Leaving aside the energy balance, the pollution (both noise and air) is vastly, dramatically greater from busses than it is from cars, at least in my area.

I have never seen more than one passenger seated on any of the double-deckers which scream past the house I'm renovating every 5 minutes at peak times, breaking the speed limit, causing plaster to fall from the ceiling.

Even if they were affordable and I didn't have a car, I wouldn't use them on principle, given the damage they do to quality of life.

I'd scrap the entire Stagecoach fleet and give everyone a free bike with a basket.

Sorry, off-topic rant.

McKay estimated average UK personal consumption (including 'stuff', transport, food+agriculture etc) to be 195kWh per person per day.

I quite agree that energy balance really matters, but ultimately the 'carbon' bit really matters too. We can (at a price) make plenty of energy from sunshine (PV, CSP, Wind) but there is a definite limit on how much CO2 we can safely generate.

My personal usage, (to the best I can work it out) is 10kWh for domestic heating, -1kWh for domestic power (PV export), negligible for commuting (5min bike ride), but the amount of power work uses on my behalf is no doubt shocking (I have no numbers yet, but it's a fancy airconned building full of computers that get left on all the time), similarly for work travel - long-distance travel at least 3 times/year. Then there is the 48kWh McKay estimates for 'stuff'. I avoid buying a lot of tat, but do buy a fair amount of electronics and building materials, both of which are heavy energy users. My car use comes to about 3.8kWh/day (largely holidays and recreation). Then there is 15kWh for food and agriculture.

But the carbon-intensity of those energy inputs varies a lot. The 'stuff' largely comes from far-eastern power (pretty dirty), but my car energy use is almost all locally-sourced biodiesel from waste oil (pretty low-carbon). The travel is mostly fossil-fuel, except when it's nuclear powering French trains. The domestic heating is nearly all wood-burning local timber (Not low-carbon, but renewable).

And so on. I think the energy sources matter as much as the totals, and ultimately there is little we can do about the sources that are out of our control, except try to get those who are in charge to see what they do (I'm going to work on work's energy efficiency via the building management committee). At least our long-term objective is to replace everyone's computers with much lower-power ones - that's some consolation for all the energy being used.