The graphic below is interesting to me in light of the discourse about greenhouse gas emissions. We often hear about emissions from cars and sometimes about emissions from industry. I was surprised, then, to see that electricity and heat was such a large contributor to carbon dioxide emissions. And I feel like land use change and agriculture hardly get discussed at all.
Graphic borrowed from ChartPorn, which also has an interactive graphic that breaks down emissions by country (via Simoleon Sense).
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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.
Comments 6
nath — August 29, 2009
Yeah, how can the extremely negative climate impact that meat and milk products constantly fly under the radar. Hm, it just might have something to do with this previous post here:
http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2009/08/25/commercials-news-and-commercial-news/
As I explained:
http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2009/08/25/commercials-news-and-commercial-news/comment-page-1/#comment-105309
Short story, anyone still eating meat and milk products today despite easy access to alternatives is intentionally choosing to do great harm and environmental injustice against the most poor and powerless of their fellow humans (and, as an bonus of maliciousness, also cause suffering and harm to the animals confined, stressed, prodded and killed)
Miguel — August 29, 2009
Hi Guys,
Thanks for linking to SimoleonSense. I follow this website closely- you do a great job of posting valuable material.
Best,
Miguel Barbosa
Founder of SimoleonSense "Enriching Ideas For Intelligent People"
P.S. You might enjoy my free newsletter I devote a weekly section to the best infographics on the blogosphere.
Peter — August 30, 2009
A possible reason this may seem to "downplay" the effects of agriculture is that this graph is for total worldwide emissions. If it were shown as a breakdown of emissions due to the average American/European, we would instead see agriculture play a more prominent role - but not by much. It would move up to third place from fourth, behind energy production and transportation.
donna — August 30, 2009
A lot of electrical plants are coal-powered, and heating is from burning oil.
izzy — August 30, 2009
it would be helpful if the diagram showed quantities of greenhouse gases that are proportional to their strength. One molecule of methane is 8x more potent than one molecule of CO2, for example, so the graph is sort of underestimating the impact of agriculture.