Who’s Driving Climate Change? New Data Catalogs 72,000 Polluters and Counting
A nonprofit backed by Al Gore and
other big environmental donors says it can track emissions down to individual
power plants, oil fields and cargo ships.
Published Nov.
9, 2022Updated Nov. 15, 2022
Upstream from Shanghai along the
Yangtze River, a sprawling factory complex in eastern China is churning out
tens of millions of tons of steel a year — and immense quantities of
planet-warming gases.
The plant’s owner has not disclosed
how much the site emits. Now, though, researchers say that by peering down from
space, they have found that the factory’s emissions are likely higher than
those of any other steel plant on Earth.
Their estimates are part a new
global compendium of emissions released on Wednesday by Climate
TRACE, a nonprofit coalition of environmental groups, technology
companies and academic scientists. By using software to scour data from
satellites and other sources, Climate TRACE says it can project emissions not
just for whole countries and industries, but for individual polluting
facilities. It catalogs steel and cement factories, power plants, oil and gas
fields, cargo ships, cattle feedlots — 72,612 emitters and counting, a
hyperlocal atlas of the human activities that are altering the planet’s
chemistry.
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