I wanted to look at whether a culture of climate change denial might be tied to oil production by country. Survey data only includes a limited number of countries, which is why there is a limit on the number of entries. This is my first graph so I'm a beginner here with lots to learn. Your feedback will help me get better!

Posted by VastStrain

42 comments

  1. Looks like there is basically no relationship between the two. Just two notable outliers. Which makes this less about data and more about political criticism.

    Edit: others have pointed out that showing no correlation is itself a useful visualization. I agree. But this is a garden-variety two-axis plot you could produce automatically using Excel. I don’t see anything beautiful about the data visualization here, helpful or not. It remains difficult for me to believe OP is genuinely interested in data visualizations and just happened to pick a political topic.

  2. Interesting graph.

    Though it would be more relevant to either put oil production on a per-capita basis, or use the oil industry’s percent share of the country’s GDP instead, to reflect the country’s citizens individual interest in oil.

    Maybe even include other fossil fuels too.

    (Also, Y-axis should start at zero.)

  3. If you remove the two outliers, it seems that there is no correlation whatsoever. This reeks of a political statement more than an actual honest analysis of the data.

  5. How was the opinions on climate change evaluated? I’m curious because I’m Indian and I’ve never seen/met/heard from Indians who denied climate change

  7. I dont get why the axis is set to the minimum and not 0 in this case

  10. Are the sizes of the country flag larger for some countries than others representing anything?

  11. Greece feels accurate to me as a Greek. Climate change is not seen as a controversial issue here in the slightest. It’s basically as commonly accepted as the theory of gravity. However, I do feel like the last couple of years there are hints of it starting to pop-up, probably due to everybody and their grandma consuming American content. I grew up without the internet and I didn’t even know climate change denial was a thing before I started to come across American political content.

  12. It honestly amazes me that with the changes we can see in my country every year, people still claim climate change isn’t real. 8% isn’t much, but it is 8% more than it should be.

    Summers get hotter and drier, winters barely freeze any more, and people just shrug and pretend like the goddamn ocean didn’t regularly freeze back in the day.

  13. To me complete climate change denial is the dumbest % of people. I can actually wrap my head around people handwringing over whether humans cause it to be as bad as it is, but to completely deny it’s changing? Idiotic.

  15. I’ve from India and I’ve never seen anyone deny climate change here. I’ve seen opinions suggesting that the responsibility of fixing it lies with the West, but that’s about how controversial it gets. I don’t know who is denying it or how they’re denying it. Every summer gets hotter, winters shorter and monsoons more and more erratic.

  16. Bad graph. Oil production is not adjusted per capita like denial %

  17. Climate cheats Australia sneaking by on technically having low oil production

  18. I’d be willing to bet a lot of money that climate change denial in the US is more than 20%.

  19. I’m curious what Alberta vs rest of Canada would look like for its data point

  20. Split Canada in oil province vs not oil province. That would be funny.

  21. It’s not denial..they just don’t give a s#### about it. Profit vs legacy

  22. OP you may get more of a correlation with coal production or % of energy produced from coal. Indonesia, India, Poland and Australia are all coal countries.

  24. There’s a segment that’s mostly linear. The interesting countries are the ones that fall off that line.

    Like UK. Produces 2 billion barrels but zero climate change denial. So what’s the story there? Understand what’s going on but just don’t care?

  25. China is playing both sides so they always come out on top

  26. Do wonder how much its also tied to coal. India for example gets half it’s energy from coal

  27. How many people from Saudi are taking these YouGov polls? Hard to claim representative data with three responses for a given country.

  28. Interesting that there seems to be little relationship by country. Polls have shown that within countries though, regions more dependent on fossil fuels tend to be more likely to deny climate change (source is citizens guide to climate success).

  29. Nothing like ignoring facts while cashing in on the planet’s future.

  31. The questions asked are horrible and alone make this data set useless.

    “The climate is not changing”… many denies say it is changing and say it is natural.

    “The Climate is changing but human activity is not responsible at all”… most deniers admit humans made some difference.

    Based on how poorly they are worded in English, I wonder how well they translated them over for these other countries.

  32. The survey data limitations seem pretty substantial. Russia, Iran, Iraq, UAE and Kuwait are all in the top 10 oil producers but not on the graph. Many countries that have no oil (like Switzerland, Sweden, Portugal, Ireland and Singapore) also aren’t on the graph. I wonder if the inclusion of more of both ends of the spectrum would make any correlation more obvious, or clarify that there isn’t in fact much of a correlation.

    As others said, it’s also limiting to only consider oil production and not other fossil fuels, and to measure absolute output which is biased by things like population and wealth. I’d expect that if there is a meaningful relationship it would be more obvious when comparing denial % to fossil fuel GDP % or fossil fuel employment % or something like that.

  33. It sure feels like climate change denial is much higher than 20% in the US (35-40%). Were “the climate always changes” or “there’s nothing we can do about it” options, because those opinions are often associated with denial too.

  34. Ethical egoism is a name for it in philosophy. 

    . It benefits me therefore it is good in every ways including physically and philosophically.

  35. Makes a good argument that Climate Change Denial is linked to economic self interest in some countries. Although the line from Greece to Indonesia (?) is all clustered around a rounding error amount of oil.

    I’m glad to see that the highest percentage is still quite low.

  36. Do people have bad memories? Climate is changing all the time.

  37. They are all maxing their oil output…so belief in climate change does nothing to stop it.

  38. Are there really that many climate change-denying Saudis on the internet?

  39. Def should include all fossil fuels. Australia produces little oil but is a leading producer of natural gas and especially coal. Here we have one of the strongest fossil fuel lobbies (to the point they overthrew a government this century) and the single major media outlet actively denies climate change.

    The graph you have only really proves that the US and Saudi Arabia both are disproportionately oil producing and climate denying which is a small enough sample to be considered a coincidence, especially with all the non oil producing, yet climate denying countries

  40. You need to include coal if you want to explain Poland…

  41. Cool graph, but on the x-axis it would make more sense to have barrels per day *per* *person*. Another even better option would be the share of oil in the GDP.

    The way it is now, a small country that’s overwhelmingly dependent on oil revenue would be towards the LHS on the left axis.

    What matters for explaining how oil production produces a biais in opinions on climate change is more how dependent on oil production, and that is more related to per person measure of production, or the share of the income from oil.

  42. Oil isn’t the only fossil fuel. Only focussing on that is going to produce a very misleading relationship. For example, Indonesia may not produce a lot of oil, but it’s *by far* the largest producer of coal.

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