Former vice president Al Gore wants to be able to keep tabs on which companies are polluting the planet.
Gore and the nonprofit Climate Trace have launched a global tracker for greenhouse gas emissions.
The map can be found at ClimateTrace.org.
The tool uses data from hundreds of satellites and thousands of sensors, along with AI modeling to create an interactive map tracking the 72,000 biggest sources of pollution.
Gore hopes to be tracking millions of sites by next year.
Climate Trace's comprehensive country-by-country data highlights individual sites — including specific power plants, steel mills, urban road networks, oil and gas fields, shipyards, airports, cattle feedlots and more — that represent the top known sources of pollution.
According to the data, the top 500 individual sources of emissions worldwide represent less than 1% of total facilities in the dataset, but account for 14% of global emissions in 2021 –- more than the annual emissions of the United States.
The organization says power plants alone represent more than half of the emissions and three-fifths of the assets in the top 500 list. Meanwhile, 26 of the 50 largest sources of emissions worldwide are oil and gas fields.
"The climate crisis can, at times, feel like an intractable challenge – in large part because we've had a limited understanding of precisely where emissions are coming from," Gore, a Climate TRACE founding member, said in a statement. "This level of granularity means that we finally have emissions data that enable us to act decisively. It also means we can prioritize efforts to achieve the deep cuts in greenhouse gas pollution we need to prevent the most catastrophic impacts of the climate crisis."
Climate Trace says emissions from oil and gas production are significantly underreported around the globe. Among the top countries that report their oil and gas production emissions to the United Nations, Climate Trace finds emissions are as much as three times higher than self-reported data.
The goal of the project is to provide decision-makers with information to determine where to cut carbon dioxide, the most common greenhouse gas, and the other pollutants, Bloomberg reported.
Gore said 75% of the world's greenhouse emissions -- carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide -- come from countries that have made pledges to become carbon-neutral by 2050.
"Now that they know exactly where it's coming from, they have tools that will enable them to reduce their emissions," he told NPR.
The map, which is free and accessible online, allows users to zoom to a location, view individual sites and see how their emissions rank among other pollution hotspots.
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