9 charts on climate change that will surprise you

What industries emit most CO2? Which country is most advanced in EV? Best-selling EV models?

‘Go after the big problems’ - road transportation (passenger cars mostly) is by far the biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions. Quite often, you read the likes of Tesla going after this vertical. But what about the other several big verticals, such as buildings (residential and commercial), iron & steel, livestock & manure, or even crop burning?! There need big technological advancements in these verticals to reduce emissions structurally.

Almost 300 years of CO2 emissions history. The world as a whole emitted 20x more CO2 than 100 years ago. It’s a proxy to industrial activities and GDP growth, or broadly speaking humanity advancements. Over that period, US and Europe contributed a large sum of emissions between 1850 and 1980, at which point emissions peaked in both regions. It was replaced by Asia most of which is China as the region began to be the manufacturing hub of the world.

Another way to visualize the data, the reduction in US and Europe was offset by the increase in Asia especially China. If you’re a globalist, it’s a zero-sum game really. If you’re a regional protectionist, you’ve got someone to blame. A much better yet unavailable way to see the emission contribution is by destination country. So if China emitted CO2 because it manufactured goods that end up being consumed by USA, then the emission will be under USA, or vice versa.

It’s encouraging to see as a whole the world is reducing its CO2 emission per person. This is coming mostly from USA and Europe. USA is still the highest per capita country, but China is sprinting fast and now the world’s 2nd largest country for CO2 emission per person.

Since road transportation is the largest emission source, not a surprise many companies are tackling this problem, like Tesla, VW, GM, BYD and Nio, to name a few. China is by far driving the most EVs on the road, almost 3x of that in the US. Apparently China knows its own problem here so it’s leading the world in EV adoption.

When technology advances, so do the products. EV batteries are a key bottleneck to mass EV adoption, especially pure EV, not hybrid that uses both batteries and petro. That bottleneck is fast going away so we see a much sharper increase in pure EV cars.

So what models are best-selling in EV? Tesla is leading the pack with 2 models in top 3. Chinese brand Wuling is coming in 2nd. Of the traditional car-makers, VW ID.4 is coming in 4th.

Let’s compare Tesla and VW using our rankings so see which is more interesting stock at the moment. VW is unsurprisingly much cheaper than Tesla, as seen by Value score. The market is still putting discount to VW’s valuation because of its legacy petro car business. Tesla is leading by a big margin on Quality and Momentum. You can see more detailed analysis in our app.

The biggest surprise here is Tesla is surprisingly very profitable (18% net margin vs. ~ 4-8% in traditional car companies) which is rarely seen in the car business. Reasons? First mover, much better products, technology IP, scales - are a few reasons that came to mind.

Enjoy a less hot weekend!

Truman 🙌

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