I’m fascinated by the fact the Earth-system is a massive conduit of power, with energy flowing into the system in the form of sunlight, flowing out of it as infrared. The flow involved is simply extraordinary: 120,000 terawatts. That’s 10,000 times the amount that flows through our industrial civilisation – all the world’s reactors, turbines, cars, furnaces, boilers, generators and so on put together.
When I saw Christopher Mims' tweet about this, I thought: hey, new infographic showing the world's energy, cool! But this is an infographic that is so mindboggling that you will have to build the image it in your own head, using just the word picture in this post. Astonishing, this world we live in and take for granted.
