Slide A, An Illustration of the Problem

The slide above shows continental Europe on a cloud-free night. Stitched together from a few thousand satellite photos by NASA, it goes by the name of Earthlights (the full image is on the next slide over the page). The Energy Beyond Oil presentation begins with this images so that, as the event is taken around the country, people can place themselves on the map.

In this slide we can see Western Europe. Although Britain might be often called the 'dirty man of Europe', in fact the Germans consume more energy per person, and produce more waste per person, than the British – it's just that they recycle more and use energy more efficiently than we do (it's also because we've closed and off-shored our manufacturing industry, whilst many Western European nations have not done so to the same extent.

The slide also enables you to see that across Europe, there are large urbanised areas. Britain may have the most concentrated level of urbanisation (compared to Germany or France) but most other states are equally 'well lit' despite the differing levels of wealth across the continent.

One of the most startling facts is that the energy you see here represents less than 0.1% of the energy being used by the humans on the ground!

Globally, as a general rule, anyone who earns more than $2/day shows up on this image. The richer people are the more energy they consume. It's only a minority of the human population (in terms of the global human population, those in the richest states) who consume the most resources. However, today it's not just in the richest states that a lot of this consumption takes place. There are a very small minority in the poorest states, who consume the majority of the energy and resources, and so who emit the majority of the world's pollution. At the same time there are small parts of some cities in the worlds richest states that have levels of deprivation comparable to the situation we see in the poorest states.

We might think that the key environmental issue is the size of the human population. This is true, but the level of consumption has a far greater impact in terms of the total human footprint on the planet. The most important population-based environmental issue is our food supply, since all humans need roughly the same level of food to sustain their life; for most other environmental issues the critical factor is the level of resource consumption practised by many of the people living in the world's richest nations, since they consume the largest share of the world's non-food resources.

Slide B, An Illustration of the Problem

As we pull-back from Western Europe we can see that the use of electric lighting is by no means a rich-world phenomenon. Most striking are features such as Egypt – a band of development some 600 miles long and only 20 to 40 miles wide. For readers of William Gibson's novels, you can see that the Boston-Atlanta metropolitan axis is well on its way to completion in the USA. And whilst some of the poorest states only have their major cities illuminated, in India the national electrification programme has ensured that the boundaries of the Indian state are well defined (development along the swirl of the River Indus in Pakistan is also well defined). The most obvious exception is of course Africa. Whilst the density of development along the continent's damp northern coast (between the sea and the desert) and around the conurbations of South Africa shows up, much of the rest of the continent is in darkness.

Another fact that this image describes is the level of human urbanisation. Poor people living in rural areas are far more subsistent, and so more energy efficient, than those in urban areas – primarily because they can source their needs more cheaply from the land around them. However this model of human living – subsistence – has been discouraged in the 'modern world', in part because if people are not subsistent they do not consume, and if they do not consume they are not part of the modern economy. Over the last two decades the growth of the world's economy has not been driven just by greater material wealth in the developed states, but by also the fact that as more people in developing states move to urban areas they become part of the global economy.

Urbanisation makes the population dependent upon large systems of production and transportation, and creates problems such as pollution and sewage disposal as the 'loop' in the human ecosystem cannot be closed locally because the environment does not have the capacity to accept the waste. Recent evidence shows that whilst the popular (amongst the richest states) view of urbanisation is that it allows people to be brought out of poverty, today rural poverty is being brought into the urban setting because of the high costs of raw materials and food. Research from the World Bank (see reference below) shows that for a comparable income, people in rural areas are 30% better off.

Background Information

NASA's 'Visible Earth' Project – the web site for the NASA Earthlights images, http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/
view_rec.php?id=1438.

A JPEG file of the image used in the slide can be downloaded directly from http://www.cojoweb.com/
earthlights_dmsp_big.jpg

Poverty Research – New Evidence on the Urbanization of Global Poverty, World Bank, March 2007.

The Annotated 2-hour EBO Presentation Slides (3.7 megabyte!!) – a PDF file containing explanatory text and web links relating to each of the slides in the 2-hour Energy Beyond Oil presentation. http://www.fraw.org.uk/download/ebo/
ebo_annotated-2008.pdf

Large format EBO presentation slides (1.7 megabyte!!) – a PDF file with a larger copy of the slide images in the presentation. http://www.fraw.org.uk/download/ebo/
ebo_presentation-2008.pdf