ABSTRACT
The USA is by far the largest consumer of commercial energy, but a number of other countries in Western Europe have comparable per capita consumption levels. Current global energy consumption rates are increasing on an average of 3 percent per year, the
Energy production and consumption are closely monitored, both by government agencies and private industry, and statistics on international use are widely available, if sometimes highly technical. As always, information on commercially-traded commodities, such as oil or coal, is much more reliable than is information on fuels of local reliance, such as firewood and small-scale hydropower. Firewood, the largest biomass energy source, and other biomass fuels together provide approximately 14 percent of the world’s energy.
