Data & Eggs
Volume 269
In this week’s edition: electric vehicles' significant production costs, melting ice's global impact, and Americans' concerning retirement savings.
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The underbelly of electric vehicles
Electric vehicles may be essential to reducing our carbon footprint, but the human and environmental cost of producing them is significant. Their batteries require minerals like cobalt, nickel, lithium, and manganese, finite resources that are expensive to mine and ship. And these minerals are concentrated in only a handful of places around the globe, which poses huge economic opportunities for certain countries.
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American Road Deaths Show an Alarming Racial Gap
Pedestrian deaths in the United States have grown at an alarming rate over the last decade, even as motorist deaths are simultaneously trending down. But these deaths are not evenly distributed across communities; studies show that Black and Hispanic pedestrians are significantly more likely to be killed than White ones, even after controlling for distance traveled. The design of our cities has a huge hand in creating these disparities.
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The world’s melting ice has surprising impacts. Can you guess them?
The planet’s massive ice sheets are melting as temperatures rise, which scientists have shown can have far-reaching effects. Intense wildfires, catastrophic flooding, and endangered whales are all connected to melting ice. See if you can connect the dots between these seemingly distant events in NPR’s interactive quiz.
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Half of American households have no retirement savings
According to the Survey of Consumer Finance (SCF), only about half of American households reported having any retirement savings in 2019. And that number didn’t increase all that much among older people; Americans between the ages of 51-55 were most likely to have retirement savings, but 40% still did not. These are alarming statistics in an era where fewer and fewer companies are offering defined benefit plans.
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Making a Data Visualization With No Coding Skills Using ChatGPT
ChatGPT is making waves in many industries, including data viz. This article from Soonk Paik in DVS’s Nightingale journal examines how you can use the latest AI tools to produce an interactive map with much less time and effort than ever before. Experiments like this open an interesting new frontier for the field.