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Podcast

Starting a Giant Online Data Platform Is the Easy Part

Rob talks with climate and data expert Hannah Ritchie about her new platform, U.S. Energy Data.

Power lines.
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America has some of the world’s best data about its own internal energy, industrial economy, and carbon emissions. That’s thanks to a federal agency called the U.S. Energy Information Administration, which painstakingly collects and updates the data every week.

But EIA data can be hard to access — and even harder to share and understand. A new project aims to change that. U.S. Energy Data takes federal energy data and repackages it, helping amateurs and experts understand the power grid, liquid fuels, and more. It is now the easiest way to make and share charts with federal energy data.

On this episode of Shift Key, Rob is joined by Hannah Ritchie, a data scientist and writer who advised and prototyped US Energy Data. She is also the author of Not the End of the World and Clearing the Air, as well as a senior researcher at the University of Oxford and the deputy editor at Our World in Data. Rob and Hannah discuss how the platform came together, what makes it such a valuable resource, and what we can learn from it about the state of the energy transition.

Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap News.

Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Here is an excerpt from their conversation:

Robinson Meyer: One thing that I so appreciate about your work, incluidng two books about climate change and Our World in Data, is that it is grounded, as it says in the title, in data. And that means that unlike those of us who are maybe in the news cycle every day and following the vagaries of policy moving one way and then moving the other way, having a framework through which to understand the world, I think a data-driven framework especially, means that you can update more slowly. And at least when you update your worldview, it’s grounded in a change which is surprising you or important, or that’s standing out, you know, in the real world, and not just in the kind of discursive or political world that we tend to cover.

At the risk of asking a very large question, how are you feeling about global decarbonization at the moment? As someone who works in the data, who looks at the data, what do you think hasn’t been noticed at the moment? I have a candidate here, but I’m curious what you think as well.

Hannah Ritchie: I think that in terms of global decarbonization, I’m still pretty optimistic. And I think one of the key distinctions there, I think when it comes to these discussions, we do naturally focus on the U.S.. And I think decarbonization in the U.S. has gone slowly, and too slowly, and has faced setbacks. And I think there is the temptation to extrapolate that view and say, well, the world is not doing well on decarbonization. And I don’t think that’s correct. I think, to not be too much of a centrist on this, we’re not going as fast as I would like, or what we frame as what we should need to be. But I do actually think that things are moving pretty quickly and accelerating in other parts of the world.

And I think the challenge there is, I think people are not saying that, yes, China is moving very quickly on this. But a key point there is, if you look at other countries, low- and middle-income countries across Latin America or Sub-Saharan Africa or Asia, many of those countries are also moving fast. And I think that’s underappreciated. And I think they’re moving fast because the energy transition and electrification and decarbonization just increasingly makes economic sense to do so.

So I guess the trade-off between increasing energy services for people — for which, in many low- and middle-income countries, that’s just a core part of development. And a key priority is no longer incompatible with also doing that in a relatively low-carbon way, and I think that’s a really key, underappreciated point, and you start to see that in these annual updates of what happened in the last year, and I think you miss it if you’re only looking at, you know, the headline from yesterday and the headline from today.

You can find a full transcript of the episode here.

Mentioned:

U.S. Energy Data

Previously on Shift Key: Daniel Palken of Arnold Ventures joined us to discuss permitting reform

This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …

RE+ 26 is the largest clean energy event in North America, happening November 16th through 19th at the Las Vegas Convention Center. Register at re-plus.com and use code SHIFTKEY20 to save 20% off a Full Conference pass.

Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.

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