Over the last year, journalists at ProPublica have dug deeply into data on Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS) – a technology that must work at a massive scale for the world to avoid catastrophic climate change. Their investigation has uncovered a sobering reality — CCS is all but impossible to deploy at the scale the world would need.
The findings of this investigation are shocking — 6 billion tons of carbon must be buried each year by 2050; to achieve that, 60,000 miles of new pipeline would be needed in the U.S. alone; the world would need to open a new geological waste site every 4 days for 25 years.
All of these stats are interesting if you know about climate data, but the average reader may not understand them or have a way to conceptualize them.
To make this investigation more accessible, the team decided to tackle the storytelling of these findings in a visual way, enlisting an animator and designers to create scenes that capture staggering scale and explain complicated processes.
This talk will cover how the visual elements of the project were conceptualized and how we tackled challenges with visualizing the data in a way that would be accessible to the lay reader without sacrificing nuance and rigorous accuracy.