Last week, Pew released a survey with the headline ‘Support for Alternative Energy and Offshore Drilling.’ The piece begins, “The public continues to favor a wide range of government policies to address the nation’s energy supply…”

That is accurate, but it doesn’t get at the most striking data.  The most important finding in the survey is the fact that clean energy and mass transit investments are vastly more popular than nuclear investments and offshore drilling.

Here is how Pew presents the data (Figure 1):

As a mini-case study on how informational graphics can add significant meaning to this sort of data, I’ve created a few simple charts.

This chart (Figure 2) shows the approval and disapproval numbers for the four policy options:

And this chart (Figure 3) shows the net approval numbers for the four policy options:

Presenting the information in text only format, as Pew chose to do in Figure 1, leaves the reader to their own devices to identify the most compelling data.  While the data is technically accurate, it fails to bring the meaning of the data to the forefront.  Pew’s accompanying analysis of the polling data also somehow fails to identify the massive gap in net approval for the policies they surveyed.

Creating a simple chart (Figure 2) based on the data itself adds significant value to the presentation of the data, especially for the casual reader.  The reader can tell at a glance that clean energy investments are significantly more popular than polluting energy sources, and that unpopularity follows the opposite pattern.

Going one step further and doing simple arithmetic to determine the net approval for each of the policies in the survey, as I’ve done with Figure 3, brings the most striking data to the forefront.  The fact that more than 50% of Americans support a variety of policies to produce-more or consume-less energy is not, in itself, especially meaningful.  But the fact that the net approval for some of these policies is 40-60%, while it is barely 10% for others, is fairly compelling.

Is clean energy deployment a race? Tom Friedman and others at The Times say yes, while Bradford Plumer and Christina Larson aren’t so sure.

Either way, China installed more wind capacity than the United States in 2009, and will likely have more capacity overall within a few years.

Here is what the last five years of installations looked like in the two countries:*

As recently as 2005, the United States installed nearly five times more wind capacity than China on an annual basis (2,431 MW vs. 498 MW). In 2009, China installed 31% more capacity than the United States did (13,000 MW vs. 9,922 MW).

*All data via the Global Wind Energy Council.

Via Yglesias, via Free Exchange, Paul Kedrosky has this useful chart:

R.A. at Free Exchange makes an interesting point about this:

[W]hat should stand out is that most of the world’s population is squished into that broad bottom tier, which includes emerging markets and undeveloped countries. Really, something like 85% of the people living on this planet consume below the world’s average energy use. Either those people need to quit aspiring to developed nation lifestyles, or the world needs to make output far less energy-intensive, or we should all prepare ourselves for a nasty time of things, in geopolitical and environmental terms, as emerging markets continue to develop economically.

The other day I mentioned that the correlation between energy use and GDP is a myth. There are significant gains to be made in terms of energy efficiency, and I agree completely with the assessment that ‘the world needs to make output far less energy-intensive.’ Much of this will take place naturally once a meaningful price is placed on carbon throughout most of the planet. Smart firms will find innovative ways to decrease energy-intensity and will profit by doing so.

There is also huge potential for developing nations to ‘leapfrog’ outdated technologies and move directly to more efficient ones. For example, in India there is not yet a national power grid. Perhaps as they develop the national grid they’ll use smart grid technologies, which will lead to significant gains in energy efficiency.

Such leapfrogging of technologies, and the decreasing energy intensity of developing economies that goes with it, is our only hope for stabilizing atmospheric greenhouse gas emissions while improving global standards of living at the same time. If developing countries don’t learn from the mistakes made by western economies, our energy and environmental crises will be entirely unmanageable in the decades to come.

Washington Post:

The world’s biggest emitters of greenhouse gases met a global deadline Sunday to reiterate their commitments to fight climate change. Under the Copenhagen Accord, which was struck in December, industrialized and major developing nations had to declare by Jan. 31 how much they would cut their emissions by 2020. Spanish Secretary of State Teresa Rivera Rodriguez, whose country holds the European Union presidency, said the pledges will turn the accord “into something meaningful.”

The flawed conventional wisdom is that increased GDP is associated with access to more and cheaper energy. This is not necessarily the case, as the chart below shows (via Yglesias):

Energy intensity is the amount of energy used per unit of activity. Decreasing energy intensity, mainly through energy efficiency, is the most direct path to decreasing greenhouse gas emissions. While getting coal-fired power plants off the grid by driving the price of renewable sources down is one way to approach the problem, it isn’t the only way.

Via Talking Points Memo.

Via Mother Jones.

Following up on today’s chart of the day, this chart is also appropriate:

Context at Climate Progress.

Update — More context in this Center for American Progress report:

unstable_oil –

Lester Brown has the details:

America’s century-old love affair with the automobile may be coming to an end. The U.S. fleet has apparently peaked and started to decline. In 2009, the 14 million cars scrapped exceeded the 10 million new cars sold, shrinking the U.S. fleet by 4 million, or nearly 2 percent in one year. While this is widely associated with the recession, it is in fact caused by several converging forces. 

Future U.S. fleet size will be determined by the relationship between two trends: new car sales and cars scrapped. Cars scrapped exceeded new car sales in 2009 for the first time since World War II, shrinking the U.S. vehicle fleet from the all-time high of 250 million to 246 million. It now appears that this new trend of scrappage exceeding sales could continue through at least 2020. (See data.)