Google Funded (and Al Gore Co-Founded) the World's First Independent CO2 Emissions Database

[Uncle Joe]

It’s crunch time on climate change. The IPCC’s latest report told the world just how bad it is, and…it’s bad. Companies, NGOs, and governments are scrambling for fixes, both short-term and long-term, from banning sale of combustion-engine vehicles to pouring money into hydrogen to building direct air capture plants. And one initiative, launched last week, is taking an “if you can name it, you can tame it” approach by creating an independent database that measures and tracks emissions all over the world.

Climate TRACE, which stands for Tracking Real-time Atmospheric Carbon Emissions, is a collaboration between nonprofits, tech companies, and universities, including CarbonPlan, Earthrise Alliance, Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, former US Vice President Al Gore, and others. The organization started thanks to a grant from Google, which funded an effort to measure power plant emissions using satellites. A team of fellows from Google helped build algorithms to monitor the power plants (the Google.org Fellowship was created in 2019 to let Google employees do pro bono technical work for grant recipients).

Climate TRACE uses data from satellites and other remote sensing technologies to “see” emissions. Artificially intelligent algorithms combine this data with verifiable emissions measurements to produce estimates of the total emissions coming from various sources.

These sources are divided into ten sectors—like power, manufacturing, transportation, and agriculture—each with multiple subsectors (i.e., two subsectors of agriculture are rice cultivation and manure management). The total carbon emitted January 2015 to December 2020, by the project’s estimation, was 303.96 billion tons. The biggest offender? Electricity generation. It’s no wonder, then, that states, companies, and countries are rushing to make (occasionally unrealistic) carbon-neutral pledges, and that the renewable energy industry is booming.

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https://singularityhub.com/2021/09/24/google-funded-and-al-gore-co-founded-the-worlds-first-independent-co2-emissions-database/