4 replies to this topic

[BioGeoMan]

Made out of curiosity, posted for discussion

 carbon.pdf   135.79K   208 downloads

[Hans van der Maarel]

Made out of curiosity, posted for discussion

 carbon.pdf   135.79K   208 downloads

I've moved it to here. It's not a map, but it's an information graphic, so I think it wouldn't be out of place in the Map Gallery.

[frax]

Interesting, but not that suprising, is it? I didn't get the shades of blue grouping first, my first comment would have been that it wasn't easy to see the patterns (on the bottom chart, i would say that there is no pattern).

I try to avoid standing type for charts, so I would have done this as a horizontal bar chart, and I would have kept the same grouping as the "main" chart, instead of having them all sorted. I would also try to avoid that black, it makes the graphic to heavy.

Otherwise I think it is good and interesting!

[Kevin McManigal]

Interesting, but I think that the "per capita" emissions kind of skew the data. Makes a state like Alaska seem as though they produce more emission than say California. But really, each citizen is given more of the industrial burden, because there are so few folks up there.

A quick bit of math shows that AK's population times the per capita emissions (650,000 people X 28 metric tons = 18.2 million metric tons per year) vs. CA's pop times emissions (38 million people X 8 metric tons = 304 million metric tons) results in the really interesting comparison. From this you could say that Democrats produce far more emissions that Republicans.

But that's not really fair either, just a different way to skew the data. Perhaps, a better way to look at this might be to assign the proper percentage of a states total emissions to the percentage in each political party (i.e. If 50% of a state are Democrats, they get 50% of the emissions) and see where the "coincidence" falls.

[frax]

But what is the cause and effect, and why is it interesting? (rhetoric question/devil's advocate, to distill the message)

Also valuable piece - if you exclude the 3-5 states with highest per capita emissions, the other states are pretty equal, with the exception of rhode island and new york, right?

Also interesting to know - is this personal transportation, or all transportation (including sea/air?). Alaskans would fly more and there would be more long truck transports, right?