Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Market Exchange and PPP (cont.)
would give you eight of their yuan for each US dollar. That
was the market exchange rate. If you bought a basket of
goods in China and compared its cost to that of the same
basket in the United States, you would have found that for
each dollar spent in the United States you would need fewer
than
yuan in China. That rate would be the PPP rate, and
in this case it would be said that the Chinese yuan would be
undervalued in the market. If the basket cost only
yuan, the
PPP rate would be
. Which rate you use
affects both the apparent size of the economy and the energy
intensity. However, it affects them in opposite directions and
as long as you use the same system for both parts of the
energy equation there is no problem. However, which you
use can make a large difference when comparing standards
of living.
to
, not
to
The amount of greenhouse gases going into the atmos-
phere will go up proportionally with respect to energy use
if we continue business as usual with the same mix of fuels
as is used now. World GDP had been going up rapidly
until the
. It is now
picking up speed again, and the larger developing coun-
tries are increasing their energy consumption and green-
house gas emissions even faster than had been expected
only a decade or so ago. The leading examples are China,
India, Brazil, and Indonesia with others not far behind.
Their rates of economic growth are much larger than
those of the industrialized world and that is what drives
their increased energy demand.
Figure
financial crisis that began in
is the IIASA projection of the growth of total
primary energy supply (TPES) to the year
.
. Primary
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