Al Gore’s New Tool Can Zoom in on Emissions in Your Town

If you’ve ever puzzled how a lot methane the landfill in your neighborhood emits, there’s now a method to probably discover out. A promising new software can zoom in on spots all over the world in varied industries to measure simply how a lot greenhouse gases these places and services are emitting.

The mapping tool, launched final week at COP27 by the group Climate TRACE, makes use of tons of of satellites, 1000’s of mounted sensors, and varied synthetic intelligence fashions to measure the worldwide emissions of various greenhouse gases from main sectors, together with oil and fuel manufacturing, waste disposal and administration, agriculture, forestry and land use, transportation and energy.

The software is exceptional in its specificity: It can hint emissions from particular person websites like landfills, energy vegetation, and cattle farms, giving each an total image of world emissions from sure industries in addition to extremely detailed info on particular places. Using the map, you possibly can zoom in on emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide—in addition to all of these emissions collectively—by totally different sectors, and see the place a few of our greatest greenhouse fuel issues are coming from.

The stage of granular element you possibly can entry utilizing this software is de facto one thing. Want to seek out the landfill with probably the most CO2 emissions within the U.S.? That’d be a facility in Michigan. How in regards to the mining operation with probably the most CO2 emissions on this planet? It’s an iron mine in Australia. The greatest single supply of agricultural methane emissions from cattle worldwide? A beef farm in Texas. Even emissions from transferring entities like cargo ships will be tracked. If the interactive map isn’t your jam, all the information and related methodology can be found for obtain, so you possibly can mess around with Excel information of cement emissions to your coronary heart’s content material.

“Of course, the world has long known what the overall amount of greenhouse gas pollution in the atmosphere is,” Al Gore, one of many founding members of the coalition, told Protocol. “What’s different about this [database] is the accurate apportioning of who’s responsible for what and the granularity that allows us a focus on specific emissions sources.” Gore instructed Protocol he had “no doubt” that the info “will be put to a lot of use in negotiations for sure.”

The entire dataset put together, Climate TRACE says, reveals some pretty staggering findings. The top 500 sites with the largest emissions in the world, which include individual power plants, oil and gas production fields, and other high-emitter locations, are a tiny fraction of the data but represent 14% of the world’s emissions in 2021, more than all the emissions of the U.S. About half of the biggest 50 emitters, the data show, are oil and gas production fields.

There’s a whole lot of utility to having a wealth of third-party data like this available on a public forum. A lot of industries self-report their emissions, which can lead to some big gaps between what companies claim is going on and the reality. A report released by the International Energy Agency last year found that the fossil fuel industry is especially bad at this, undercounting its methane emissions by as much as 70%. Getting a more accurate third-party picture of where emissions are actually coming from is the first step in increased regulations to bring those emissions down.

But as Climate TRACE notes, pinpointing emissions from a specific location is just the start of figuring out where to assign blame.

“Consider something as ‘simple’ as an individual power plant and its owner,” the group stated in a release posted to its web site. “Should the emissions be assigned to the immediate owner? To a parent company if it’s wholly owned? To equity investors? To the offtaker of the power, whether a utility or another entity? These are tough decisions, but we can’t even consider making such decisions if we can’t map emissions down to specific sources.”