More Efficient Transportation Needed

See the light grey in the top right corner, “Rejected Energy”? That consists of things like the heat coming off car brakes when you decelerate, i.e. the part of the energy you consumed during your acceleration that you will end up never using. Unlike the acceleration which has value, no matter how subjective, the heat is pure waste. Almost no one should object if you reduce it. This is the energy consumption where reduction is a technical problem not a political one. And it’s more than half!

It comes mainly from electricity and transportation. Now if you go one step further back and consider the input sources, electricity is 60% hydrocarbons. Transportation uses energy that is more than 90% hydrocarbons. Therefore, the best target to reduce CO2 emissions without getting stuck in political problems (and I don’t mean “political” pejoratively, just simply the fact that you will have subjective differing interests) is transportation. Regenerative braking FTW!

Sadly, despite all those Priuses and Teslas (or should I say Prii and Teslae?), if you compare the above picture with the same one from 2009, transportation is not getting more energy efficient.

Tragedy of the commons etc.

But at least we have, in these charts, a very efficient form of data visualization!