have suggested that the western Antarctic ice sheet could collapse, resulting in a major sea-level rise. It has been suggested by numerous authors that there is a correlation between energy consumption and gross national product per capita. This issue was considered by us in some detail and in this paper it is assumed that gross national product is a good indicator of the standard of living. Data for gross national product per capita, population, and energy consumption per capita are from Reference 6. These data sets were aggregated into nine groups of countries in accordance with the groupings developed by Edmonds and Reilly.7 The following nine groups, comprising the entire world, were used: 1. United States (US) 2. Western Europe and Canada (WEC) 3. Japan, Australia, and New Zealand (JANZ) 4. Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union (EUSSR) 5. Centrally Planned Asia (AC) 6. Middle East (ME) 7. Africa (AFR) 8. Latin America (LA) 9. South and East Asia (SEAS) The data shows that for both GNP per capita and energy consumption per capita, region 1 had the largest value and region 9 had the smallest value. The disparity in the standard of living and the respective energy consumption is quite large, with a ratio of values for these regions of 39:1 and 59:1 respectively. In order compress the range for plotting, the values for the nine regions were normalized to U.S. = 1, and then the logarithm (to the base 10) was taken. A least squares straight line fit was calculated for these log normalized values (see Figure 3). In doing this fit, data for
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