Implications for My Energy Consuming Countries

High energy use per capita has generally been considered a detriment in a society. Considerable effort has been made by the US government and various organizations to have the public conserve energy. Since the converse of conservation is waste, most people will agree that we should not be wasting our natural resources.

However, we may want to look at some of the countries whose inhabitants are in the highest category of energy usage (waste?) per capita.

We have considered the per capita energy usage of 17 countries, with their associated populations, and some comments relative to energy usage.

Fourteen of the countries are either unusually rich in energy sources, such as geothermal, hydro, oil, gas, coal, and nuclear or are processing some of these materials for export. Exceptions are Luxembourg, as a large investment fund center, and Belgium and Finland in their use of large quantities of energy for production of export industrial goods.

With respect to population, the countries decrease in size from United States through Canada, Saudi Arabia,, Australia, Belgium, and Sweden. The other 11 countries have very small populations. The largest population countries tend to have lower energy usage per capita.
From these data, we can draw several conclusions:

1. The higher energy usage per capita countries have lower populations. This could result from the mathematics of the low population calculation.

2. The higher energy usage per capita countries may have significant energy usage in production and export of energy per se (oil and gas) or from manufacture of industrial products for export. There may also be significant waste because of ready availability of energy sources.