November 15th, 2007

By John DeFore

Today sees the arrival of an accessible new tool for those wanting to understand the relationship between electricity production and greenhouse gas emissions — and those looking to move beyond understanding to activism. The Center for Global Development, a Washington think tank, has launched a web site that graphically tracks the carbon emissions of power plants around the world.

CARMA, (the name “CARbon Monitoring in Action” doubles as an acronym threatening polluters that what goes around comes around) integrates a familiar Google map with a database compiled from government records, published site plans, and corporate reports. The result is a summary that can be digested at a glance: A big red dot on the map means a plant produces a great deal of CO2 along with its electricity; a big green dot says it makes plenty of power with little or no CO2.

Beyond the icons, visitors will find pages collating stats into rankings: “Five Biggest Power Producing Plants in the World,” say, or “Five Highest CO2 Emitting Power Companies,” which tallies up the many plants held by a single corporation.

There’s also a page ranking countries against each other. Its announcement that the US produces more tons of CO2 than anyone else is no surprise, but the chart goes farther to show how we stack up in percentage of power generated by alternate means like hydroelectric (not so well) and other renewables (much better than you might guess).

Data will be updated every quarter, so activists working to get humanity off fossil fuels can chart their progress, and compete with those in other nations, as the years go by.

Copyright © 2007 | Distributed by Noofangle Media