October 12th, 2020
So?: Although most countries have recognized climate change and environmental damage as a problem, the countries with higher socio-economic status are still far from being environmentally conscious in their use of energy.
So What?: Well, the data suggests this is a problem and although there are a lot of different aspects to consider of a country (like it's population, wealth distribution, and geography) before one can analyze if a country is making efforts to use less fossil fuels or is beginning to successfully switch to renewable, one can also analyze the initial research results and see that many richer countries have not been making notable efforts.
Now What?: I chose to begin to analyze four different countries that are of different social mobility ranks. Social mobility “dictates whether children are on the path to having a better life than their parents, or if they will remain tethered to their [natal] socio-economic status.” This is relevant to my question because this indicates if a country has good healthcare, education, access to technology, work opportunities, and social protection. For my initial research, I chose to further analyze Denmark (ranked 1st) and the United States (27th).
These countries consumed different amounts of energy from 2009 to 2018. This energy consumption was measured in terawatt-hours, which is a unit of energy equal to outputting one trillion watts for an hour. Denmark consumed 2,071 terawatts of energy from 2009 to 2018, with over 75% of it being nonrenewable. About 21.1% of its energy consumption came from renewable energy, with the majority being wind (14.5%). The United States consumed about 125 times what Denmark did, using about 257,192 terawatt hours of energy from 2009 to 2018. Over 85% of this was nonrenewable energy with only 14.2% of its total energy used coming from renewable.
Everything I just stated makes sense when you’re comparing the population sizes of Denmark and the USA; however, the US has a population that’s only 65 times the size of Denmark's, so why did it consume over 100 times more than Denmark in energy consumption? Well, the USA is the largest contributor to the world economy (taking up about 24.42% of the world’s economy which is about $21.4 trillion) so one could make the argument that the US is more industrial and needs to consume more energy in order to meet the demands of the world economy. However, seeing how much money the US does have, shouldn’t that make it easier for them to begin switching to renewable energy sources? Renewable energy sources, although their prices are declining, are still relatively too high for countries with lower socio-economic status. The main priority of these countries is getting cheap and easy-to-install electricity, which comes in the form of fossil fuels. Therefore, richer countries should initiate the switch to renewable energy first. Another argument that could be made is about the geography or climate of the two countries. Although this would require further research on my part, I can immediately say that Denmark is a nordic country, meaning it is located further north than the US, therefore it experiences colder temperatures than the US. This means that Denmark needs to use more energy to warm their houses than the majority of houses located in the US. In order to compare the usage of cars in both countries, more research would have to be done but I’m sure that there’s information there as well that indicates that one country requires more fossil fuels to power their cars than the other does.
The next thing to analyze would be the energy consumption per individual. The thing to keep in mind is that there’s a much larger wage inequality in the US than in Denmark, but that’s also one of the reasons why Denmark is ranked higher for social mobility. I’m thinking of creating either a graph or chart for this October SDA with more complete information in order to more easily compare the two countries.