In mid-December, United Nations delegates from around the world flew their private jets to Dubai to announce a deal to phase out the use of coal, oil, and natural gas to fight climate change. United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres scolded skeptics that this was “inevitable whether they like it or not.”
Those private jets are a far cry from the lifestyle you lead, or we lead — or indeed, much of the rest of the world. Curious about our comparative carbon footprints, we recently engaged in an experiment. We kept energy diaries, and what we found might surprise you.
What Energy Poverty Looks Like
The result of policies designed to hold back the developing world is an ongoing gulf in energy consumption between the West and nations such as Kenya. To practically illustrate the difference, the co-authors compiled an energy diary, one in Texas and the other in Kenya.
The diary summarizes a typical day for each household and then expresses the energy used in an easy-to-understand format: the energy equivalent of a gallon of crude oil. A gallon of crude contains 135,500 BTUs of energy — a British Thermal Unit is defined as the energy needed to raise the temperature of a pound of water by one degree Fahrenheit. A gallon of gasoline with 10 percent ethanol has 89 percent of the energy of a gallon of crude. Put another way, a gallon of crude has almost 40 kilowatt hours (kWh) of energy, or enough to run a 1,000-watt
