Maps of land required to get to net-zero emissions

Princeton University’s Net-Zero America project analyzes and models the infrastructure required to get to net-zero carbon emissions nationally. Dave Merrill for Bloomberg highlighted the group’s estimates for land usage to build things like wind and solar farms, which, as you might imagine, will require millions of acres.

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Who owns the most land in the U.S.

Bloomberg News mapped the land owned by the largest owners:

The 100 largest owners of private property in the U.S., newcomers and old-timers together, have 40 million acres, or approximately 2% of the country’s land mass, according to data from the Land Report and reporting by Bloomberg News. Ten years ago, the top 100 had fewer than 30 million acres.

It may not seem like much—all told, just about the size of Florida. But land is an often-overlooked repository of wealth, one of those quiet assets, such as artworks or trusts, that make up so much of the country’s unexamined riches as inequality widens.

Just one state’s worth of land? I mean, I guess that’s a lot.

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How America uses its land

Dave Merrill and Lauren Leatherby for Bloomberg visualized land use for the conterminous United States using a pixel-like grid map:

The 48 contiguous states alone are a 1.9 billion-acre jigsaw puzzle of cities, farms, forests and pastures that Americans use to feed themselves, power their economy and extract value for business and pleasure.

Using surveys, satellite images and categorizations from various government agencies, the U.S. Department of Agriculture divides the U.S. into six major types of land. The data can’t be pinpointed to a city block—each square on the map represents 250,000 acres of land. But piecing the data together state-by-state can give a general sense of how U.S. land is used.

The above map is the full aggregate, but be sure to click through to see the comparisons across categories. Using a scrollytelling format, the graphics are a hybrid of grid maps and square pie charts. States serve as a point of reference. They’re the banana for scale. I like it.

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Mapped history of how Native American land was taken

Invasion of America

In Invasion of America, an animated map shows the loss of land.

Between 1776 and 1887, the United States seized over 1.5 billion acres from America's indigenous people by treaty and executive order. The Invasion of America shows how by mapping every treaty and executive order during that period. It also contains present-day federal Indian reservations.

See how it happened in the video below.

There is also an interactive version that provides links to related treaties and events.

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