39C3 - Greenhouse Gas Emission Data: Public, difficult to access, and not always correct

Data about greenhouse gas emissions, both from countries and individual factories, is often publicly available. However, the data sources are often not as accessible and reliable as they should be. EU emission databases contain obvious flaws, and nobody wants to be responsible. Which factory in my city is the largest emitter of CO2? Which industrial sector is responsible for the largest share of a country's contribution to climate change? It should not be difficult to answer these questions. Public databases and reporting required by international agreements usually allow us to access this data. However, trying to access and work with these datasets — or, shall we say, Excel tables — can be frustrating. UN web pages that prevent easy downloads with a "security firewall", barely usable frontends, and other issues make it needlessly difficult to gain transparency about the sources of climate pollution. While working with official EU datasets, the speaker observed data points that could not possibly be true. Factories suddenly dropped their emissions by orders of magnitude without any explanation, different official sources report diverging numbers for the same emission source, and responsible European and National authorities appear not to care that much. The talk will show how to work with relevant greenhouse gas emission data sources and how we can access them more easily by converting them to standard SQL tables. Furthermore, we will dig into some of the strange issues one may find while investigating emission datasets. # Background / Links * Why is it needlessly difficult to access UNFCCC Emission Data? * UNFCCC Emission Data Downloads: * Code (Docker, MariaDB/MySQL, phpMyAdmin) to easily access EU emisison data: Hanno Böck https://events.ccc.de/congress/2025/hub/event/detail/greenhouse-gas-emission-data-public-difficult-to-access-and-not-always-correct #39c3 #Science Licensed to the public under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0