This story was originally published by Verite News.
Aside from flaring and smokestacks, air pollution can be hard to picture. A new tool from a nonprofit climate coalition spearheaded by former Vice President Al Gore aims to help Louisiana residents see how the invisible threat travels — and who’s most at risk.
Introduced at New York Climate Week in late September, Climate TRACE is a new website that aims to show an inventory of emissions. The tool models the spread of particulate matter, tiny particles that can lead to heart and lung problems as well as premature death when inhaled.
On a given day, the map uses thousands of dots to show how the pollutants disperse into the air from facilities and into nearby communities. The tool also shows how much the same facilities contribute to human-caused climate change, as both the pollution and greenhouse gas emissions come from fossil fuels.
“The connection between the climate crisis and the public health crisis driven by particulate pollution from the burning of fossil fuels to make petrochemicals, power transportation or generate power has not often received adequate attention,” Gore said in an interview.
Climate TRACE is offering a new tool to visualize air pollution in Louisiana’s Cancer Alley and worldwide. Courtesy Climate TRACE. Gore teased the release of the tool at an August event in St. James Parish. His group first developed it to depict how pollution travels in Louisiana’s 85-mile-long petrochemical corridor along the Mississippi River, nicknamed “Cancer Alley.” After working with groups in the region, Gore said he was shocked by how severe health problems had become for local residents. Then, his group decided to expand the project.
“When we succeeded in visualizing the particulate pollution in Cancer Alley, it became apparent that this was something we should do all over the country and the world,” Gore said.
He said he hoped the new data and modeling will help community groups make their case to local officials and hold companies accountable.
“There could be some companies that want to swap out their supply chains so that they are not contributing to the disease burden in communities like the River Parishes,” Gore said.
Climate TRACE is already working with some subnational governments, business leaders and other organizations to choose suppliers with lower emissions, Gore said.
The tool itself was developed by Carnegie Mellon University’s CREATE Lab, combining pollution and weather datasets to model the plumes of particulate matter as the prevailing wind changes. It also uses satellite data and remote sensing to more accurately track greenhouse gas emissions.
Amy Gottsegen with the CREATE lab said Climate TRACE is a much larger, global version of plume modeling her lab creates for the Pittsburgh area each day to help people reduce their exposure to bad air quality.
She noted the tool is limited by the data available. For example, facilities don’t report how much particulate matter they emit each day, so the team uses monthly data to create a daily average. They’ve also estimated what pollution plumes look like on days with the greatest emissions. The visualization can’t be used to precisely say how much pollution a community is exposed to, but the denser concentrations of particles indicate where more pollution was modeled to be at ground level.
Eventually, Gore hopes this global plume modeling tool — which currently depicts pollution across 9,500 urban areas — will mimic CREATE Lab’s Pittsburgh model, providing new plume modeling as close to real-time as possible. The timeline for such a roll out would likely take years, though, Gore said.
When he announced the tool in St. James, Gore noted that this tool alone won’t help reduce pollution, but communities empowered with information could.
“The information doesn’t do anything by itself unless you turn it into action,” he said. “If you’ve got neighbors and friends to whom you’ve been talking about this, and you have not been able to strike a spark, show them this … Maybe it’ll make it easier to see clearly.”