When thinking about global energy consumption, and the closely related risks of climate change, it’s useful to have some grounding in the basic facts. Here, I pass along a few figures from the annual Statistical Review of World Energy (June 2024). At a global level, the shift to non-carbon energy sources is more limited than many people seem to believe. In addition, carbon emissions and coal production are becoming more concentrated outside the United States and Europe, as other parts of the world economy develop. For all the controversy over US- and EU-based policies to encourage non-carbon energy, the outcome of carbon emissions for the world as a whole is going to be determined elsewhere.
As a starting point, here are the sources of “primary” energy in 2023 (that is, combining electricity generation, transportation, industrial uses, everything) for the world as a whole. Out of global primary energy of 620 exajoules in 2023, 81% is fossil fuels (coal, oil, natural gas). Noncarbon sources are the remaining 19%. If you focus on the “other renewables,” leaving out nuclear and solar, that’s 8% of total output. If the goal is to replace fossil fuels without (much) expanding nuclear and hydro, the “other renewables” would need to multiply more-or-less tenfold to cover existing energy demand. Of course, a ten-fold increase wouldn’t be enough, because the billions of people living in lower- and middle-income countries badly want to consume more energy, not just replace existing fossil fuel use.
It’s already true that over 60% of global energy consumption is happening outside the higher-income OECD countries. Here’s a breakdown by region. Notice also that the growth rate of energy consumption over the past decade is near-zero in the United States and negative in western Europe, but rising in Africa, India, and China.
Here’s a similar table, but describing per capita energy consumption, not total energy consumption. As you see, the average person in the world consumes 77 gigajoules of energy. The average American consumes 277 gigajoules, or more than triple the global average. However, the average person Africa consumes 21 gigajoules, the average person in India 39 gigajoules, and the average person in Central and South America 58 gigajoules. It seems plausible that developing countries may find ways for the standard of living to improve without consuming US levels of energy, but it seems impossible that the they can do so without some quite substantial rises in per capita energy consumption.
The report offers a breakdown of different sources of primary energy, and I’ll just note that, globally speaking, coal has been on the rise.
A more detailed breakdown is that China is 51.8% of total global coal output, India is 11.1% and Indonesia is 8.5%. Coal output is rising in all three countries. Meanwhile, the United States is 5.8% of global coal output and western Europe is 4.8%–and in both the US and Europe, coal production has been falling about 5% per year for the last decade. Indeed, news reports are suggesting that whatever China’s announced goals for clean energy, its expansion of coal is ongoing.
Given this background, it’s perhaps not shocking that global carbon emissions reached an all-time high in 2023.
If you break down this total,, 31.9% of these global carbon emissions were from China in 2023, and another 8% of global emissions were from India. The Asia-Pacific region as a whole–adding in Japan, Australia, Indonesia, South Korea, and others–already accounts for 53.7% of global carbon emissions, and total carbon emissions in this region have been rising 2% per year in the last decade. Meanwhile, the US accounts for 13.2% of global carbon emissions in 2023 (with the total declining an average of 1.2% per year in the last decade) and western Europe accounted for 10.1% of global carbon emissions in 2023 (with the total falling an average of 2.2% per year in the last decade).
At about this point, it’s common to note that historically, carbon emissions from today’s high-income countries have been much larger. This is true, but looking ahead at efforts to reduce global carbon emissions, it’s also not especially relevant. If global efforts to reduce carbon emissions don’t focus heavily on the biggest current emitters, as well as offering a cost-effective path to higher energy use and a higher standard of living for lower-income people across the world, the effort will not succeed.
