Let’s look more closely at transport. In our red stack, we found that
the energy footprints of driving a car 50 km per day and of flying to Cape
Town once per year are roughly equal. Table 18.3 shows the relative im-
portances of the different transport modes in the national balance-sheet.
In the national averages, aviation is smaller than road transport.

How do Britain’s official consumption figures compare with those of
other countries? Figure 18.4 shows the power consumptions of lots of
countries or regions, versus their gross domestic products (GDPs). There’s
an evident correlation between power consumption and GDP: the higher
a country’s GDP (per capita), the more power it consumes per capita. The
UK is a fairly typical high-GDP country, surrounded by Germany, France,
Japan, Austria, Ireland, Switzerland, and Denmark. The only notable ex-
ception to the rule “big GDP implies big power consumption” is Hong
Kong. Hong Kong’s GDP per capita is about the same as Britain’s, but

Figure 18.4. Power consumption per capita, versus GDP per capita, in purchasing-power-parity US dollars. Squares show countries having “high human development;” circles, “medium” or “low.” Figure 30.1 (p231) shows the same data on logarithmic scales.