Naked Science Forum
Life Sciences => The Environment => Topic started by: another_someone on 17/07/2006 18:01:35
-
Energy production and source
Does anyone know approximately what if the total amount of energy produced by humans worldwide (whether it be a hearth fire in a peasants hut, to a nuclear power station in France)?
Does someone know how much energy we receive from natural sources (solar and geothermal) in a comparable time?
OK, I will accept that there is a complicating factor, in that if someone is burning wood on the hearth fire, then they are actually using energy that originated as solar energy, and so it would arise in both categories. To some extent, the same is even true of oil, although for wood we are consuming solar energy that was received a few decades or a few centuries ago, while with oil we are consuming energy created a few hundred million years ago. It may then possibly be argued that the only true human energy source is nuclear energy.
Thus, I suppose to make sense of the above numbers, one should separate out nuclear power, time shifted solar energy, and immediate solar energy.
Also, given all the satellites spinning around us measuring the amount of heat we give off – how much energy are we actually sending back out into space (as a matter of interest, is this increasing or reducing, over the decades the satellites have been up there)?