[SustainableTompkins] NASA & DoE effort - high-res map of US Carbon Footprint]

[Daniel Roth]

FYI, via Wired:

http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/04/scientists-unve.html

---

A team of scientists has completed a carbon dioxide emissions inventory 
of the United States plotted down to 100-square-kilometer chunks.

That means that the NASA- and Department of Energy-funded scientists can 
detail emissions across all 9 million square kilometers that compose the 
United States. For a full explanation, check out the video ( 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJpj8UUMTaI&feature=email ) that Purdue's 
Kevin Gurney put together, which features a number of other excellent 
CO2 visualizations. Andy Revkin, the New York Times' environment-beat 
writer, put a memorable headline on a post about the video, calling it, 
"Breath of a Nation." ( 
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/07/breath-of-a-nation-animated-co2-map/ 
)

The work, known as The Vulcan Project, has already yielded a significant 
discovery: Previous CO2 estimates that used population as a proxy for 
emissions overestimated the Northeast's greenhouse-gas generation, while 
underestimating the coal-heavy Southeast's contribution.

Now, given the opposition of the Southeast's congressional delegations 
to climate-change action ( 
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2007/12/ten-takeaways-f.html#more ), 
I'd like to see the new emissions map matched up with House and Senate 
districts.

Image: Courtesy The Vulcan Project. The units are log(million metric 
tons/year/100 square km.), so sayeth our team of commenters. The data is 
drawn from 2002.

 

-- 
Daniel Roth	
Sustainability Coordinator 
Office of Environmental Compliance and Sustainability 
Cornell University  
www.sustainablecampus.cornell.edu

Youth Action Team Co-Chair
US Partnership for Education for Sustainable Development
www.uspartnership.org

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