Population, Oil Consumption, and Carrying Capacity

In this work, I studied the relation between the population and oil consumption from the years 1980 to 2004. While one would expect oil consumption to increase with population growth, I examined a stronger hypothesis. I hypothesized that oil consumption is proportional to population. To understand the true nature of this proportionality, a number of representative countries were chosen and examined from around the world. As a general trend, the total world population has been on the rise with a corresponding rise in oil consumption. Of particular interest is the country of North Korea for which, following the decline of the Soviet Union, there was a rapid decrease in oil consumption. If oil consumption is proportional to population, and the oil consumption falls, so will the population. In fact, there was a famine in North Korea during the mid 1990\u27s in which 2.5 million people died. My work has determined that oil consumption and population are proportional for most of the representative countries