CO2, Global Warming, and Energy Consumption

Global Comparisons of High, Medium, and Low wealth countries

Golden Echidna
Olaf de Rohan Willner, Richard Kelly, Jake Lawson

2023-03-01

Our Research Questions

• Question 1: How does the energy mix vary by country for high and medium-low income countries? (measured by GDP)
• Question 2: Are global fossil fuel use and average global temperature correlated?

Our Data

To answer these questions we use multiple datasets:

• Our World In Data’s Energy Use Dataset containing tens thousands of records for over 100 years of data (from TidyTuesday)
• NASA and Earth Policy Institute’s global warming datasets.

Q1: How does the energy mix vary by country for high, medium, and low wealth economies (measured by GNI)

What are we looking at?

Both the amount and type of energy vary by how wealthy a country is. If we are to analyze the impact of energy consumption and global warming we need to look at the difference in culpability.

We separate the countries we wish to study into two groups: high-income and lower middle-income, as measured by gross national income (GNI) in 2022. We look at their national energy consumption per capita for each of coal, oil, natural gas, renewables, and nuclear.

We will also look at the differences in energy consumption between 1990 and 2021 for high and medium/low income countires.

Per-capita consumption - High Income Countries

Per-capita consumption - Lower-middle income Countries

Changes in Energy Consumption - High income countries

Changes in Energy Consumption - Lower-middle income countries

Q2: Are global fossil fuel use and average global temperature correlated?

What are we looking at?

Now that we have established the difference in energy use/consumption between the top and bottom global economies, we aim to investigate the human influence on global temperature The three fossil fuels we look at are:

• Oil
• Coal
• Natural Gas

Fossil Fuel Use and Temperatures

Statistical Correlation