climate-money

A data visualization exploring the gap between public opinion on climate change and the legislative action of Representatives, and the role of money. Check it out at https://inewell.github.io/climate-money/.

I did this in my CSC630: Data Visualization class at Phillips Academy for my open project. I selected the topic, found all the data, and came to all the conclusions about it myself.

Climate change is a topic I care about a lot; I saw this project as a way to illuminate some questions I had as well as to get other people to worry about it as much as I do. We live in a representative democracy, and it is a responsibility of citizens to hold their representatives responsible for their actions. As such, it is vitally important to be aware of areas, like on environmental policy, wherein representatives are voting more in-line with wealthy industry donors than with their own voters. Especially on climate policy; climate change is a grave, long-term threat which we are already doing far too little to address, even taking steps in the wrong direction, like the US pulling from the Paris Accord. How we treat the environment has serious consequences for people. And, contrary to a shockingly large portion of Americans' misinformed beliefs, it is a real threat, and humans are causing it. Hopefully data visualizations like this can make a difference by compelling people to become concerned about climate change, vote for environmenally-reasonable representatives, and push for policy that actually has the people and the planet in mind. In a world where facts matter less and less, who knows how much good projects like this can do. But at least it's worth a try.

Table of Contents

• open-project.html: the HTML page that generates the visualization.
• DataCleanup.ipynb: the Jupyter notebook that cleans the data.
• Data:
  • YPCCC_cd113_n28_2015Jan5.csv: Yale's climate opinion data
  • cb_2015_us_cd114_20m.json: 114th Congressional district map path data
  • cb_2016_us_state_20m.json: State map path data
  • climate_scorecard.csv: The voting scores of the US Representatives, according to the League of Conservation Voters.
  • lobbying_2016.csv: The money data; contains numbers from the Oil & Gas, Coal, and Natural Gas Transmission industries.

Authors

• Isaac Newell