2025-12-29 –, One
Data about greenhouse gas emissions, both from countries and individual factories, is
often publicly available. However, the data sources are often not as accessible and
reliable as they should be. EU emission databases contain obvious flaws, and nobody
wants to be responsible.
Which factory in my city is the largest emitter of CO2? Which industrial sector is
responsible for the largest share of a country's contribution to climate change? It
should not be difficult to answer these questions. Public databases and reporting
required by international agreements usually allow us to access this data.
However, trying to access and work with these datasets — or, shall we say, Excel tables
— can be frustrating. UN web pages that prevent easy downloads with a "security
firewall", barely usable frontends, and other issues make it needlessly difficult to
gain transparency about the sources of climate pollution.
While working with official EU datasets, the speaker observed data points that could not
possibly be true. Factories suddenly dropped their emissions by orders of magnitude
without any explanation, different official sources report diverging numbers for the
same emission source, and responsible European and National authorities appear not to
care that much.
The talk will show how to work with relevant greenhouse gas emission data sources and
how we can access them more easily by converting them to standard SQL tables. Furthermore, we will dig into some of the
strange issues one may find while investigating emission datasets.
More background:
Why is it needlessly difficult to access UNFCCC Emission Data? https://industrydecarbonization.com/news/why-is-it-needlessly-difficult-to-access-unfccc-emission-data.html
