I’m sorry but what the hell is this figure trying to say?

Its like an inverted stacked area plot, but I’m yet to figure out how I should be interpreting it.

A ‘beautiful’ presentation should be immediately obvious in terms of how to interpret it.

From what I can tell, this is saying that…

I can’t tell what the hell this is saying…

This should not be a stacked area plot. this should be a line plot, and the data surely should not be stacked. I think its a total misrepresentation of whats going on here. These lines are not cumulative, unless you are considering some kind of optimization curve, in which case ‘cost’ should be flipped to ‘price’. But then why is that axis in giga tonnes when it states that it is in cost per metric tonne, then how is it tonnes on the Y axis? Should be dollars?

And even then it doesn’t make sense because the scale of the y axis is backwards. if it was ‘price’, it could be reconfigured to make sense.

Looks like something one of my students would turn in when they are just guessing on how to make a plot in excel without engaging with the material (although its clearly made in R). Remake and resubmit for half credit.

(I’ve read the methods. This figure should be remade by swapping x and y. Y should be labeled cost per mega gram to deploy (and should be in megagrams, not gt), x should be carbon offset capacity. If this was done, it would be easily interpreted as the points and price points (in units of $/ megagram of carbon) at which a given technology becomes cost effective.)

I know up and to the right is boring, but its intuitive and there is no need to have drawn this curve in this way.