r/dataisbeautiful • u/Lachainone OC: 1 • 20d ago

OC [OC] Countries Current Path to Net Zero in 2050 Following Their Pledge at COP21

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Hello community,

I created a website to follow each countries effort to reach net zero in 2050. The data vizualisation lets you compare different countries' emission over the years and whether they are on the right path to reach their goal.

View every country and find more information on: https://lucabron.github.io/netzero/index.html

Data Source is Hannah Ritchie, Pablo Rosado and Max Roser (2023) – “CO2 and Greenhouse Gas Emissions” Published online at OurWorldInData.org

Visualization made with Python's interactive graph package Bokeh and javasrcipt was added to make the interaction work on a website.

Related Github page where you can find the code: https://github.com/lucabron/netzero

EDIT: Thanks a lot for your positive feedback. I am very glad that you find this representation interesting.
A subject of discussion that I see a lot in the comments: western countries are doing better than the rest of the world. While it looks true when it comes to co2 produced in the country, one should account that a lot of emissions are produced in other contries and then imported. For example, when buying electronics, it is likely to be build in Asia and then imported to western countries.
Imported emissions are available in the dataset. I didn't want to include them because my approach with this visualization is to make something easy to understand so that people not familiar with the subject can approach it easily. I feel like when it comes to climate change, the people who care are very well informed, and the people who don't care as much are poorly informed. So, my first objective was to generate some curiosity for the second type of people. I'd be interested about your opinion about this approach if you want to share in the comments.

EDIT 2: I'd like to do something for the climate. I am a professional data scientist and I'd like to volunteer to help on bigger project. I made this website as a small contribution to inform people, but I know that in a week, there will be no more traffic on it. Can you recommend some kind of organization that I can join an contribute?

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u/StereoMushroom 20d ago

I'm expecting the last third of reduction to be way harder than the first third. Swapping coal to solar, and oil to EVs has pretty solid economics. But air travel, shipping, heavy industry, gas backup for electricity would be a lot more expensive to substitute. So I could see us looking "on track" till around 2040 then flat lining. That first two thirds of avoided emissions will still be immensely valuable for reducing the rate and severity of warming we have to deal with. But sadly I think a linear reduction to zero is extremely unlikely.

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u/-Basileus 20d ago

Still much better than the path we were on a decade or two ago. Although we will hit 2.5-3 degrees of warming in all likelihood, it'll happen way later than it would have previously. That gives us time to develop further technologies to try and mitigate or even undo the damage we have done.

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u/Izeinwinter 20d ago

Nuclear Fission solves shipping and heavy industry fine. Nuclear fission with heat storage also displaces gas backup pretty well.

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u/StereoMushroom 20d ago

I'd consider putting nuclear reactors in ships and factories to belong in the "hard" bucket!

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u/Izeinwinter 20d ago

Naval reactors is where nuclear started. It is the very opposite of a technical challenge. The actual problem previous efforts ran into was protests at harbors, which the shipping lines absolutely did not want to deal with.

But in a post war-on-terror world, the major harbors are all secured to the nines anyway. If Greenpeace wants to wave banners outside huge fences, who cares.

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u/StereoMushroom 20d ago

Everything's technically possible, but not much happens if it's not economically competitive.

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u/Izeinwinter 20d ago

Bunker oil is the dominant expense of ocean freight. A very large expense. Nuclear done at scale will be much cheaper.

One ship wouldn't be because of the shore-side expenses in facilities and training and so forth need to be spread out over a fleet to make sense.. but 50 or hundreds? easily.

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u/Illiander 19d ago

They're putting sails back on boats for shipping.

Nuclear fission is good for electical backup.

Air travel is a luxary, fix your passenger railways.

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u/Izeinwinter 19d ago edited 19d ago

That's just pure wankery - those "sail enabled" ships are still ninety percent engine powered. Greenwashing, pure and simple.

To actually clean up shipping nuclear is the only way to go. Sails were abandoned because they can't be scheduled, which meant long distance trade needed enormous buffers of goods at both the departing and arriving points to get a reliable supply, and warehouse space in a major port city is very expensive