Charts of the month (October)

Hey,

I usually send this on the last Tuesday of the month, but I've been a wee bit swamped. So it's nice to see you on a Wednesday for perhaps the first time ever. Here's our 9th edition of 'Charts of the Month,' with 50+ (!) charts enclosed for plus supporters. Each chart tells its own story and offers a wealth of insight into climate tech, climate science, the state of the energy transition, and more. I provide light commentary throughout.

First 5 charts are free for all today.

For those of you who are new and curious what this is, it's a monthly roundup of my favorite data visualizations from all the nooks and crannies where I do research.

If you've been curious to check this out, today's a good day to do so. Over the past week, we've had a dozen new premium subs who saw the light and are waiting for you to join them.

Alert, Missing! (Evidence of energy ‘transition’)

I read the IEA’s 2024 World Energy Outlook and a lot of other reports of late and aggregated charts from all of em’ so you don’t have to. Here are some key callouts.

Let’s start with where the energy transition is actually at. Two things can be true at once: Many climate and energy technologies are scaling exponentially. And it’s not enough.

For one, demand for coal—buoyed by China and India, which together cover 60% of consumption—hasn’t peaked and isn’t forecast to fall as fast as needed for basically any and all decarbonization targets.

The coal story is very spatially variable and centralized. While the U.K. already went through a 300-year cycle of exploding coal use followed by a relatively rapid phase-out, China is only a few decades into a significant industrialization and standard of living push, which includes a lot more (often coal-fired) electricity, cement, and steel production, and more emissions-intensive work.

Coal mines also emit a lot of methane. It’s not just a CO2 (or air pollution) problem:

Because variables like coal usage haven’t peaked, the world is likely on pace for somewhere between 2.4°C and 2.9°C of warming, much higher than the 1.5°C target set in 2015 at the Paris Accords (virtually untenable now) and even 2°C targets.

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