The Crunch: big cars and road deaths, the people’s verdict on CEO salaries and tracking baby pandas

Hello and welcome to another edition of The Crunch!

In this week’s newsletter we have charts on how bigger cars result in a higher chance of road deaths , what people think CEOs should really earn , how Japan built a global natural gas empire , maps, graphics and illustrations showing how North Korea has unleashed wave after wave of balloons carrying rubbish and manure into South Korea – and read to the end for cute panda twins!

But first … a new way to look at air pollution

A team of scientists have created a new way to visualise the contrasts in air pollution breathed around the globe. The results show huge inequalities in air quality, with the situation worsening in many countries.

Inspired by Ed Hawkins’ climate stripes , the new air quality stripes show air pollution from 1850 to today, and also tells a positive story in some countries: that focused government action can lead to cleaner air. Read more here .

Four charts from the fortnight

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1. Larger cars are more dangerous for other people

The Economist has produced this excellent analysis of crash data from the United States ($). The data shows that increasing the weight of a car only increases the safety to the driver up to a certain point, but the risk of death to other people increases dramatically:

The increasing bloat in car size is an ongoing issue for other countries as well. You can read some of our coverage of the issue in Australia here and here .

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2. Guardian readers think CEOs earn too much

It is company financial reporting season in Australia, and so we have updated and re-run one of our popular quizzes – an interactive asking you to guess how much each profession earns and how much you think they should earn.

Not surprisingly, everyone thought CEOs and politicians should earn less and teachers should earn more. You can check it out here .

We also created an interactive to visualise how much more CEOs earn than average Australians a second.

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3. North Korea keeps sending balloons carrying garbage into South Korea

Reuters has previously covered South Korean activists sending balloons into North Korea . Now they’ve produced another illustrated feature about the huge volume of balloons sent the other way .

According to Reuters, North Korea has sent aloft thousands of balloons with bags of rubbish attached since May, disrupting flights and causing chaos.

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4. How Japan built an LNG empire

This story was quite surprising to me as I had only read about Japan importing gas in the context of Australian exports, and the impression I had was most gas was used for domestic purposes. Bloomberg has written about how Japan’s energy transition has resulted in it using about two-thirds of the LNG it buys and reselling the remaining third abroad .

As a consequence, Japanese firms are also profiting from the country’s gas exports by providing gas-related services such as supplying turbines for power plants.

Spotlight on … life, death, and aging

• Why do Australians live so long? ($)

• Cancer has replaced cardiovascular diseases as the leading cause of death in several wealthy countries

• Feeling Suddenly Older? Scientists See Aging ‘Waves’ at 44 and 60 ($)

Off the Charts

Baby pandas! The South China Morning Post (SCMP) has created this page to track the growth of Hong Kong’s panda twins nicknamed Elder Sister and Little Brother. It also asks such important questions as “Does Elder Sister look like Albert Einstein?”

The SCMP promises a panda picture a day, which is more value than many websites are offering in 2024 in my humble opinion.

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