Annual production of cement by country in billions of metric tons. Click to expand. Source: USGS 2006 report (PDF) and the USGS 2008 report (PDF).

Cement is mainly used to make concrete, and is sort of the "active ingredient" in concrete - it is combined with sand and gravel in roughly fixed proportions. So cement production can be considered a rough proxy for the total amount of construction going on in a country.

This post updates Stuart's post about this two years ago (and yes, it's still a graph that will blow you away!) with two more years of USGS cement data, 2006 and 2007. The growth in China, from 1 GT to 1.3 GT in two years is mindboggling, even India and Russia are interesting...and there's more to think about under the fold.

edited to add: As a couple of folks pointed out--I have interchanged "production" and "usage" in this post incorrectly--however, China's 2007 cement exports were only 33 million tons out of 1.3 billion tons produced. So, at least for China, production is a good proxy for demand/consumption. My apologies for the mistake.

A week or so ago I wrote about the power supply debate going on in New England, with the controversy over the wind farm to be sited in the waters off Cape Cod. In that post I commented on the fact that, in response to an energy shortage that had appeared in 2004, the area had ensured additional supplies of LNG, and had converted some power stations so that, instead of relying on natural gas, they could also burn oil. The advantage of oil in this particular case is that it is somewhat more easily stored and thus is accessible when the gas lines are not available.

However I skated around the issue as to what would happen if there were neither oil nor gas available. This is not, unfortunately, a theoretical exercise. Chris Skrebowski has projected a supply shortfall by 2012. Yet already in India power plants are being idled because they cannot get enough LNG. And as for the supplies of oil, the likelihood of us being past peak by 2012 is increasingly real. So, that being the case, where can one look for alternate fuel. As articles in the New York Times and in the Washington Post have noted, for most of the rest of the world the short-term answer would appear to be from coal.

This is the last of the posts that deal with the content of the ASPO Conference last week in Houston. I will have my usual personal closing review tomorrow. As I hope you will gather, it was full of information and somewhat intense. And that did not include talking to folk in the breaks, which expanded a lot on what was being said in the papers. So if you want to think of this as the first commercial for next years meeting (which will be in California) then you’re right again. And just to remind you, the earlier posts were a report on the Workshop day, the first morning report, the rest of Thursday, and then Friday morning. A quick thanks to all, and it was more fun than I had even hoped to meet so many of the TOD folk, as well as so many others – thank you all, and of course, a much bigger thank you to the organizers for putting this on. The result, gentle folk, was well worth the effort.

We rejoin the meeting just as we sat down to lunch, and a talk by Houston Mayor Bill White who has the enviable distinction of having Matt Simmons as the Treasurer of his Campaign Committee. He acknowledged Matt as a prophet (with all that usually brings). He sees the current situation as one that comes down to a race between depletion and technology. It is not possible to give a political speech and create more oil fields. It is not possible by giving a political speech to create a hydrogen economy either immediately or in the practical future. It is not possible by giving a political speech to over-ride the laws of physics.

Earlier last week, I wrote a diary (What the west means and what roles NATO plays therein) that used a recent Financial Times editorial as a springboard for a discussion on what the "West" was, and what the use of NATO was - questions that  left-of-center Europeans tend to see quite differently from most Americans, including left-of-center ones.

The editorial, by a well-respected British pundit, was insightful and interesting, and led me to conclude what many on the European Tribune have long suspected: that NATO is simply an instrument for Europe to support US strategic priorities, and that the "West" exists only when Europe (and in particular France) aligns itself unconditionally on US positions. The UK, as per that senior British commentator, has as its main role that of disrupting and dividing Europe when it is insufficiently respectful of US interests.

Since I'm French, you may be tempted to conclude that this is just sour grapes by a citizen of a supposedly declining country; however, what I found more interesting in that article was the dominant tone of fear - about the west being under siege, and needing security against various threats - in the form of coordinated military power and little else. It was a narrow, downcast, closed vision of the world, with little about values, progress or hope.

The comment thread is worth reading too, and one of the last comments, by Loefing, pointed me to another article on the same topic, this time by a graduate of the US Naval War College, Tony Corn. The article, (The Revolution in Transatlantic Affairs, has the same dominant tone of fear, but a much more detailed examination of the world. Given the credentials of its author, it is likely to have serious influence on the thinking of the strategists in the Pentagon, and it is thus worth deconstructing.