Sustainably Starts With Efficiency: The Rise of Carbon Efficiency In The Early 2000’s
Divija Maitra, Daniel Muljono, Kane Gu
Continuous global advancements in technology are making everything in our lives faster, better, and more efficient. From computers that process unbelievable amounts of data to the way we manufacture those very computers, innovations in all fields of our lives have allowed for the world to develop rapidly, steadily. While these innovations have greatly improved the way we live in many ways, the world has already seen the devastating environmental effects that continue to worsen with our developing world. Like the growing population that comes with world developments, our global carbon emissions and energy usage continues to grow. Compared to the 1990s, Deborah Zabarenko reports in a Reuters article that carbon dioxide emissions increased “three times faster after 2000”, a worrying trend that has prompted both worry from environmental scientists as well as action from the government (2007, para. 1).
From looking at the average global carbon emissions (measured in metric tons per capita) from 2000 to 2010 plotted as a line graph (pictured to the left), we can see that carbon emissions were increasing fairly rapidly at a continuous increasing slope from 2000 to 2008, with a slight decrease in 2009 followed by the highest average (in 2010) of 160,867 metric tons per capita within the ten year span. The rate of change of this increase begins to decrease in the mid-2000’s, with a visible uptick at the close of the decade. The rise in carbon emissions in the first decade of the new millennium is undeniable — Zabarenko notes that in addition to the growing population and GDP, the increasing carbon emissions are largely driven by the “intensity” at which energy is being produced and an increase in the amount of carbon needed to supply the growing needs for energy. It is clear, as Zabarenko quotes from Gregg Marland of the Oak Ridge National Library, that after 2000 globally people are “just using more energy and being more consumptive” (2007).
Thus, it is clear that with the rise in carbon emissions, there is a distinct rise in energy usage as well. Energy usage, in this context, is defined by the amount of energy consumed per capita measured in equivalent kilograms of oil. As indicated by the graph above, there is a general increase in energy usage in the early 2000’s, with a significant slump between 2004–2007 that is largely due to changes in consumption in the Americas and Oceania. What happened between 2004 and 2007 was the 2000s oil crash, where oil prices spiked up drastically between those years. However, that trend recovered from the slump and again increased to then surpass earlier levels. There is a similar uptick to carbon emissions as there is in energy usage, and the general trends of both indicators point towards an increasingly energy-hungry global economy.
With this precedent set, however, there is still one more metric to observe to truly understand how our energy and carbon consumptions have changed over time — carbon efficiency. Although both metrics have been increasing over time, it is difficult to discern how efficiently we’ve been spending our carbon without understanding how this metric interacts with energy usage. To better understand these patterns, carbon emissions and energy usage was put on the same standard scale (from -1 to 1). By normalizing energy usage and carbon emissions, it ‘enables more effective value comparison’ meaning that we can compare energy usage and carbon emissions more easily (Heer & Shneiderman, 2012). Carbon efficiency was then produced by subtracting carbon emissions from energy usage — if the value is positive, it indicates some scale of carbon efficiency since that indicates that more energy was being used at a lesser value of carbon emissions. On a standardized scale, the graph of carbon efficiency largely reflects that of energy usage, with a general positive trend distinct from the slump from 2004–2007. In that period of time, it is apparent that even though energy usage decreased, carbon emissions remained at a steadily increasing rate, thus resulting in lower carbon efficiency during those years. From 2008–2010, however, carbon efficiency resumed its overall positive trajectory, with an uptick at the close of the decade. This indicates that our carbon efficiency not only returned to levels seen during lower energy usage, but is slowly surpassing earlier levels. However, it is also crucial to note that despite rising trends, carbon efficiency remains at negative levels, indicating that globally, the early 2000’s was a period in which we still emitted more carbon than what can be considered efficient.
Understanding a slow and gradual rise in efficiency can be done through various lenses — economic, technological, and societal. Economically, a general rise in GDP accompanies newfound efforts to invest in energy efficiency (Tweed, 2010). Regions including Europe and the Americas both had relatively higher cumulative GDP, as well as higher efficiency. Regions like Asia, however, struggled under dense populations to maintain similar rates of efficiency, although countries such as China and India led a slight uptick with money put into “operating expenditures for energy efficiency investments” in the later years of the decade.
From a societal and technological standpoint, it is apparent that rising awareness of climate change as a global crisis also leads to innovation in energy efficient technology and support for renewable energy. For corporations, “attracting and retaining customers” was an important driver for the widespread adoption of energy efficiency (Tweed, 2010) through renewable energy and carbon efficient technologies. Thus, as such awareness, technological prowess, and economic standing of the world rises, it is a hopeful indication that carbon efficiency will continue to climb and elevate us into a more sustainable and climate-friendly reality.
Note: Seeing that our aim is to do effective storytelling about data to the general audience, the visualizations included in this text needed to be simple in order to be understandable. To achieve this, we took inspiration from Colin Ware, who points out in Design of Visualizations for Human Information Interaction that one of the best and most accurate way to encode quantitative data from information space to representation space is through the use of length, the second best visual variable for quantitative data beaten only by position (Ware, 2019). Taking inspiration from a lecture by Professor Taylor Scott Jackson of UCSD, we try to minimize our non-data ink and redundant data ink, in other words, we attempt to maximize our data-ink ratio as much as possible so that our audience only focuses their attention into what we are trying to convey which is in the data-ink. Lastly, taking inspiration from Robert Kosara’s “Storytelling: The Next Step For Visualization”, the storytelling scenario we plan to employ is the self-running presentation to a large audience — partly due to the fact we are unable to have live speakers in our presentation, this means that one of the challenges we face during our storytelling is capturing our audience’s attention (Kosara, 2013). With carbon emissions, climate, and our planet’s livelihood becoming the forefront of our global focus, however, we believe our audience understands the severity and significance of this topic with no added work.
References
Heer, J., & Shneiderman, B. (2012). Interactive dynamics for visual analysis. Communications of the ACM, 55(4), 45–54.
Kosara, R., & Mackinlay, J. (2013). “Storytelling: The next step for visualization”. Computer, 46(5), 44–50.
Ware, C. (2019). Information visualization: perception for design. Morgan Kaufmann.
Segel, E., & Heer, J. (2010). “Narrative visualization: Telling stories with data”. IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics, 16(6), 1139–1148.
Tweed, K. (2010, June 4). Global Energy Efficiency Sees Growth in 2010. Greentech Media. https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/global-energy-efficiency-sees-growth-in-2010.
Zabarenko, D., & Correspondent, E. (2007, May 21). World CO2 emissions speed up since 2000. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-climate-emissions/world-co2-emissions-speed-up-since-2000-idUSN2135818320070521.
