HUSCII C02| What Is Our Carbon Footprint?
What Is Our Carbon Footprint?
Elevating Emissions
Summary
This project aims to educate and inform about the rising problem of carbon emissions. To provide our findings and the data provided, we have a created a web application with informative graphics, as well as created a list of polluters that contribute the most to each economic sector of carbon emissions. As part of the "Inform" challenge, we have researched possible large-scale solutions, as well as local solutions with linked resources that the average US citizen can accomplish regardless of the state they live in.
How We Addressed This Challenge
We have developed a web application with the intention to inform and educate about the carbon emissions in the US. The carbon emissions are broken down into different economic sectors, and displays how each sector contributes to carbon pollution. Our web application provides visual aids and list potential polluters that fits within that economic sector. We have also provided suggestions to users that describe what they can do at a large scale (if they have that power) and smaller scale that is more realistic for a single person to do. Our goal is ultimately to demonstrate how much pollution the US causes, the sources of that pollution, and what we can do to reverse the damage.
How We Developed This Project
As we are all young students, global warming due to carbon emissions has always been a prominent issue for the majority, if not all, of our lives so far. We have often heard that permanent damage will be inflicted unless we act now to reduce carbon emissions. Because of this, if the problem is not fixed soon, we will be living in a damaged world for the majority of our lives.
Our main goal was to display the impact of the economic sectors and how people can help reduce the impact. We knew a web application is the simplest way to do something like this, so we decided to create a website using primarily frameworks and libraries to create a simple but great looking web application.
One problem we ran into was the data itself. We wanted data on a more local scale, but were unable to find anything usable that was specific to Washington, or the individual states in general. Most data was world wide or the whole country, so we had to scrap the idea of informing people based on the state or city they lived in. Because we had data for the whole US, we then opted to just create something more general that could apply to everyone regardless of where they live. Not everyone's needs are the same, but they will at least find one solution that we have provided that is possible for them to achieve.
How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project
We used the data to create informational graphs displayed the amount of carbon emissions per year. As stated above, because we did not have any data local to individual states of cities, the data changed what our web application was going to be. It was not possible to give suggestions or information relating to a single area, so we went with something more generalized that would apply to people in any state in the US.
Project Demo
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1KY9fWsqvCEZUWmBmDX3AaC05vr776jP1tWIrKL3vq1g/edit?usp=sharing