China leads the world in renewable energy investment

If I had a nickel for every time I had heard someone say renewable energy, green tech or clean power within the past year, I would be a billionaire. These phrases are thrown around like their mere utterance will translate into a clean and energy independent future. However, green tech requires a great deal of green and data from the Pew Environmental Group indicates that China is leading the world by several measures of investment. Take a look at our interactive visualization of the data below. You can also find this viz on The Guardian.

Although the Chinese lead in investment by a significant margin, the real story here is investment as a percentage of GDP. As a gauge of relative importance, it is clear that the Chinese place a significant premium on renewable energy investment compared with other countries.

Annotations: readers should know the most important part of a visualization within five seconds. Annotations help facilitate this and also encourage questions about other parts of the data.

Thanks to the The Guardian for sharing the data and displaying our visualization.