increasing per capita energy consumption).
Figure 2.12 shows how energy consumption has become synonymous with the concept of societal welfare, as expressed as tangible expression of the ‘quality of life.’ Goldenberg et al. (1985) correlated per capita energy consumption with a Physical Quality of Life Index (PQLI), which is an attempt to measure the quality of life or well-being of a country. The value is the average of three statistical data sets: basic literacy rate, infant mortality, and life expectancy at age one, all equally weighted on a 0 to 100 scale. It was developed for the Overseas Development Council in the mid-1970s by Morris David Morris, as one of a number of measures created due to dissatisfaction with the use of GNP as an indicator of development. PQLI is best described as the measure of tangible features of the society, not unlike GDP (Khan and Islam, 2007). Ever since, numerous other indices have been proposed, including more recently developed Happiness index, but they all suffer from similar short-comings, i.e., focus on tangibles, as outlined by Khan and Islam (2012 and Zatzman, 2012, 2013). The following steps are used to calculate Physical Quality of Life:
Figure 2.12 A strong correlation between a tangible index and per capita energy consumption has been at the core of economic development (from Goldenberg, 1985).
1 Find the percentage of the population that is literate (literacy rate).
2 Find the infant mortality rate (out of 1000 births). INDEXED Infant Mortality Rate = (166 - infant mortality) × 0.625
3 Find the Life Expectancy. INDEXED Life Expectancy = (Life expectancy - 42) × 2.7
4 Physical Quality of Life = (Literacy Rate + INDEXED Infant Mortality Rate + INDEXED Life Expectancy)/3.
This trend goes back to the earliest times of the Industrial Revolution more than two-and-a-half centuries ago. Khan and Islam (2012) discussed the mindset that promoted such wasteful habits in all disciplines. Figure 2.13 summarizes the dilemma. At the dawn of the industrial age, civilization began to be defined by consumption and wasteful habits. As the population grew, the energy consumption per capita should have been decreased in order compensate for the increasing energy demand. This would be in line with the claim that industrialization had increased human efficiency.
Figure 2.13 While population growth has been tagged as the source of economic crisis, wasteful habits have been promoted in name of emulating the west.
The opposite happened in the developed countries. For centuries, the per capita energy consumption increased, along with dependence on mechanization. It only stabilized in 1990s. By then, the population growth in the west has been arrested and have been declining in most part (the exception being USA). This population and energy paradox was further accentuated by encouraging the developing countries to emulate the west in wasteful habits. In every country, consumption per capita increased with time as a direct result of colonialism and imposed culture that is obsessed with externals and short-term gains. As a result, a very sharp increase in per capita energy consumption took place in the developing countries. As can be seen from Table 2.5, even with such increase, the “south” has not caught up with the “west”, with the exception of some petroleum-rich countries.
A major case in point here is China. For the last two decades, it attempted to curtail its population growth with a one-child per family law. The current Chinese government at the behest of the latest congress of the Communist Party of China has now repudiated this policy as practically unenforceable. Furthermore and even more interesting, however is that Figure 2.14 shows that the population growth has in fact been dwarfed by the increase in per capita energy consumption. A similar conclusion emerges from the comparable statistical profile for the Indian subcontinent, where infanticide and female-selective abortion is in order to boost male population in favor of female population that is considered to be a drain to the economy. This finding is meaningful considering India and China hold one third of the world population and can effectively change the global energy outlook either in favor or against sustainability.
Figure 2.14 Population and energy paradox for China (From Speight and Islam, 2016).
In order to change the above trend, and address the population and energy paradox, several indices have been introduced. These indices measure happiness in holistic terms. Comparing one person’s level of happiness to another’s is problematic, given how, by its very nature, reported happiness is subjective. Comparing happiness across cultures is even more complicated. Researchers in the field of “happiness economics” have been exploring possible methods of measuring happiness both individually and across cultures and have found that cross-sections of large data samples across nations and time demonstrate “patterns” in the determinants of happiness. The New Economics Foundation was the first one to introduce the term “Happiness index” in mid 2000’s (Khan and Islam, 2007; White, 2007). In first ever ranking, Bangladesh, one of the poorest nations of the time was found to be the happiest among some 150 countries surveyed. At that time, Bangladesh was among the lowest GDP countries along with very low per capita energy consumption. This study demonstrated that happiness is in fact inversely proportional to per capita energy consumption or GDP. Before, this study would set any trend globally in terms of energy policies, a number of similar happiness indices were introduced in succession, all showing a direct, albeit broad, correlation between GDP and happiness. One such index is the Happy Planet Index (HPI) that ranks 151 countries across the globe on the basis of how many long, happy and sustainable lives they provide for the people that live in them per unit of environmental output. It represents the efficiency with which countries convert the earth’s finite resources into well being experienced by their citizens. The Global HPI incorporates three separate indicators:
1 ecological footprint: the amount of land needed to provide for all their resource requirements plus the amount of vegetated land needed to absorb all their CO2 emissions and the CO2 emissions embodied in the products they consume;
2 life satisfaction: health as well as “subjective well-being” components, such as a sense of individual vitality, opportunities to undertake meaningful, engaging activities, inner resources that help one cope when things go wrong, close relationships with friends and family, and belonging to a wider community;
3 life expectancy: included is the child death, but not death at birth or abortions.
The first item couples CO2 emission levels with the carbon footprint measure. This emission relates only to fossil fuel usage, and does not take in account the fact that CO2 that is emitted from refined oil is inherently tainted with catalysts that are added during the refining process. This creates bias against fossil fuels and obscures the possibility of finding any remedy to the energy crisis.
The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) introduced the Better Life Index. It includes 11 topics that the OECD has identified as essential to wellbeing in terms of material living conditions (housing, income, jobs) and the quality of life (community, education, environment, governance, health, life satisfaction, safety and work-life balance). It then allows users to interact with the findings and rate the topics against each other to construct different rankings of wellbeing depending on which topic is weighted more heavily. For the purpose of this analysis, what matters is the Life Satisfaction
