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It's an interesting point to consider. If you look at Google Earth—there are very few lights on during the night in North Korea. The comparison of the North to the South is stunning—and even more stunning considering the imbalance of raw and earth materials in each country, but that's a separate thing. I think Americans generally fail to appreciate our shared, unspoken mindset of abundance. Our grocery stores are stocked with food we'll never eat, we leave lights on and charge our electronics when we don't need to, we drive when we don't need to...all the way down to Dunkin' Donuts throwing away hundreds of donuts per store per day. We waste so much stuff, just because we can. If you remove the North's nuclear ambitions and just consider on a human level—25,000,000/80,000 would mean that for the assumption to hold, an ASU student would need to use 312.5 times more power than a North Korean. It's my guess, that if you do not include the power used in Chinese factories where workers are from NK, that probably checks out. I would take another bold stroke and say that the power used by NK on an institutional and military level is probably similar to ASU's consumption—I know ASU has a (probably smaller) nuclear lab of its own. This also depends on how we count power consumption—is the jet fuel and gas used by students' travel counted? North Korea only has like 3 Soviet-era planes and very few vehicles, and travel is generally a disproportionate use of energy and carbon emissions for the average person. The problem with any sort of analysis like this is everything we (as the public) know about NK is from defectors. However, the defectors also skew our perspective—they are generally from higher class families that serve in military positions or travel in ways that can get them closer to the border (not all cases, but a fair generalization). They would generally (again making very broad strokes here) use much more electricity than the average person. For this reason, and it's ironic, but most SK scholars I met thought that we in the West _overestimated_ the North's living standards, but they had an ulterior motive in looking to win the soft power war. Anyway, thanks for the thoughts. I lived in Seoul for a while and was just fascinated by the imbalance between the two countries. |
That was the point of my post so thanks for contributing some interesting comparisons of your own. BTW, I was thinking of that shocking nighttime satellite photo of the Korean peninsula that you mention as well as the fact half of N. Korea's residents don't have electricity at all. For many of the rest there are daily rolling blackouts and some only get power for one hour a day to cook dinner (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_North_Korea). Also, Arizona and Florida State Universities, the two largest in the USA, are in extremely hot climates. The HVAC consumption alone for all those classrooms, common areas, facilities and dorms must be massive, whereas electric HVAC is virtually unheard of in N. Korea.