How lovely would New York City look if its streets were full of giant blue bubbles? Kinda like the Thanksgiving Day Parade, maybe? But what if those bubbles represented the city's carbon dioxide emissions? Yuck.
Check out this compelling video from UK-based CarbonVisuals, which animates in real time the total emissions and rate of emissions for the Big Apple in 2010 (the latest year for which data is available).
Each sphere, 33 feet across, represents a metric ton of carbon dioxide. According to CarbonVisuals, "If this is how New York's emissions actually emerged we would see one of these spheres emerge every 0.58 seconds." (To its credit, New York City's carbon emissions were 12 percent less in 2010 than in 2005, and it is on track to reduce emissions by 30 percent by 2017.)
Image by CarbonVisuals
Reed McManus is a senior editor at Sierra. He has worked on the magazine since Ronald Reagan’s second term. For inspiration, he turns to cartoonist R. Crumb’s Mr. Natural, who famously noted: “Twas ever thus.”
