Figure 2.36

Night lighting reveals patterns of energy consumption. This image, which shows night lighting worldwide, is a composite of many satellite images developed over several weeks in April and October 2012, to avoid cloud cover, and stitched together. Areas with dense populations and high levels of economic development (eastern North America, western Europe, northern India, South Korea, eastern China, and Japan, for example) consume the most energy. The Northern Hemisphere consumes more energy than the Southern Hemisphere. There are places, such as sub-Saharan Africa, where the population is large, but there are few lights because of low levels of economic development. Similarly, there are places where lights are caused by natural-gas flaring, not large populations.

(NASA)