I’m currently wondering how much energy does it take to make
a £1. It’s an odd conversion. One way I guess would be petrol price. I haven’t
looked lately but say it’s £1.20 per litre. Well it’s 36MJ/Litre or 10Kw
hours/litre so it takes ~ 0.8 Kw hours to make one pound. That means an income
of £1m equates to 800,000Kw hours or 80,000 litres of fuel and a billionaire is
sitting on 80,000,000 litres. OK now it
takes a human, even on minimum wage, say 15 minutes to make a £1. We are
‘powered’ by on average 2000 calories of food per day, which equates to .002Kw
hours so 15 minutes equates to 0.00002 Kw hours per £1. But lets times it by
ten to be generous and say 0.0002Kw hours. So we’re 4000 times more efficient
than petrol in terms of energy per £1. Right, minimum wage would bring in
~£8,600pa or if paid in litres 10,400 or ~1 litre per 15 minutes and get paid
0.8 Kw hours for it or 3.2Kw hours per hour but expend 0.0008 Kw hours in the
process. So which is it, are we extremely efficient or grossly over paid? I
think this gross discrepancy is due to the myriad of added costs in everything
we consume. Where we can barely exist on £160/week (min wage), if we built a
house on free land, raised our own animals and plants, made what we need etc
this discrepancy wouldn’t exist. It’s because we live in a world wide web of
human activity where even buying a pack of sausages requires a petroleum plant
for the packaging and fertiliser, a farm, a processing plant, infrastructure,
lorries, a distribution centre, more lorries and a supermarket, and a car to
get you there. And that’s why the Walton family who own Wall-Mart are sitting
on 6.1 billion litres of fuel. Anyone got a match?
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