Carbon Majors Interactive by Adam Nieman

The Carbon Majors project (www.carbonmajors.org) is the culmination of eight years of combing through publicly available records about fossil fuel extraction from all across the globe and detailed analysis of the data. The project covers oil, coal, natural gas and cement production from the 1850s through 2010. The Report names the institutions responsible for extracting the oil, coal and gas that’s causing warming of the planet. Instead of allocating between countries, as has up to now been the case, any institution that produced more than eight million tonnes of carbon dioxide in any given year is identified in the study together with their cumulative contribution to the problem we all now face.

Our package included an Interactive diagram to show the historical unfolding of the Carbon Majors data. In this instance, the area of the circles is used to show quantities. By moving the cursor over the circle, the actual figures can also be seen. As well as showing the overall growth of Carbon Majors cumulative emissions in all years between 1850 and 2010, the interactive shows the emissions attributed to each of the 90 Carbon Majors so that they can be compared to each other for any year, and also compared to ‘unattributed emissions’. It also serves as a discovery tool that is more intuitive than a table. All data are accessible by mouseover.

An important feature of the visualisation is that it places the emissions in context. The question, ‘yes, but is that a lot or a little’ is answered with reference to the ‘remaining carbon budget’. This is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s best estimate of the total quantity of carbon dioxide we can add to the atmosphere and have a reasonable chance of keeping the rise in global temperatures below 2 degrees centigrade.

The interactive allows users to see just how much impact these ‘carbon majors’ have had on the atmosphere, and also to trace the history of their impact.