Question: Who is responsible for what CO2 emissions?

1.1.   Data selection

We’ll use EPA’s FLIGHT database, a list of largeindustrial/commercial facilities across the U.S. and their GHG emissions.Later, we’ll join this dataset with EPA TRI database, a list of facilities andtheir toxic releases, and the EIA power-plant data to get at electricgeneration numbers.

Flight data looks like this:

Looking at just the column headers, we get:

Columns	Data Type	Description
Facility Id	ID (number)	ID specific to the EPA FLIGHT database
FRS Id	ID (number)	Standard EPA ID, used in multiple databases
Facility Name	ID (string)
City	geographic ID (discreet)
State	geographic ID (discreet)
Zip Code	geographic ID (discreet)
Address	geographic ID (discreet)
County	geographic ID (discreet)
Latitude	geographic ID (continuous)
Longitude	geographic ID (continuous)
Industry Type (sectors)	Classifier	Facilities are classified as one of 30+ industry types, based primarily on product output.
reported CO2e emissions (metric tons)	measurement	Total CO2 equivalent emissions reported by each facilities. This is the sum of multiple indicators, including the ones below.
CO2 emissions (non-biogenic)	measurement	Total direct CO2 emissions per facility, not from biological sources.
Methane (CH4) emissions	measurement	Total methane emissions per facility, in units of CO2e
Nitrous Oxide (N2O) emissions	measurement	Total N2O emissions per facility, in units of CO2e
Biogenic CO2 emissions (metric tons)	measurement	Total CO2 emissions from biological sources (cows, agriculture, etc.)

 

Now, there’s way too many rows here to work with it justusing Excel. Let’s load the data into Tableau.

What isTableau

Open Tableau and connect to a text file. Navigate to the GHGRP data.

The “Show me” lists all the basic graph types that Tableaucan generate. Most are greyed out, because we don’t have enough Dimensions /Measures on the Columns / Rows shelf to generate anything interesting. It’salways worthwhile to click “show me” if you’re not sure how to graph stuff.

Let’s click on Histogram, the only thing not greyed outunder “Show me”, this bell curve representing a histogram.

There’s a ton of small facilities and few large facilities,seems to follow a power law. So we’ve answered our initial question. Yay!

Note that Tableau created a new dimension “reported CO2eemissions (bin)”. This allowed Tableau to count the CO2e emissions reportswithin each bin size.

1.4.  Createa group from existing dimension (select groups of states to form regions)

Question: Might the distribution be different for differentregions in the U.S.?

Start a new worksheet through the menu bar at the top:worksheet -> new worksheet

Our data’s largest geographic Dimension is State, we do nothave a region Dimension. So, we need to create one. The easiest way to do thisis to drag State onto the middle of the graph area, “Drop field here”

This should cause a map to pop up, with a mark (circle) inthe middle of each state. We can click and drag on the map to select groups ofstates.

Right click on the selected group of states and click the“group” option.

This creates a legend on the right side of the screen,displaying two groups: the one we just made and all other states. Let’s changethe label of the new group to improve readability. Right-click on the group inthe legend, then click “Edit Alias”

Now, group the rest of the states into their respectiveregions. Northwest, Southwest, Midwest, Northeast, Southeast. Ignore Alaska,Hawaii, and other US territories.

Now we have a good Region dimension to use on other graphs.And, we can answer our question: what’re the regional distributions of GHGemissions? Go back to our histogram, and add the new dimension to the Columnsshelf.

1.5.  Modifyfirst histogram worksheet to generate histogram for each region. 

Add the new regions dimension to the Columns shelf