Third World population growth and economic development are setting the stage for an energy crisis in the next century. By mid-century the Third World population will double from 4 billion to 8 billion people, while the population of the industrial world will grow by about 20 percent to 1.2 billion. Impoverished Third World people today use less than one-tenth as much energy per capita as do U.S. citizens. Unless we expect to see the majority of the world's people living indefinitely in dire poverty, we should be prepared for per capita energy use to rise rapidly with economic progress. Even if Third World per capita energy use rises to only one-third of the U.S. level, that increase in combination with expected population growth will result in a threefold increase in world energy use by 2050.
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