Vox writer Dave Roberts is not always perfect (who is?), but he consistentlyputs out high-quality writing and thinking, mostly about clean energy, but ranging more broadly than that. On Twitter he can be counted on for his thoughts on how political will is what's needed to address the climate crisis, rather than technical details. Before he was a writer, he was a philosophy major, so it may not be surprising that he also has a great analysis of our current epistemic crisis, as described in this Why Is This Happening podcast conversation with Chris Hayes.
His recent post, What's causing climate change, in 10 charts, is a definite keeper for the filing cabinet. While it starts with a chart showing China is the largest carbon emitter, it soon makes it clear that this is a very recent blip in the data, as the next several charts show how Europe is the historic heavyweight emitter and the U.S. is the biggest offender as a single country, both in total and per capita.
For the regions over time, this chart is of note:
On these comparative charts, we see that Europe's carbon output took a downward turn before the year 2000; the US's after 2000, and not as as sharply.
In the rest of the world, another chart shows that electricity and heating account for almost twice as much of the CO2 output as the next highest cause, transportation... but in the U.S., transportation recently passed electricity and heating as the biggest source of output. (It's partly because of our love affair with SUVs.)
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