Serendipity

I was doing some research on Canada’s climate targets recently, and came across this chart, presented as part of Canada’s Intended Nationally Determined Contribution (INDC) under the Paris Agreement:

Looks good right? Certainly it conveys a message that Canada’s well on track, and that the target for 2030 is ambitious (compared to a business as usual pathway). Climate change solved, eh?

But the chart is an epic example of misdirection. Here’s another chart that pulls the same trick, this time from the Government’s Climate Change website, and apparently designed to make the 2030 target look bravely ambitious:

So I downloaded the data and produced my own chart, with a little more perspective added. I wanted to address several ways in which the above charts represent propaganda, rather than evidence:

• By cutting off the Y axis at 500 Mt, the chart hides the real long-term evidence-based goal for climate policy: zero emissions;
• Canada has consistently failed to meet any of it’s climate targets in the past, while the chart seems to imply we’re doing rather well;
• The chart conflates two different measures. The curves showing actual emissions exclude net removal from forestry (officially known as Land Use, Land Use Change, and Forestry LULUCF), while Canada fully intends to include this in its accounting for achieving the 2030 target. So if you plot the target on the same chart with emissions, honesty dictates you should adjust the target accordingly.

Here’s my “full perspective” chart. Note that the first target shown here in grey was once Liberal party policy in the early 1990s; the remainder were official federal government targets. Each is linked to the year they were first proposed. The “fair effort” for Canada comes from ClimateActionTracker’s analysis:

The correct long term target for carbon emissions is, of course zero. Every tonne of CO2 emitted makes the problem worse, and there’s no magic fairy that removes these greenhouse gases from the atmosphere once we’ve emitted them. So until we get to zero emissions, we’re making the problem worse, and the planet keeps warming. Worse still, the only plausible pathways to keep us below the UN’s upper limit of 2°C of warming requires us to do even better than this: we have to go carbon negative before the end of the century.

Misleading charts from the government of Canada won’t help us get on the right track.

I’m a bit of an Information Visualization junkie. I love good well presented data (I’m a fan of Tufte) and I dislike visualizations that are badly presented and/or misleading. I posted last week about various graphs showing relationships between urban density and transportation fuel consumption, some of which were hideous, some elegant, and some possibly misleading. I bemoaned the lack of access to the raw data, and a lively discussion followed about the believability of the relationship plotted on the graphs.

Yesterday I came across an interesting case, in the leaflet distributed to Torontonians from the city council, showing revenue and expenditure data. From a data visualization point of view, it looks like a series of poor choices were made, and I’m glad someone cared enough to point them out. But when you interpret these choices in the context of a right-wing Mayor who was elected on a tax-cutting, pro-car, anti-transit platform, it would appear these weren’t just mistakes – they were part of deliberate (if subtle) attempt to mislead:

• The leaflet shows a pie chart of revenue sources (in $billions) along side a pie chart of capital expenditure (in $millions), setting up a false impression that transit projects gobble up the majority of the city’s budget. The deception is enhanced by the fact that the largest segments in each pie are the same colour, and of a similar size. A quick glance therefore leaves the impression that nearly all our property taxes go to the Toronto Transit Commision.
• The leaflet fails to distinguish between gross and net expenditure. So a bar chart of budget items shows that the TTC (at $1.5 billion) is by far the most expensive item, followed by employment and social services. But the net cost of the TTC to the city is only about $0.5 billion, because most of its costs come from fares, while employment and social services are largely funded by the province. If you look at net costs (which is what most homeowners expect in answer to the question “how does the city spend our property taxes?”), the Police Service is by far the biggest item.

It’s the steady drip drip drip of this kind of misinformation that allows certain politicians to generate support for cutting budgets for transit and social services. Surely we should be investing in the kinds of community programs that reduce crime, so that we can trim that massive policing budget?

Here’s the chart on (gross) expenditures that they used:

and here’s the chart they should have used: