📊 EV’s Charts of the Week #46

Hi, I’m Azeem Azhar. I convene Exponential View to help us understand how our societies and political economy will change under the force of rapidly accelerating technologies. This is my member’s-only Charts of the Week mailout in which we explore the world through data.

DEPARTMENT OF CLIMATE

Prize-winning

The new Nobel Laureate, Klaus Hasselmann, created a model linking weather and climate. His methods have been used to prove that the increased temperature in the atmosphere is due to human emissions of carbon dioxide. Via Nobel Prize

You don’t want to be the winner

Simon Evans @DrSimEvans

Super excited to finally share this updated analysis on the countries most responsible for climate change, now including all sources of CO2:

US 509GtCO2
CN 284
RU 172
BR 113
ID 103
DE 88
IN 86
UK 74
JP 68
CA 65

1/nhttps://t.co/5PlQMZRhyR pic.twitter.com/z72TWakPVB

This week, I have prepared an expanded decarbonisation section. We are in the processing of revamping the decarbonisation section of the Sunday newsletter. I would love your thoughts in the comments about how you think it should look and what types of content we should curate there. For now, let’s jump in with this fantastic graphic of the leading carbon-emitting countries over the last hundred years or so. The top three historical emitters of CO2 are the US at 509Gt, China at 284Gt and Russia at 172. Brazil and Indonesia, with their aggressive deforestation, come higher than one might expect. (If the video doesn’t load up, click on the link.) Via Simon Evans

Carbon captured

BloombergNEF put together a number of scenarios for decarbonisation. In their “Gray scenario”, they assume energy decarbonisation occurs at a moderate rate, forcing us into more aggressive carbon capture and storage (CCS) to achieve Net Zero. Were that scenario to hold, the task for the nascent CCS industry is an enormous one. (Fortunately, there are signs the power sector will decarbonise faster than that.) Via BloombergNEF

More energy, more storage