Yeah this is better but you should also bring in GDP growth each year vs population vs oil.

The problem is of course this conflates efficiency claims esp if you start looking at individual countries.

For example in the US we claim that the US has become much more efficient at using oil since the 1970's but this does not include the export of a lot of basic manufacturing overseas. And worse if you start looking at per person GDP growth or oil usage in the countries where manufacturing was exports the demographics tends to hide the truth.

Per capita oil consumption goes up but given that a lot of this is fueled by manufacturing for exports its not near as large a real growth in general wealth in the exporting countries.

Although the per capita oil usage peaked in 1980 the process was set in motion back in the 1970's with the move to pure fiat curriencies coupled with the peak of US production. It just took a bit for US production to decline and oil imports to increase and fiat currency inflation to become noticeable.

These are some of the underlying reasons we are seeing trends out to 100 years start peaking at the same time. The wheel where set in motion a long time ago. And as you showed the path we have chosen was firmly established by 1980.

A particular reason to look at the last few years however is that a tremendous amount of debt has been created to induce growth. In general the worlds GDP has been inflated by a moved into the financial world. So the GDP itself has been heavily inflated by growth in areas that at the end of the day actually remove money from more productive pursuits.

Whats really interesting is that the world does not even really try to compute what I'd call sustainable wealth. And easy metric would be the amount of personal savings in the bottom half of the worlds wage scale adjusted for inflation.

http://www.morganstanley.com/views/gef/archive/2007/20070604-Mon.html

What this fails to address is that most of this supposed global savings is concentrated int sovereign wealth funds and multi-national corporations.

You can question the real savings rate calculations easily.

http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2008/08/whats-behind-soaring-...

And further you can question the savings rate for third world countries.

http://www.dallasfed.org/research/eclett/2008/el0807.html

Given that most of the population of these third world countries barely participate in the modern banking system how can Morgan-Stanley talk about how much they have saved ?

http://angrybear.blogspot.com/2005/06/international-saving-comparisons.html

One thing I've not found is the actual spread of savings amongst the population in third world countries even though we have tons of information that the wealth is highly concentrated in the top 1%.

http://www.undp.org.cn/downloads/nhdr2005/06chapter2.pdf

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2004/jun2004/rich-j22.shtml
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-12/unu-pss120106.php

No way we can talk about general GDP, oil usage and net savings without dealing with concentration of wealth. In fact in general it looks like overall all thats happened is that the exporting countries have created more extremely rich individuals.

And last but not least what has allowed this charade to continue ?

Assuming since 1980 the worlds gotten poorer outside of the top 1% whats happened ?
Why did we pull this off ?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution

Turns out that fertilizer was probably the underlying reason for success.
As the world increased its work force by the billion these billions in general are focused on obtaining enough food. We have been highly successful in providing bread for the masses. Also another incredibly important factor thats overlooked in the time honored Roman tradition is the circus.

Not only did these super poor people get access to bread they where also submerged with American entertainment. Real increases in personal wealth amongst the poor was successfully replaced with dreams of personal wealth as seen on TV.

Often overlooked and ignored the combination of food and the modern remote circus ala TV and music and las the internet has resulted in people willingly playing by the rules expecting to get their SUV and McMansion any day. And although in many countries when people are interviewed they publicly decry the sex and violence they perceive through films in America we should probably assume that the reality is quite different and the flood of effectively porn into the third world has acted as a sedative to the masses encouraging them to dream of making it to the land flowing with sex.
The selling of real food and virtual sex to the world by the wealthy is probably and not unsurprisingly the real reason that the warped financial system has worked.
Nothing more then bread and circus's just like the Romans.

Of course as peoples lives really worsen in the sense that the food supply worsens I suspect they will reevaluate their warped view of the American Dream.