The entire world generates about 25,000 TWh of electricity every year.
Finland consumes about 87 TWh of electricity every year.
An entire Finland of electricity use thinly distributed over the entire planet disappearing is a negligible rounding error on the grand scheme of things. It's about a ~0.3% change.
News media uses word imagery like "an entire Finland of electricity use" because it sounds huge and scary to the average person who doesn't understand that absolute numbers are meaningless out of context. Zooming out, you realize that while Finland is big from an individual human scale, it barely exists in the wider cacophony of human civilization.
And that's just looking at electricity, which is a percentage total human energy use. Much more energy use comes from transportation, industry, and heating, which is much more carbon intensive than electricity generation, since much of our electricity comes from hydro, nuclear, and increasingly solar and wind.
Finland consumes about 87 TWh of electricity every year.
An entire Finland of electricity use thinly distributed over the entire planet disappearing is a negligible rounding error on the grand scheme of things. It's about a ~0.3% change.
News media uses word imagery like "an entire Finland of electricity use" because it sounds huge and scary to the average person who doesn't understand that absolute numbers are meaningless out of context. Zooming out, you realize that while Finland is big from an individual human scale, it barely exists in the wider cacophony of human civilization.
And that's just looking at electricity, which is a percentage total human energy use. Much more energy use comes from transportation, industry, and heating, which is much more carbon intensive than electricity generation, since much of our electricity comes from hydro, nuclear, and increasingly solar and wind.