Wandering Smoke

naeros:

ilovecharts:

thescrambler:

How Energy Actually Gets Used.

Stop the presses. This may actually be the most useful chart I’ve seen in a while. A breakdown of energy usage across our economy, courtesy of the friendly folks at Lawrence Livermore Nat’l Lab (go science!), posted by Ezra Klein.

This graph comes by way of Keith Hennessey, who observes that “when battery technologies improve, the fuel and power worlds will blend in the U.S., and there will be strong and direct economic relationships between the production of electric power and the use of oil. Until that day, from an energy perspective, ‘fossil fuels’ conflates oil with coal and natural gas in a way that is at best confusing and at worst misleading. Substituting biofuels for oil or making vehicles more fuel efficient has almost no effect on the amount of coal or natural gas we use.” And coal-fired power plants, as those who remember this graph will know, remain a bigger problem for carbon emissions than most people realize.