Our Rate of Energy Consumption: Unsustainable

Reader and cool guy Brian McGowan writes in:

I once read something that I think applies here. In the old days before cars, people rode horses for transportation. 1 horse for 1 person. What can we take away from this? It only takes 1 horsepower to haul your butt around. The rest of the horsepower is to haul your ego around.

I reply:

Ha! I’m not sure that’s the exact reason we drive cars, but it’s certainly a disgracefully large part. And dig this: we (adult Americans) take in 2500 calories per day endosomatically (into the body) but we use 230,000 calories daily (almost 100 times that much energy) in our cars, HVAC, electronics, etc. This IS, at its core, unsustainable. Something’s about to change here. Thanks for being tuned in.