Building Gypsy Rose

Progress on Gypsy Rose has slowed over the past couple of weeks due to a combination of holiday events, weather, and work requirements. This past weekend I put a coat of paint on the trim boards and am now ready to nail up the cedar clapboard siding. I also was able to finish the soffet detail and get some insulation tucked into the eaves to keep the roof warm at the edges.

While things are slow for a moment, I've been giving thought to how a small house fits into a planet that is increasingly hungry for power. A week or so ago, I was reading an article in the New York Times about the economic costs of global warming. One of the graphics in the article caught my eye (below).

While the graph clearly shows the United States as a leader in energy consumption and the biggest contributor to greenhouse gases, it shows only absolute numbers. The illustration fails to normalize the data so that we get a true picture of how much energy we are consuming in relation to, say population, or perhaps GDP.

If we'd like to see how much energy we consume as a function of population, for instance, we could take the U.S. consumption, at about 92 quadrillion BTU's (92,000,000,000,000,000) per year and divide it by our population of 300 million (300,000,000). Our per capita energy consumption per year is 300 million BTU's. By comparision, the average European is responsible for about 66 million BTU's of energy consumption. As the graph below illustrates, we are responsible for energy consumption at a rate of almost five times as much per person as the Europeans, and more than six and a half times as much as China. And, to what end, I might ask?