by Cameron Dudzisz-Pounds
Background
As global warming becomes more severe and prevalent through the years, ways to measure and compare contributing factors, such as carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, become increasingly important. However, there are multiple ways to quantify the relative fault, culpability, and share of blame by country, industry, and so on. Countries have vastly different size, climate, and populations — to the point that a country with a higher absolute production of greenhouse gasses like CO2 might in fact be more efficient than a smaller country. To demonstrate this, I decided to compare the Co2 produced relative to the electricity generated by European countries in the year 2018. While electricity generation is not the only source of CO2 emissions, this comparison can provide a rough comparison of the various European country’s efficiency regardless of population.
The visual inspiration for this report was primarily this map from GreenMatch. I appreciate the very simple presentation and color gradient, though admittedly I find “effects” to be kind of vague as to what exactly that means, and how they measure it, and I’m also not sure if the steps only go up by 5 or if there is also a gradient within each 5-step block.
Process
The CO2 and electricity data came from two separate data sets, both sourced as Comma-Separated Values (.csv) files from the UN Data Explorer database. The shapefile (.shp) is from the IPUMS International Boundary files. The data was mostly clean, but both datasets were run through OpenRefine in order to check for consistency in names and typos. Following this, the datasets were imported into Tableau Public Desktop. The files were joined in each dataset on the Country Name fields and the Year fields, respectively. However, it was discovered while working on the maps that data was missing for various countries every year. The year 2018 was the most recent that contained all of Germany, Turkey, and the Nordic countries, and thus that was the year used. However, this meant that some countries were still missing, including many Baltic countries and the Czech Republic.
Three sheets were created for the dashboard: CO2 emissions, electricity generation in kilowatt-hours, and finally the average of the two for the final sheet. The CO2 sheet used warm grey colors to evoke the feeling of pollution and smog. The electricity sheet uses an orange-to-gold scale as yellow and orange tones are often used to evoke electricity. Finally, the ratio sheet goes from green to red, as the higher ratio indicates lower efficiency– the higher the number in the final sheet, the more CO2 is generated per kilowatt-hour in each country.
Results & Discussion
In the Emissions map, we can see that Germany, Turkey, the UK, France, Italy, and Poland (in that order) produce the most CO2. There is also a very large gap between the most polluting country, Germany, and the lowest (that this map displays) by a factor of more than 10. Germany also produces 64.5% more CO2 than the next largest gross producer, Turkey. At first glance, this general pattern seems to hold when looking at the Kilowatt-hours map, with higher CO2 producing countries also producing more electricity.
However, simply eyeballing the two separate maps in this way produces a slightly inaccurate picture. The final map shows the ratio of CO2 to electricity production, and this reveals some interesting patterns. The average of all countries is 1.6, with Red being higher (and thus worse) and green lower (and thus better) than this average, with deeper hues indicating distance from this average. The Nordic countries, particularly Iceland, are far and away the most efficient, having a ration of under 0.5 (except Finland), and Iceland is the overall leader in efficiency at 0.26. This ratio reveals that most of Western Europe is fairly middling in efficiency, with exception of the quite inefficient Ireland, and the better than average France and Switzerland at nearly or slightly less than 1. Eastern Europe as a whole, Turkey, and Ireland are considerably worse than average, with Poland the worst at 2.9, although Germany and the Netherlands are both less efficient than the “best” Eastern European countries Slovakia and Hungary.
Reflection
The most important avenue for future investigation is to look for various “Pain Points” in each country’s CO2 production. As previously mentioned, electricity generation is not the only source of greenhouse gasses, and different countries could have other areas of efficiency or inefficiency that they need to correct. For instance, the Nordic countries may have very efficient electrical sources such as geothermal, but they may have other main sources for their CO2 production, and those may or may not be more efficient than other countries — which obviously will not be seen with this methodology and data set. The climate, economic output, and even modes of transportation are all important to evaluate, which these maps do not consider. Looking at these factors would be important, even necessary, to determine why there is such an enormous variance in the efficiency of countries.
Also, while these maps were generated to demonstrate that gross populations and emissions are not everything, they are still important when evaluating pollution. Ultimately, countries that produce more overall pollution still have more responsibility to reduce emissions- while political divisions are important in determining what to do and how, the atmosphere doesn’t care about country boundaries.
Finally, more complete datasets would be desirable to make sure as many countries are included as possible — as the datasets used were missing data for several countries, those countries are not included, which is undesirable for a more thorough study.