D'oh!

Found this interesting fact in, of all places, Chris Turner's excellent sociological study Planet Simpson: How A Cartoon Masterpiece Defined a Generation.Since 1950, the United States has used more resources than the entire human population of the world managed to consume prior to 1950. And using a little extrapolation, since the United States, at 5% of the world's population, uses about 25% of the world's resources, which means that since 1950, the entire world has burned through 4 times the amount of resources than the entire human population of the world managed to consume through all of history before 1950.