The United Kingdom Generates Less Electricity per Person Than in the 1970s

Electricity generation per person in the United Kingdom has fallen by a third from its early-2000s peak

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Globally, electricity generation per person has grown by more than 50% this century.

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Its generation per person peaked in 2003 and has fallen by more than a third since then.

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Today, levels are back to where they were in the late 1960s.

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Some of that decline is a change in electricity imports, rather than demand: net imports have increased from 1% of electricity demand in 2010 to 9% in 2025.

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But it’s still true that the UK consumes much less electricity than it used to.

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The most common explanation is deindustrialization: as the economy shifted from manufacturing to services, electricity demand fell.

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Sectoral data from the International Energy Agency confirms that electricity consumption in industry has fallen by one-quarter since 2005 (more if we calculate this per person).

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But residential and commercial electricity use has fallen by just as much.

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Deindustrialization has reduced demand, but improvements in energy efficiency — such as the shift from incandescent to LED lightbulbs and the introduction of efficiency standards for appliances — have played an important role too.

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China reduced extreme poverty fast, but Indonesia hasn’t been far behind

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China is often the poster child for rapid reductions in poverty, and for good reason.

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In 1984, 86% of Indonesians lived on less than $3 per day.

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While it didn’t quite match China’s decline, it has still been impressive.

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The number of people living in extreme poverty has fallen from 140 million to about 10 million.

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Note that the international poverty line is extremely low, defined as people living on less than $3 per day.

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But Indonesia has also made progress when measuring higher poverty lines.

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In 2020, Gapminder asked people in Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, and the UK this question.

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They had three options to choose from:

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Almost nine in ten people picked B or C, thinking it was more than one-third.

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The correct answer was A: around 0.5% of plastic waste ends up in the ocean.

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The chart shows how the OECD gets to this number.

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Globally, we produce around 350 million tonnes of plastic waste a year.

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Most of this is managed responsibly, either in secure landfills, through recycling, or incineration.

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But around one-quarter of it is mismanaged or littered.

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From there, a decreasing fraction of plastic waste leaks to the environment, then into rivers and coastlines, and finally into the ocean.

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Around 1.7 million tonnes end up there: around 0.5% of what was generated in the first place.

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People tend to think that most of our plastic ends up there, but only a tiny percentage does.

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