The Kardashev Scale - Great blog post.

Spent some time this morning reading a great blog post by Centauri Dreams about what Kardashev actually meant by Type I, Type II, and Type III civilizations.
See the post here:
http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=30255&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+centauri-dreams%2Feepu+%28Centauri+Dreams%29

Centauri Dreams speculates that we should be well past the energy consumption required to categorize us as a Type I civilization, which according to Kardashev was described as:

I – technological level close to the level presently attained on the earth, with energy consumption at ~4 x 1019 erg/sec.

So I did a tiny calculation and indeed, we are WAY beyond the minimum necessary to be a Type I civilization. Total World Energy Consumption (WEC) in 2008 was 15 terawatts, and has increased several percentage points since then. By the way, 4x10^19 erg/sec  = 4 terawatts. So at least in terms of the "literal" definition, we are easily a Type I civilization as our WEC is nearly 4 times that defined by the Kardashev Scale. 

Of course it depends on where this energy comes from, whether we can control it or not, and if we're using it purely for interstellar communication. But since we're using SETI and METI for listening and transmitting signals, plus much of our energy does come from planetary sources (with the exception of solar), I'd say we probably qualify as Type I. What Kardashev meant by "technological level close to the level presently attained on the earth" is a bit weird since it implies earth is more advanced than Type I civilizations. Sort of a bad definition if we're trying to define Earth....

My 2 cents in the half hour I had between experiments.