History of energy consumption in the United States, 1775–2009 (2011)

Are you asking about the feedstock input to plastic, or the energy input? I doubt that the Energy Information Administration tracks feedstock inputs, as they are not consumed as energy.

GP's link is renewables only. Nuclear isn't considered a renewable energy source. Neither are plastics or the petroleum products they're made from.

GP's chart should be considered a blow-up of the 20% of U.S. energy that your link shows from renewable sources. Within that context the numbers match up pretty well, except that biomass is much more heavily represented in [0] than in [1].

It's BOTH.

You can't run a plastic industry without high density energy - fossil is the best for that short of nuclear. Simple matter of Carnot. No way to fake it or break it.

Feedstocks also ONLY can come from oil. Not even coal works as well. You must have carbon in the supply chain.

Sadly a lot of Soviet-style propaganda and erasure of "inconvenient" information is absolutely happening with every .gov site these days.

I'm not used to seeing BTUs outside of heating systems. It's bizarre. Also I often see GWh/yr or some other such. I don't get it. Just use Watts and Joules (or maybe watt-hours). It somewhat bothers me that batteries are labelled in amp-hours, though it makes partial sense because they typically have a fixed voltage. Still. I guess next we need to introduce the watt-hour-per-second?

the US also cares because oil is fungible, and as a result, pricing happens at the global margins, not just between north american countries.

Wood at the beginning of the period covered by chart is at 0.2 Q BTUs, so, using the 10x factor, food would be on the same order of magnitude.

Food as an energy source is actually an important aspect. Things like domesticated animals represent significant sources of energy, on the order of thousands of calories per day. More nutritious crops also confer a significant boost to available energy. This had significant impact on the disparate levels of development between Eurasia and the Americas before the early modern period.

"The Measure of Civilization" by Ian Morris is a book I'd recommend on this topic.

I assume the chart is only counting energy important for human economy (and not whatever it is that you're bringing up). Food as energy source was crucial part of the energy mix before fossil fuels - food-powered animals were tilling fields, hauling goods, powering machinery etc. (not to mention less savory aspects of it like slavery - slaves were essentially food-powered machines for picking cotton, harvesting sugar cane etc.). Nowadays majority of that work is done by machines powered by fossil fuels, and food is used mostly for us to sustain ourselves (i.e. prevent starvation) and not as an economically-productive resource.

I suspect food was the biggest energy source in the economy, above wood and renewables (i.e. watermills and windmills powering various machineries and pumps).

> also missing the energy that a mother transfers to her child in the form of love

probably simpler analysis to define a boundary around human population and only estimate energy flows that cross that boundary, ignoring internal flows

But I was told that the singularity was coming, whereupon I could upload my consciousness to the cloud and experience an eternal orgasm of exponentially increasing bliss, thereby nullifying all laws of physical constraints. Did that get cancelled?