Energy Information Administration
(EIA)
The EIA web site contains a variety of statistical information on energy.
The page is produced by the U.S. Department of Energy. The focus
is primarily on the United States, but the site also contains considerable
information on other countries in the international section. Data
tables and figures are organized primarily by fuel type. Changes
in price, production volume, geographic distribution, and other variables
are tracked over time. In addition to data tables, the site provides
reports and links to a selection of related government resources and industry
sites.
U.S. Census Bureau
The U.S. Census Bureau is a good source of information for population
figures, as well as economic, health, and other topics. While the
focus is on U.S. figures, the census site does include an international
database.
Energy Conversion
Calculator
This site from the University of Exeter allows you to quickly convert
between various energy units. Two notes of CAUTION: (1) you must
show your work on the problem sets so the Exeter site and others like it
will only be useful for checking your answers, (2) you might prefer
to rely on your own calculations because web sites can contain errors (lurking
in scripts or elsewhere).
International Institute for Applied
Systems Analysis (IIASA)
IIASA is an NGO based in Austria with an important focus on climate
change issues, an arena where their work is quite influential. Reports
from IIASA typically include aggregated energy trends and feature a varitey
of future scenarios that are useful benchmarks for modelling.
Centre for Science and the Environment
(CSE)
CSE is a non-governmental organization (NGO) based in India.
CSE provides technical and political analysis of environmental issues within
India and in the international context. Green Politics: Global Environmental
Negotiations - 1 is a book from CSE from which we will draw material for
the climate change section of the course (we considered requiring you to
read the book but decided to place it on the supplemental reading list).
Their climate
change campaign has an excellent discussion of the politics in and
around the international climate change negotiations.
World Resources Institute (WRI)
WRI is an NGO based in the United States. WRI produces a valueable
reference book, World Resources, which covers a variety of environmental
topics, including energy, land use, economic indicators, water resources,
and other categories. The book is published semi-annually and is
available on-line (98-99,
00-01)
. Here is a direct link to the energy
and materials data tables which contains production, consumption, and
trade figures for all nations. WRI has received some criticism for
biases that favor political positions of the United States and western
European nations. For example, the agricultural chapters in World
Resources focus (almost exclusively) on staples such as cereals, tubers,
and pulses but ignore the major commodity crops (cocoa, tea, tropical fruits,
nuts). This decision seems reasonable but has subtle, important political
ramifications for how the book is used. Many developing nations earn
foreign currency through commodity exports in order to make debt repayments.
Using the WRI statistics, which at first glance appear to be fairly comprehensive,
one can create a detailed picture of international agricultural trade which
drastically undervalues the contributions of developing nations.
Why is this information important to us in energy and society? We
have and will continue to discuss energy in the context of economic development.
Whether particular development projects involve a large hydoelectric dam
or a decentralized solar power system, the people involved in the project
usually include international development workers in addition to some combination
of local elites and the local poor who can be participants in or objects
of the project. Development workers--including students, professionals,
and volunteers--use data from a variety of sources, such as WRI, to help
design their projects and to defend or critique others. Choosing
to include or exclude commodity crop data yields two very different understandings
of local economies and their connections to international markets--factors
that are critical to most development projects. If you are doing
work in this area, you can supplement the WRI data with information from
the agriculture
data page of the Food and Agriculture
Organization of the United Nations. CSE has criticized WRI for their
estimates of national historical contributions to global warming.
According to CSE, the WRI data contain a number of politically convenient--or
politically motivated--assumptions that result in a significant underestimate
of the United States historical contributions to global warming.
A discussion of the difference in methodologies between CSE and WRI is
included in the supplemental reading box.
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC)
The IPCC functions roughly as an academic, expert advisory group which
supports international climate change policy negotiations. Some of
their reports are available at their web site. They have a nice page which
tracks current
greenhouse gas emissions, including comparisons to pre-industrial levels
and links to the sources of their data.
Created: September 2, 2000
Last Update: September 9, 2000
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