Due to pollution, climate change, and the need to store and produce renewable energy sustainably and effectively, there is an acute need for CO 2 utilization methods such as electrochemical CO 2 reduction (CO 2 R). As a result of this, scientific and industrial interest in CO 2 R has increased greatly over the last few decades. The CO 2 reduction reaction (CO 2 RR) is complex, in large part due to the many different products and reaction pathways. To achieve performance good enough for industrial applications, however, understanding and tuning the CO 2 RR to give specific products with high enough selectivity and activity is essential. One of the main challenges here is finding out why different catalysts give different products. Previous work by Hori et al. grouped the transition metals according to whether they produce mainly H 2 (Ti, Fe, Ni, Pd, Pt, Ga), CO (Ag, Au, Zn), HCOOH (Cd, In, Sn, Hg, Tl, Pb), or hydrocarbons and alcohols, here denoted as beyond *CO (Cu). Fig. shows the grouping of the metal catalysts according to their major product, with the assigned color and the Faradaic efficiency for the major product shown for each metal. The colors given for the four groups in Fig. are utilized throughout the work to show the product classification. We previously found descriptors explaining the selectivity of Cu and H 2 -producing metal catalysts in the binding energies of ∆E *H and ∆E *CO . However, neither the observed relation of ∆E *H , nor the analysis of anyone else to our knowledge, fully provides an empirically based explanation of why different metals give different products.