L The world in 2025
A chapter added in the 2026 revision. MacKay wrote in 2008 with 2005 numbers. What follows is the same kind of stock-taking for the most recent complete year, computed from the Energy Institute’s Statistical Review of World Energy — the annual compilation BP published for seventy years, and which the Energy Institute, with Ember, has published since 2023.1
The world used 600.3 EJ of primary energy in 2025, against 592.2 EJ in 2024: a rise of 8.1 EJ, or 1.4%. Divided by 8.09 billion people and by 365 days, that is 55 kWh per day per person averaged over everyone alive.
Before going further, it is worth checking this book’s own arithmetic against the same source, because MacKay built his numbers from the bottom up and the Energy Institute builds them from the top down. He put a British person’s consumption at 125 kWh/d and an American’s at 250. The Energy Institute’s per-capita series gives the United Kingdom 123 kWh/d in 2005, the year his data came from, and puts the American peak at 256 kWh/d in 2000. Two independent methods agreeing to within two per cent is the strongest endorsement of his method in this book, and it was not available to him.
Figure L.1. Energy supply per person, in the units of this book. The dashed line is the world average.
That figure shows eight series because eight is as many as a printed page can carry. The Statistical Review has 103, so the same data is below as something the reader can query directly. It runs DuckDB compiled to WebAssembly, inside the browser: the Parquet file is fetched once and every query after that is executed locally, with nothing sent anywhere. The SQL is editable, so any question this chapter does not answer can be asked of the same numbers.
The query behind the chart — edit and run it
Figure L.1a. Added in this edition. Energy supply per person for any of the 103 countries and regions in the Statistical Review, 1965 to 2025, in kWh per day per person.
Electricity and income
There is a companion to figure L.1 that says something the energy totals do not, and it is worth stating plainly because it cuts against a common reading of this chapter. Plot electricity consumption per person against national income and the two are very tightly related — an r² of about 0.83 across countries.2 High-income countries average around 10 000 kWh per person a year, which is 27 kWh per day in this book’s units; low-income countries average 125 kWh a year, which is 0.34 kWh per day. The gap is a factor of eighty.
What makes the relationship interesting is the absence of exceptions at either end. There is no wealthy country with low electricity consumption: the lowest is Romania at 2 845 kWh per person, and its income is $15 692, only just inside the high-income band. And there is no low-income country above 500 kWh per person. The few apparent outliers — Mozambique, Tajikistan, Iceland — are countries whose consumption is dominated by an energy-intensive export industry such as aluminium smelting, and adjusting for that trade tightens the correlation rather than loosening it.
Figure L.1b. Per-capita electricity demand, from Our World in Data. The map view makes the eightyfold gap geographic.
This is the counterweight to the framing of the whole chapter. Every earlier section has treated growth in energy demand as the problem — the thing outrunning renewables, the reason emissions keep rising. Read against income, most of that growth is people leaving poverty, and there is no historical instance of a country becoming rich while consuming 125 kWh of electricity a year. MacKay’s own position was the same, and he stated it as an engineer would: the question is not whether the poor world’s consumption will rise, because it will and it should, but what it will be supplied with.
What figure L.1 shows is that the world average has risen — from 34 kWh/d in 1965 to 55 — while the rich countries’ averages have fallen. Britain is now at 69 kWh/d, down 44% from the 123 of MacKay’s data. Sweden has fallen from about 200 in the 1980s to 118. America is where it was in 1965. Meanwhile China has gone from 5.7 to 87 kWh/d, a fifteenfold rise that took it past Europe in 2023, and India from 3.3 to 20. Africa, at 11 kWh/d, uses less per person than Britain did in the eighteenth century.
This is close to the central fact about the modern energy system, and it is not the one usually reported: consumption per person in the rich world is falling while total consumption rises anyway, because the number of people consuming at a middle-income rate is rising faster.
But “falling” needs a boundary before it means anything, and the boundary here is the wrong one. These are territorial figures: energy used inside a country’s borders. If a British smelter closes and Britain imports the aluminium instead, British territorial energy falls, Chinese rises, and the aluminium is unchanged. The same applies to the ships that carry it, since fuel burned on international voyages sits outside every national inventory, and the flag a ship flies is a matter of registry rather than of who owns the cargo.
The size of that effect can be measured, because emissions are also published on a consumption basis, which reassigns the carbon embodied in traded goods to whoever finally buys them. In 2023 the United Kingdom emitted 4.5 tonnes of CO2 per person territorially and 7.1 on a consumption basis, 58% more. Sweden’s figures are 3.5 and 5.9, a gap of 68%. Germany’s gap is 29%, America’s 10%. China’s runs the other way: it emits 8.6 tonnes per person and consumes 7.6, because roughly a tenth of what it burns is making things for other people.3
So how much of the rich world’s decline is real? Most of it, but not all. Measured territorially, Britain’s emissions per person fell 57% between 1990 and 2023; measured on consumption, they fell 39%. Germany’s fall goes from 47% to 40%, France’s from 41% to 28%, America’s from 29% to 21%. About a third of Britain’s apparent progress is production that moved rather than stopped. Sweden is the exception that makes the point worth checking rather than assuming: its consumption-based emissions fell further than its territorial ones, 55% against 48%, so its decline is not an offshoring artifact at all.
The energy figures in figure L.1 have no consumption-based equivalent published, so the same correction cannot be applied to them directly. Read them knowing that the rich-country lines would fall less steeply if it could be, and that some part of China’s rise is Europe’s and America’s consumption wearing a different flag.
Where the energy came from
Of the 600.3 EJ, oil supplied 201, coal 166 and gas 151. The three together came to 518 EJ, or 86% of all the energy the world used. Nuclear supplied 31 EJ, hydroelectricity 16, and everything usually meant by “renewables” — wind, solar, biofuels, geothermal and the rest — supplied 35.
Figure L.2. World energy supply in 2025, and where that year’s growth came from. Two panels rather than one: the stock is measured in hundreds of EJ and the flow in single EJ, and a shared scale would make the flow invisible.
Two true statements about the same year
The right-hand panel is where the argument about the energy transition actually lives, and it rewards being read carefully, because two opposite-sounding summaries of 2025 are both correct.
The first: renewables added more new energy than any other single source — 3.2 EJ, against 2.0 for gas, 1.9 for oil and 0.7 for coal. Excepting the financial crash of 2008 and the pandemic year of 2020, this is the first time this century that the largest single contributor to the growth in world energy supply has not been a fossil fuel. That is a real milestone and the Energy Institute leads with it.
The second: fossil fuels still supplied most of the growth. Oil, gas and coal added 4.6 EJ between them, against 3.2 EJ from renewables and 0.3 from nuclear and hydro. Total supply grew 8.1 EJ, and 56% of that was fossil.
Neither statement is spin. They differ in one respect only: whether renewables are compared with each fossil fuel separately or with all three added together. The first comparison tells you which single technology is winning the race to supply new energy; the second tells you whether the system as a whole is decarbonising. In 2025 the answers were “renewables” and “not yet”. A reader given only one of these has had half the arithmetic, and both halves are usually quoted by people who want you to reach opposite conclusions.
The underlying difficulty is the one MacKay spent a whole book on: the base is enormous. Renewables grew 9.9% in 2025, which sounds transformative, but 9.9% of 32 EJ is 3.2 EJ, and world demand grew by 8.1. A large percentage of a small base loses to a small percentage of a large one, and it keeps losing until the base is no longer small.
Electricity is where the change is visible
Electricity is a third of the story and much the fastest-moving third. World generation reached 32 202 TWh in 2025, up 855 TWh or 2.7%, faster than energy supply as a whole — which is what electrification looks like in a statistic.
Figure L.3. World electricity generation by source, 2025.
Here something happened that did not happen in the energy system as a whole: fossil-fired generation fell. It went from 18 314 TWh in 2024 to 18 263 in 2025, a drop of 51 TWh, while total generation rose by 855. Every unit of the growth in the world’s electricity, and a little more besides, came from something other than coal, oil or gas. In the electricity sector alone, and for the first time, the transition is not merely gaining share — it is displacing.
Solar did most of the work. It grew 30% in the year, overtook wind, and now stands at 8.7% of world generation against nuclear’s 8.8% — a share it will almost certainly pass in 2026. Solar and wind together generated 5 525 TWh, more than hydro’s 4 479 and nearly twice nuclear’s 2 845, though still short of those two older low-carbon sources combined. Against MacKay’s chapter 6, where he found Britain’s solar potential real but modest, this is what has changed most since he wrote: not the physics, which is unchanged, but the cost, and so the deployment.
Yet fossil fuels still made 56.7% of the world’s electricity. Even in the sector where the transition is furthest advanced, the incumbent is still the majority, and a 51 TWh decline against an 18 263 TWh base is a beginning, not a trend.
Where the electrifying is happening
One shift is invisible in the generation totals, because it is about what the energy is delivered as rather than where it came from. Asia overtook the West on the share of final energy delivered as electricity in 2016, at a point when its income per head was about a quarter of Western levels, and the gap has widened since: roughly 26% against 21%, with Asian electrification rising about five times faster. The United States has been close to flat on this measure since 1990.
Asia has also been responsible for about three quarters of the growth in world electricity demand since 2000, and holds around 60% of installed solar and wind capacity. The manufacturing is more concentrated still — on Ember’s accounting Asia makes over 95% of solar panels, 85% of batteries and 75% of wind turbines.
This is the one place where the direction of travel is not a Western story at all, and chapters N and 28a give the reason: the region that is electrifying fastest is the one that has to buy its fuel from somewhere else.4
The reason is legible in one column of numbers. Net energy imports as a share of energy use, on the World Bank’s series, with countries outside Asia marked for comparison:
| country | year | net energy imports, % of energy use |
|---|---|---|
| Singapore | 2023 | +280 |
| Japan | 2023 | +87 |
| South Korea | 2023 | +85 |
| Germany * | 2023 | +70 |
| Sri Lanka | 2022 | +60 |
| Cambodia | 2021 | +59 |
| Thailand | 2023 | +58 |
| Philippines | 2022 | +54 |
| France * | 2023 | +47 |
| Bangladesh | 2022 | +44 |
| United Kingdom * | 2023 | +44 |
| Pakistan | 2022 | +40 |
| India | 2023 | +36 |
| Vietnam | 2022 | +34 |
| Nepal | 2022 | +27 |
| China | 2023 | +24 |
| Malaysia | 2022 | −1 |
| United States * | 2023 | −9 |
| Myanmar | 2022 | −19 |
| Laos | 2022 | −49 |
| Russia * | 2022 | −75 |
| Indonesia | 2023 | −90 |
| Kazakhstan * | 2023 | −119 |
| Brunei | 2022 | −173 |
| Australia * | 2023 | −214 |
| Mongolia | 2022 | −226 |
Asterisked rows are outside Asia on the IEA and Ember regional definition used earlier in this section, which places Russia and Kazakhstan in Eurasia rather than Asia. Negative means net exporter.5
Read down the positive half and it is the list of countries electrifying in a hurry. Read down the negative half and the incentive reverses: every kilowatt-hour of domestic solar an exporter builds displaces a barrel it would rather have sold. Indonesia at −90, Brunei at −173 and Mongolia at −226 are in the same region and on the opposite side of the argument, and Russia at −75 is the position taken to its conclusion. That is why this is not simply an Asian story but an importers’ story, and why the same logic puts Japan and South Korea, at +87 and +85, in the same boat as Thailand rather than in the same boat as their neighbours.
Two entries need reading carefully. Singapore’s +280 is not a typo: it imports crude, refines it and bunkers ships, so its imports are nearly three times the energy it actually uses. And the exporters are not uniformly slow — Malaysia and Brunei both deliver a higher share of final energy as electricity than the United States does, and both are named among the economies that have passed it.6 What the trade balance predicts is which countries have a reason to hurry, not what every one of them does.
What China built
The chapter keeps arriving at China from different directions — 65% of the increase in emissions, a fifteenfold rise in energy per person, more than half the world’s coal — so it is worth looking at the thing itself rather than at its share of other people’s totals.
In 1985 China generated 411 TWh of electricity, about a seventh of what the United States generated. In 2025 it generated 10 575 TWh, which is 26 times as much and a third of all the electricity in the world. The comparison that conveys the scale is not the ratio but the increment: China added 9 220 TWh of annual generation after 2000, and the United States and Europe together generate 8 728 TWh in total today. China’s growth alone exceeds the entire present output of the old industrial world, and it accounts for 55% of all the growth in world generation this century.
Figure L.4. Electricity generation by region. The United States and Europe are flat for twenty-five years; the world’s growth is almost entirely the other lines.
The same story is told in a material that this book has not so far mentioned, and it is the one that makes the point unarguable. The United States produced 4.2 gigatonnes of cement in the entire twentieth century, and consumed about 4.4. China produced 4.9 gigatonnes in 2020 and 2021 — two years.7 The widely repeated version of this comparison says three years, and was true when it was coined; China has since got faster, and Hannah Ritchie’s recomputation from the USGS series puts it at two. China now makes about 1.9 of the world’s 4.0 gigatonnes a year, roughly half. Whatever else the last three decades were, they were the largest construction event in the history of the species, and it was mostly one country pouring concrete.
Cement matters here for a reason beyond scale: its emissions are chemistry, not fuel. Making cement means heating limestone until it gives up its carbon dioxide — calcium carbonate becomes calcium oxide, and the CO2 leaves as gas. More than half the carbon dioxide from cement comes from that reaction rather than from the fire underneath, which means it does not appear in any figure headed “CO2 from energy”, and no amount of clean electricity removes it. Cement is about 4.5% of global CO2 emissions on its own. It is one of the few large emissions sources for which decarbonising the power system is simply not the answer.
That is a large hole in the numbers this chapter has been quoting. The Statistical Review counts it separately: industrial-process and methane emissions came to 4 902 Mt of CO2-equivalent worldwide in 2025, against the 35 806 Mt from energy — so the categories the energy figures exclude are about 12% again on top, and the combined total is near 41 000 Mt. China’s share of that excluded category is 1 309 Mt, 27% of the world’s, up from 213 Mt in 1990: a sixfold rise, steeper than its rise in energy emissions.
Emissions, and three different questions
Carbon dioxide from energy rose 1.1% in 2025, to 35 806 million tonnes. The OECD countries emitted 11 161 Mt, 31.2% of the total; the non-OECD countries 24 645 Mt, 68.8%.
Arguments about who is responsible go wrong by switching between questions that have different answers, so it is worth separating them. Who emits most now? China, at 11 220 Mt, about 2.4 times the United States’ 4 755. Who emits most per person? Not China: an American emits roughly 14 tonnes a year against a Chinese citizen’s 8.7. Who put most of it there? The industrialised countries, by a wide margin, since carbon dioxide persists for centuries and they burned first.
Figure L.5. Share of cumulative carbon dioxide emissions, from Our World in Data — the third question drawn. Because carbon dioxide persists for centuries, this is the stock rather than the flow, and it is the chart the historical-responsibility argument rests on. Note that a country’s share here can fall while its emissions rise, since the denominator is everyone’s cumulative total.
And a fourth, which is the one most often conflated with the others: who is driving the increase?
Figure L.6. The change in energy-related carbon dioxide emissions by region, 2000 to 2025. Note that two regions have negative bars.
Since 2000 world emissions have risen 12 129 Mt a year. China accounts for 7 912 Mt of that, 65% of the global increase, and India for a further 2 002 Mt. Over the same quarter-century United States emissions fell by 986 Mt a year and Europe’s by 1 274 — declines that were more than cancelled by growth elsewhere. So the answer to the fourth question is China, and it is not close.8
There is a fifth question hiding underneath the other four, and it is about the boundary rather than the denominator: what counts as an emission? Every number above is carbon dioxide from energy. It excludes cement chemistry, agriculture, and — most consequentially — whether a country’s land absorbs carbon or releases it. Sweden makes the point sharply. On the Statistical Review’s energy basis Sweden emitted 39.4 Mt of CO₂ in 2025. On its own national inventory, which counts the whole economy and includes the forest sink, Sweden’s 2024 figures were 47 Mt emitted against 54 Mt absorbed: net −7 Mt, the only country in the European Union whose balance is negative.9 Both numbers are correct. They are answers to different questions, and a country can be a positive emitter and a net absorber at the same time without any contradiction at all.
Rather than take any of that on trust, the same data is below as Our World in Data’s emissions explorer, which is the rare interactive that lets a reader change the thing being argued about. Its Accounting control switches between territorial and consumption-based; Gas or warming switches between carbon dioxide from energy and all greenhouse gases in CO2-equivalent, which is what brings cement chemistry and methane back inside the fence; and Count switches between national totals and per person. Every claim in this section can be checked, or broken, by moving one of those three controls.
Figure L.6a. Greenhouse-gas emissions for China, the United States, India, the United Kingdom and the EU-27, from Our World in Data. Opens on all greenhouse gases, territorial, by country. Switch Accounting to consumption-based to watch the British and European lines rise and the Chinese line fall — which is the trade correction of the earlier section, drawn rather than described.
All four answers are true at once, and each is a different question. The atmosphere responds only to the total, which is why an argument that answers one question with another’s answer is not an argument. MacKay’s rule is the way through: state the quantity, state the denominator, then argue.
Did efficiency improve, or was it a mild winter?
There is a trap in every one of these year-on-year comparisons. Energy consumption depends heavily on the weather: a cold winter raises heating demand and makes a country look less efficient than it is, and a mild one flatters it. Comparing raw consumption between years measures the weather as much as the economy.
The European instrument for separating the two is ODEX, the energy-efficiency index of the EU-funded ODYSSEE-MURE project, coordinated by Enerdata and published as an indicator by the European Environment Agency.10 Its indicators are climate-corrected, so that year-to-year variation is independent of how cold the winter was, and it is a longitudinal index rather than a level: a sector starts at 100 in a base year and falls as it becomes more efficient. That is the right instrument for the question this chapter keeps running into, which is whether a fall in consumption is a real gain or just a warm year.
Across the EU, ODEX improved 1.4% a year between 2010 and 2023, 16% in total. The sectoral detail matters more than the average. Households, industry and services all improved at about 1.6% a year over that period and then accelerated after 2019, to 2.4%, 2.4% and 2.2% respectively. Transport is the laggard, at 0.9% a year and 11% in total over thirteen years — which is what one would expect of a sector whose efficiency depends on replacing a vehicle fleet that lasts fifteen years. EU final energy consumption in 2023 was 868 Mtoe, the lowest since 2000, falling at 1.6% a year since 2018.
Sweden is worth reading beside it, because it is the case the companion model is built around.11 Swedish ODEX improved 1.12% a year between 2000 and 2023, 25.8% in total — a longer window than the EU figures above, so the annual rates are not directly comparable, but the total is the more meaningful number anyway. Residential and services did best at over 1.6% a year, 31% in total; transport managed 0.8% a year; industry 1.2% a year overall, but with little progress since 2006, which is a long plateau for the sector that consumes most of Sweden’s electricity. Final energy consumption fell from 32.2 Mtoe in 2000 to 29.6 in 2023, with industry down 1.0 Mtoe and transport 0.8, while services rose 0.35.
Three things follow. Efficiency is improving steadily and unspectacularly, at one to two per cent a year — and figure L.1 shows what that compounds to over decades, which is Britain’s 44% fall. That rate is close to the rate at which world energy demand has been growing, which is why the two have largely cancelled in the global total even as they diverge sharply by country. And the sector that has stalled in Sweden, industry, is precisely the one the electrification argument depends on: an efficiency index that has not moved since 2006 is a different problem from a price signal that never arrives, and the two are easily mistaken for each other.
A caution about area per person
Chapter J’s tables invite a particular argument, so it is worth stating what they can and cannot support. Land area per person says nothing on its own about how many people a country can feed or power, because a square metre is not the same everywhere. A square metre at 60°N receives roughly half the annual sunlight of one at 20°N, and grows correspondingly less. Sweden’s 42 600 m² per person and Nigeria’s 4 800 are not comparable quantities, and a table of densities that ignores latitude will mislead in whichever direction the reader was already inclined.
The argument is made in Sweden in exactly this form — that the country is the most densely populated in the world for its latitude, and has therefore already exceeded what its own sunlight can support.12 The observation about insolation is sound and is MacKay’s own point in chapters 6 and 13: northern countries have less solar resource per square metre, and a country’s renewable potential scales with its area times its insolation, not its area alone. What does not follow is the policy conclusion usually attached, that the population should therefore be reduced. That inference skips the trade that has existed for as long as agriculture, treats consumption per person as fixed when this book’s whole method is to ask how far it can be lowered — and figure L.1 shows Sweden’s own falling by 40% while nobody left — and rests on no published carrying-capacity estimate. The physics is worth keeping. The conclusion is not a physical result and should not be presented as one.
Statistical Review of World Energy, Energy Institute with Ember, KPMG and Kearney, 2026 edition, published 30 June 2026, covering 2025: https://www.energyinst.org/statistical-review. Supply, generation and emissions figures in this section are from that edition. All figures in this section are computed from the Statistical Review’s consolidated workbook by the
chapterJstep of this edition’s data pipeline, not transcribed from the report’s text. One trap in that workbook is worth recording for anyone repeating the exercise: on the fuel sheets each block of columns repeats, and the year label sits at the end of its block, not the start, so the obvious reading has 2024 and 2025 the wrong way round.↩︎Todd Moss, “Killer graphic shows why high income requires lots of energy”, Eating Policy: https://toddmoss.substack.com/p/killer-graphic-shows-why-high-income, plotting the Our World in Data trade-adjusted electricity-demand dataset. The underlying series is at https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-electricity-demand. Note the unit change: this section is electricity per person, where the rest of the chapter is total energy per person, and the two differ by roughly the factor by which primary energy exceeds electricity.↩︎
Consumption-based emissions reassign the carbon embodied in traded goods from producer to consumer. Data from the Global Carbon Project via Our World in Data: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-co2-per-capita beside https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita, both for 2023, the latest year with both series. International shipping and aviation fuel is reported separately as “bunkers” and is in neither national total, which is a second boundary problem and one no reassignment fixes.↩︎
Ember, Electric Asia: How Asia is leading the electric age, 11 June 2026. The figures, and the cautions that go with them — that Ember advocates for electrification, that its “Asia” excludes Russia, that the “share of Asia” percentages have an unstated denominator, and that the resource multiple is a technical potential rather than a forecast — are set out in full in the corresponding note to chapter N.↩︎
Net energy imports as a percentage of energy use, from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators (series EG.IMP.CONS.ZS), which draws on IEA and UN energy statistics; assembled by the
energyImportsstep in this edition’s data-refresh script. Net imports are energy use less production, both in oil equivalents, so a negative figure is a net exporter. A figure above 100 looks impossible on that definition and is not: the indicator’s energy use excludes fuel supplied to ships and aircraft in international transport, while the import side includes it, so a refining and bunkering hub can import far more than it is recorded as using. That is the Singapore case, and it is a quirk of the boundary rather than a measure of dependence. Two cautions. Countries stop reporting in different years, so each row is that country’s own latest and the table mixes 2021, 2022 and 2023; the ranking is robust to that but small differences between adjacent rows are not. And the indicator is measured on primary energy, which counts a joule of imported coal against a joule of domestic hydro without regard to what either delivers — it is a measure of dependence, not of how well an energy system works. Taiwan is absent because it is not in the World Bank series.↩︎Ember, Electric Asia: How Asia is leading the electric age, 11 June 2026. The figures, and the cautions that go with them — that Ember advocates for electrification, that its “Asia” excludes Russia, that the “share of Asia” percentages have an unstated denominator, and that the resource multiple is a technical potential rather than a forecast — are set out in full in the corresponding note to chapter N.↩︎
Hannah Ritchie, “China vs the US: cement”, Sustainability by Numbers: https://hannahritchie.substack.com/p/china-us-cement, recomputing from the US Geological Survey series — US production of 4.2 Gt over 1900–1999 against Chinese production of 2.4 Gt in 2020 and 2.5 Gt in 2021. She notes that Chinese production and consumption are near enough the same, since exports run around 5 Mt a year. The three-year version of the comparison, drawn from USGS data and popularised by Bill Gates, is in the Washington Post’s “How China used more cement in 3 years than the U.S. did in the entire 20th Century”, 24 March 2015; it used 2011–2013, and the interval has shortened since. The 4.5% share of global CO2 is hers. World production of about 4.0 Gt in 2024 with China at 1.9 Gt is USGS. Process and methane emissions are from the Statistical Review workbook’s “CO2-Process Emissions, Methane” sheet, which is a separate series from the CO2-from-energy figures used elsewhere in this section.↩︎
The framing of this section — that “who emits most”, “who emits most per person”, “who put most of it there” and “who is driving the increase” are four different questions with four different answers — follows Robert Rapier, “Yes, China Is Largely Responsible For Rising Carbon Emissions”, Forbes, 24 June 2026: https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2026/06/24/yes-china-is-largely-responsible-for-rising-carbon-emissions/. The numbers here are computed from the Statistical Review workbook rather than taken from that article, and differ slightly from it: measuring from 2000 gives China 65% of the global increase where he reports about 62%, the difference being the base year.↩︎
Sweden’s net-negative balance: Daniel Mellwing, “Svenska succén – ensamt om minusutsläpp i Europa”, Tidningen Näringslivet, 8 June 2026: https://www.tn.se/hallbarhet/48138/svenska-succen-ensamt-om-minusutslapp-i-europa-speciellt/, reporting figures from Naturvårdsverket, SCB, SLU, Skogsstyrelsen and Eurostat, with Johanna Jeansson of Kunskapsverket quoted to the effect that Sweden is in practice alone among EU countries in meeting net-zero. The 39.4 Mt energy-only figure beside it is from the Statistical Review workbook, so the two are on deliberately different bases: whole-economy including land use, against carbon dioxide from energy alone.↩︎
ODEX and the ODYSSEE-MURE project: https://www.odyssee-mure.eu/publications/other/odex-indicators-database-definition.html; the European Environment Agency publishes the EU-27 series at https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/figures/odyssee-energy-efficiency-index-odex-1.↩︎
Country profiles from ODYSSEE-MURE: the European Union at https://www.odyssee-mure.eu/publications/efficiency-trends-policies-profiles/european-union.html and Sweden at https://www.odyssee-mure.eu/publications/efficiency-trends-policies-profiles/sweden.html. The project also maintains a searchable database of the policy measures behind these numbers at https://www.measures.odyssee-mure.eu/energy-efficiency-policies-database.html. Note that the EU figures quoted here run from 2010 and the Swedish ones from 2000, so the annual rates are not like for like.↩︎
The Swedish statement of the latitude argument is Lars Wilderäng, “Är Sverige överbefolkat?”, Cornucopia?, February 2015: https://cornucopia.se/2015/02/ar-sverige-overbefolkat/. It is a blog essay arguing a policy position, not a study, and it cites no carrying-capacity calculation; it is given here as the popular form of the argument rather than as evidence for it.↩︎