CNN’s “Powering the Earth” Infographic
December 17th, 2009
CNN has another infographic online showing the growth in population, CO2 emissions, and electricity consumption from 1950 to present around the world. The chart looks pretty, but I have a few issues with it:
- Comparing disparate values – Population vs Tons of Emissions vs Watts. What’s the relationship between them?
- The use of Circles.. that overlap rather messily
But it does do a rather effective job of showing the explosive growth in the Asia markets. What do you think?
Randall Hand on 
VizWorld.com 
The problem with this graphic it is not comparing like with like. For example, the power consumption or CO2 emissions of Asia and Oceania, are much greater than that of North America, but the population of North America is 430 million, whereas that of Asia and Oceana is in excess of 3.6 billion. The graphic should have simply depicted quantities normalised to population of the various regions ie energy consumption per head, or CO2 emissions per head.
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