Have you ever that ridiculous statistic dropped in conversation about how the US is only approximately 4% of the world population, but we use 30% of its resources?

Ignoring, if you can, the obvious, glaring error of that statement (like what qualifies as a resource? how do you attach a number to that? who came up with that?), I just did a quick statistical comparison for fun. According to the Wikipedia listing of countries, ranked by GDP (adjusted to current USD), the World has a total GDP of $44,433,002 (in millions of USD). Ignoring the EU listing, since that is a group of countries, the US comes in first with $12,485,725 million USD. That means the the US produces approximately 28% of the total world output. Hmm, 30% resource input, 28% output … what do they want, perfect efficiency??

To put that in perspective, the next country on the list, Japan, comes in at $4,571,314 million USD. That is approximately 10% of the total world output. The second country in total rankings, next in line, and we produce 3 times more than them. The UK? 5% world output, ranked 5th. We produce almost 6 times as much as the UK.

So, given these facts, I think it is fair to assume that we should get 30% (or what ridiculous number it is) of the worlds resources, given that we produce that much!