Introducing : energy, civilisation and wealth.

“The combustion of fossil fuels and the generation of electricity created a
new form of high-energy civilization whose expansion has now encom-
passed the whole planet and whose primary energy sources now include
small but rapidly rising shares of new renewable sources, especially solar
(harnessed by photovoltaic devices or in concentrating solar power plants)
and wind (converted by large wind turbines).” V. Smil, 2016.

Over the last two centuries, a portion of humankind has unleashed massive amounts of a new type of fuel whose energy densities are of 10 million joules per kilogram. This allowed Homo sapiens to manufacture transportation such as high-speed electric train, a mean of transport four orders of magnitude more powerful than two oxen pulling a cart, the most used prime-mover of Human history¹.

This access to cheap and abundant energy made human existence more comfortable than it ever was, with life expectancy going from mere 26 years for the average African in 1800 to 61 years in 2015, literacy rate doubling in Brazil from 35 % in 1920 to 68 % 1970 and undernourishment prevalence in developing countries being divided by a factor of 3 from 1970 to 2015².

Sadly enough, the very cause of the easing of human distress, i.e the combustion of fossil fuels, is poised to also be our curse. As the burning of fossil fuels release greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, having adverse effect on the climate. Climate change is threatening the survival of millions in the near-future³.

Moving away from fossil-fuels to cleaner and safer energies is a global challenge which can be step up only by data-driven public policies. We are a team of statistics students from KU Leuven in Belgium and in this blog, we wish to provide new inventive way to visualise a dataset related to energy and wealth.

[1] A French high-speed train can exert a maximum power of 9.6 x 10⁶ W while two oxen pulling a cart maximum power is no more than 700 W.

[2] These staggering figures were all gathered from Our World in Data.

[3]. The World Bank estimated that over a 140 million people could be climate-refugees by 2050