Helmut Haberl from the Institute of Social Ecology, at Klagenfurt University in Vienna, who does interesting work on human appropriation of ecological production, has a paper The global socioeconomic energetic metabolism as a sustainability problem in a special issue of Energy 31 (2006) 87–99. In the paper, Haberl some interesting figures that estimate total human energy use over the last 1,000,000 years and since the widespread use of fossil fuel.
Haberl writes:
conventional energy balances and statistics only account for energy carriers used in technical energy conversions as, for example, combustion in furnaces, steam engines or internal combustion engines, production and use of electricity or district heat, etc. That is, energy statistics neglect, among others, biomass used as a raw material as well as all sorts of human or animal nutrition. These are very important energy conversions in hunter-gatherer and agricultural societies, but are still significant even in industrial society.
Global socioeconomic energy metabolism in the last 1 Million years. The increase in socioeconomic energy flows encompasses six orders of magnitude, from 0.001 Exajoule per year (EJ/yr) about 1 million years ago to nearly 1,000 EJ/yr today.
