Worldwide CO2 emissions in an easy-to-understand new chart
It’s time for a chart that makes it easy to see both the absolute size of CO2 emissions per country and the per capita emissions — at one glance. The trick is to draw an area chart, similar to what McKinsey did in the now famous chart that demonstrates the cost of measures for greenhouse gas reduction: “U.S. MID-RANGE ABATEMENT CURVE – 2030“.
In the new chart, we used 2007 data from the International Energy Agency from their 2009 edition of CO2 Emissions from Fuel Combustion: Highlights. Each country or region is represented by a rectangle. The height of the rectangle corresponds to the per capita emissions, and the width corresponds to the population size. Therefore, the total area of all rectangles adds up to the total worldwide CO2 emissions.
It becomes immediately clear how difficult any limitation or decrease of CO2 will be. Countries like the U.S. have a multiple of CO2 emissions per capita compared to India, China, or Africa; it is in the U.S. then where the most potential for savings from the current levels lies. However, most of the growth is expected in China and India, and we can see that there is just no way these countries could ever grow into the levels of European or U.S. CO2 emissions per capita. The Earth would not sustain it.
Download the PDF file here or get it on Slideshare:
Worldwide CO2 Emissions (2007) v091116
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Very cool chart. We need to get this in front of the people in Copenhagen.
Nice chart Tom! Is the info available to do the same chart by US state?
Hi Tom, great chart. What amazes me the most is U.A.E. which has the highest CO2 emission per capita, even higher than the U.S. – of course U.A.E. has much less people compard to the U.S., hence we cannot see them on the slide. With regards to China … well several Chinese automotive companies anounced ambitious plans to become the leading e-car manufacturers worldwide. I guess every German manufacturer announced also plans, the only difference, in Germany a car is around EUR 100.000 and the Chinese build e-cars for less than EUR 10.000 (one "0" less can make a big difference). Who will win the race … the billion dollar question.
I found the data source at the EPA: http://www.epa.gov/climate/climatechange/emission…
I'll look into creating a chart later this week.
Very insightful, Tom. One suggestion to add yet another interesting dimension: color code each 'country block' according to their growth rate. For example, red is super high growth, yellow high, blue low, green flat/negative, etc.. Great work!
Great idea. I'm in touch with Excels/Powerpoint gurus who might help me with this. The current Excel templates I am using are a pain.
Somebody asked for the data source:
International Energy Agency: "CO2 Emissions from Fuel Combustion, 2009 Edition"
http://www.iea.org/co2highlights/
http://www.iea.org/co2highlights/CO2highlights.pd…
Nice chart. I saw your question on PE about alternate software. This would be quite straightforward in R. With a script to automate updates.
To address the question of total emissions (not per capita), you could place that value (say Gt/yr) right inside the largest rectangles (US, China, etc.).