Last year, the Trump administration announced plans to end the Environmental Protection Agency's role in tracking U.S. carbon emissions.
For more than 15 years, the EPA’s program has tracked the greenhouse gases produced by more than 8,000 facilities across the country each year.
But the Trump administration says the effort is burdensome to American businesses.
“The Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program is nothing more than bureaucratic red tape that does nothing to improve air quality,” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said in a statement last year.
If that federal data collection ends, NAU researchers say they’re ready to fill the void with what they call Project Vulcan.
Kevin Gurney with the School of Informatics, Computing, and Cyber Systems leads the effort and says it’s far more detailed than anything released by the federal government.
“A lot of this data within the climate space is being either threatened or has already been shut down, and that has placed increasing importance on our role,” Gurney says.
The researchers’ new maps show 13 years of carbon emissions down to the city street and neighborhood throughout the United States.
Broadly, the maps look a lot like a simple depiction of population.
“As you zoom in and go down to finer scales is where you really start to see the things that aren't necessarily related to population, and it really is about infrastructure. It's about the way we use fuel, the way we burn it, and where we burn it,” Gurney says.
He says the maps are an important tool for local policymakers seeking to reduce greenhouse gases within cities and states.
Gurney says his team plans to release even more detailed maps this year showing hour-by-hour emissions levels.
“What are the highway emissions? What are the local road emissions? Do that by every single segment within the city,” Gurney says. “In a world in which we have limited resources to go after [carbon] mitigation, we have to be very shrewd and careful and targeted about where we go to do the mitigation. [...] You can tackle everything in your landscape, but it's actually much more prudent to go for the big things first.”
