
1,851,852 lbs / 8.34 (lbs per gallon) = 220,044 gallons, or about 1/3rd of an Olympic sized swimming pool.
So to put it another way, total USA primary energy consumption is equivalent to heating from nearly freezing to nearly boiling, 100,000,000 Olympic sized swimming pools.
365 days in a year x 24 hour day = 8,760 hours in a year, x 60 = 525,600 minutes in a year, x 60 = 31,536,000 seconds in a year.
So total USA primary energy consumption is equivalent to heating three Olympic sized swimming pools from just above freezing to just below boiling EVERY SECOND.
Since energy = standard of living, and there are 6.6 billion human beings on the planet, the USA contains 1 in 22 humans, so for the whole world to enjoy a USA standard of living that is an energy equivalent of 66 Olympic sized swimming pools from just above freezing to just below boiling per second.
The average domestic kettle holds half a gallon, so if all 300 million USAians, men women and children, each fill a kettle with freezing water and simultaneously turn it on that is 150 million gallons, or about 231 Olympic swimming pools (648,000 gallons per Olympic pool), about 77 second worth of total primary energy consumption, except we all know that a kettle filled completely with ice cold water will take several minutes to come to the boil.
So let's go back and look at that 333,333,333 Btu per person per annum another way.
333,333,333 / 31,536,000 seconds in a year gives us about 10 Btu per person per second, that is a nice figure to juggle with in our heads, just remember this is a constant 24 hour a day, 365 day a year rate.
1 Btu = about 1,055 Joules, and 1 kWh = approx 3,600,000 Joules (per hour), or 1,000 Joules per second, so 1 Btu per second = about the same as 1 kWh, so our mean USAian 10 Btu per person per second also works out to about the equivalent of 10 kWh, eg ten 1 bar electric fires on 24/7.
Of course normally we buy energy in various forms, petroleum / gasoline or diesel by the gallon or litre, electricity by the kWh, natural gas by the cubic metre, bottle gas by weight, and so on, so it is harder to compare, but generally speaking if you do the comparisons, and exclude things like taxes and subsidies, all these different forms of energy cost about the same when you settle on a standard monetary unit and a standard energy unit.
Yes, there is some variation, but it is mainly based upon suitability for various applications, diesel makes a much better way of re-energising a vehicle than electricity, because of the relative storage methods available, conductor limits, etc etc.
So bottom line is all forms of energy cost approximately the same, when reduced to the same units of money and energy.
This is fairly obvious, if one form of energy was significantly cheaper than others, it would represent a wasted opportunity for profit...
So, if we take a ballpark figure of 20 US Cents per kWh, and a mean primary energy consumption rate of 10 kWh, we come up with a number of US$ 2.00 per person per hour, or a shade under 50 bucks per day, or 350 bucks US per week.
The great thing about global capitalism is that you can defer a great deal of that cost away from the US citizen, and place it on the shoulders of Johnny foreigner, doesn't matter who or were, as long as it ain't "Here".
This is known in business as "externalisation" (spell with a "zee" if you prefer) (look it up) and it is a FUNDAMENTAL principle of the business as an entity.
Do it right and you can externalise(ze) maybe 50% of the cost, so 10 cents per kWh, or about 25 US bucks per person per day.
US$ 175.00 per person per week, or US$ 9,100 per person per annum, is the minimum cost of living that you get left with, this is the "bottom line", the poverty line. (don't confuse food as being separate to this, food is energy, takes energy to produce and ship, and is inherently in the equation somewhere)
This is a frighteningly accurate way of analysing a society, a civilisation, an economy, it says that under the current externalising socio/political/ecomonic regime the wheels fall off at US$ 175 per person per week.
Tweak the equation by bringing home some of those externalised costs or god forbid, an actual global shortage of available energy, and the point at which the wheels fall off when measured in US$ per person per week increases, maybe to 250, or 350, or more.
When the wheels fall off it is a "tipping point", the classic example is the bucket with a hole in it, the complex explanation is that as it leaks when carried from point A to point B, there comes a distance along that line where it is no longer possible to sustain the losses, the simple explanation is the bucket being filled from a tap, once the leak exceeds that taps ability to replenish the losses, the level drops, period, end of story, game over.
Anything you want to know about foreign policy, fiscal policy, or any other policy can be explained thus.
It is all about the equations and costs of energy, per person, per second, and how much of that cost you can externalise, and how long for.