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Gas imports or solar panels?
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this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2026
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Climate
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Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.
As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades:
How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world:
Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:
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If you're just gleaning it in a hurry, you miss the relatively fine print from "LNG" to "55%". Selecting font sizes to emphasize the most important information, and being understandable by an uninformed audience base (think social media), is absolutely fundamental to infographics.
Not necessarily. Quite a lot of solar installation companies like Tesla's popular roof-like tiles push self-sufficiency for some reason. My guess is to sell batteries. Anyways, even without that, your petrol bill's still a useful visualization for how much more economic solar is
https://xkcd.com/2501/
Buddy, I obviously agree for MMBtu, which is why I cited it among other unordered points and explicitly called out that people are liable not to know it. If you do know it, though, it immediately gives it away, which is why I included it to cover bases.
But a crude oil tanker is a common thing plenty of people have seen, and putting "power plant" in there is straight-up a self-own: you are profoundly ignorant about energy infrastructure if you think we're taking gasoline into power plants to convert into electricity. That doesn't make someone bad or stupid; it just means they have zero standing to complain about how an energy infographic misled them by calling methane "gas". They lack the bare minimum foundation to even understand what it's trying to say.
It should also be obvious that when I said "not pure solar", I meant "generally", because at that point the reader would need to be willfully obtuse to construe the graphic to be about electric cars. I almost hedged with "generally", but I (wrongly, naïvely) assumed it wouldn't be subjected to superfluous pedantry.
Edit: I actually forgot another obvious point because there are just so many things that would tell reasonable people this isn't about gasoline: why would a tanker be used as an icon to represent gasoline anyway? A jerrycan, an oil barrel, or a gas pump would clearly be much better, because oil tankers don't represent the final product anyway, aren't a common icon for gasoline (if basically at all), and don't have a distinctive side profile. There are a million reasons it's not the graphic's fault if you look at it and assume it's about gasoline.
Not everyone lives in oceanside windows. Out of those who have looked at one they don't necessarily know that's an oil tanker; if it's through a beach, it's too distant (and likely heatwaved) to perceive something different with the deck at first sight, and at closer ranges I used to think they were just empty cargo ships "and of course the decks are so high up because the ship is floating higher up because it's lighter". Working with content who've never been on a ship they think there's nothing beneath the deck except what makes it float.
There's also the assumption that one wouldn't think "it's probably a different kind of oil tanker I haven't seen since it 'obviously' says gasoline". "What the fuck is an MMBtu?" Something related to gasoline, of course. Hindsight is not first sight.
Most US people are profoundly ignorant about energy infrastructure other than coal plants exist and the US relies on fossil fuels and you put petrol in your car. Just because you remember a great education doesn't mean others remember their bad education. Ask someone outside of the energy and environmental subject what they learned in Earth Science (sorry if I got the subject name wrong) other than the different types of rocks, tectonics, and what the weather really is.
An infographic's purpose is to communicate to the uninitiated, not preach to the choir. This is just a single word that artificially limits its target audience and frankly I don't see why we're arguing so pointedly about it.
I didn't think it was about cars either, but I still think it's plausible enough that one in a hundred could mistake it, and that is my point.
P.S.: Kudos for the diaeresis.