William ChopsWestfield wrote:

> The US energy consumption is probably excessive, but in some very real
> sense, I think you can estimate a peoples' standard of living pretty
> accurately by measuring their per capita energy consumption...  (this
> does NOT mean that one shouldn't be as efficient as possible, of
> course.)

Two very, hm, controversial statements in one phrase :)

First, what's "standard of living"? Before saying what it correlates to, we 
probably have to have an agreed-upon way to measure it. This is not easy. 
Are you sure that the US standard of living is about 75% "higher" or 
"better" than Germany's? How would you measure that (so that we then can 
see whether the correlation with the energy consumption is there)?

One example for the difficulty of measuring "standard of living" is the 
higher freedom of movement when walking one enjoys in Germany and the 
higher freedom of movement with anything motorized one enjoys in the USA. 
How do you figure that into the standard of living calculation? I know 
people for whom one is an essential part of their standard of living, I 
know others for whom the other is an essential part, and I know people for 
whom neither is. 


Secondly, I think you severely limited your first statement ("you can 
estimate a peoples' standard of living pretty accurately by measuring their 
per capita energy consumption") with your second ("this does NOT mean that 
one shouldn't be as efficient as possible"), without making the consequence 
that follows from that explicit. IMO it follows from the second statement 
that you only can estimate a peoples' standard of living by measuring their 
energy consumption as long as they do things in a similar way. 

For example, if a people would do most of their day-to-day chores by bike 
or similar and had built an infrastructure that would permit that, their 
energy consumption would be lower than the USA's or Germany's (everything 
else being equal or comparable). Yet I'd say that their standard of living 
would be higher.

Given the restriction that must be put on the first statement when 
including the second one, I'm not sure the first one continues to make much 
sense. 

Gerhard

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