Although the creators — led by Kevin Gurney of Purdue — generated the data primarily as a tool for expanding scientific exploration of human influence on the carbon cycle, there are sure to be other uses in the social sciences and public policy. The maps, for example, give us the best look yet at the spatial distribution of emissions in the U.S., allowing us to think about areas where the introduction of clean technologies or energy conservation would have the biggest CO2 bang for the buck. That’s not an insignificant issue, because using limited clean technology funds most efficiently must be a priority.

If the methodology can be extended to countries other than the U.S. — as envisioned in Vulcan’s sister project named Hestia — then finding least-cost, highest-mitigation solutions will become easier. It may be that the most effective and efficient use of scarce mitigation funds is not in the U.S. or Europe but, instead, in more rapidly developing societies where the technological status quo is much dirtier and rate of growth in emissions far higher. Detailed spatial data is required to provide a complete answer.

In the vein of CARMA, Vulcan is also a tool for public education and awareness. For example, California — a relatively clean locale in terms of power plant emissions — shows a much dirtier profile once Vulcan’s data on transporation emissions is included. Indeed, one can see emissions clustering around the state’s major transporation and commute routes. And given that some of the Vulcan data is available in hourly time-steps, you can see your region “inhale and exhale” CO2 as people head to work and factories fire up.

All in all, Vulcan is an excellent complement to the CO2 disclosure process and one we hope CARMA users take a look at.

Data – Carbon Footprint

AMME, the Avoid Mass Extinctions Engine, provides a common standard for calculating carbon footprint. Data are available via an API. These calculations are tied to a profile, which could be an individual, an organization, or another entity. It’s another REST API and returns data in HTML, XML, or JSON. Access to the API requires credentials, and the idea is to provide data about the carbon footprint of nearly any product, such as an appliance, or activity, like an airplane trip. It’d be interesting to see how average domestic electrical use correlates with power plant emissions. A mashup might use AMEE to get representative home’s electricity usage for a country and compare that to the CO₂ output and Intensity from CARMA.

Data – Environmental Protection Agency

The United Stated Environmental Protection Agency provides an envirofacts database, which could be really compelling if displayed next to CARMA data, particularly mapped power plants, for a US zip code, city, or county. The EPA maps show points where pollutions was discharged to water, Superfund sites, hazardous waste, and more. You can see a sample map for the latest Geospatial Data files. The zip file contains a single 169 MB file. That’s better than nothing, but you will have to parse the file and transform it into data you can query by state, zip code, etc. FindPollution makes use of EPA data for displaying pollution by US Zip code. Planet Hazard also maps EPA’s National Emission Inventory of hazardous air pollutants.  But neither of them republish the data.

Data – CAIT

Protected behind a login and password, the World Resources Institute has a Climate Analysis Indicators Tool. You can get some data, but as posted in their Forum, “We have actually purposely set up CAIT to not allow users to download large amounts of data at a time (e.g., by sector, or year). This is due to our data-sharing agreement with the International Energy Agency, one of CAIT’s principal sources for CO₂ data.” A quick look at the IAE’s data page shows that getting data from them is not so easy or available for free. Still, if you are willing to register and parse the CSV files , you could do some interesting analyses. For example, one could calculate and compare what fraction of a country’s total CO₂ emission come from its power sector. Similarly, one could compare CAIT’s calculations of Intensity (in gCO₂/kWh) per country to CARMA’s intensity data for Power Plants.

Tools – DIY Map

DIY Map is a very easy to use flash mapping application that reads data from a specially crafted XML file.  It can present data as points on a map or by filling a country or state with different colors.  CARMA data could be presented by coloring countries based on their CO₂ emissions.  Users could then click around various regions and countries to explore the data further.  Transforming CARMA data to display on a world map wouldn’t be very difficult, the only challenge is in matching Country data to the FIPS country codes DIY Map uses to identify countries.

Tools – XML/SWF Charts

Another way to present data is through traditional graphs and charts, and there are many solutions available for building graphs from data.  One free option is XML/SWF Charts, which takes an XML data file describing a chart and its data to draw and animate slick flash charts.  Besides the usual regional/country/state comparisons, one could plot the CO₂ emission, electricity generated, and intensity for a set of plants.  Such a chart could provide another perspective for comparing the environmental impact of a group of plants.

In the same press release, the Minister responds to a query from India’s Parliament about CARMA’s report that carbon dioxide emissions from India’s National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC) rank third globally among power companies. While stating that CARMA’s report “has not been validated or authenticated by the Power Companies,” the Minister draws on CARMA itself to note that NTPC has a much better global ranking on another CARMA measure: CO2 intensity (emissions per unit of electricity produced).

It is very gratifying to see that CARMA has provided useful information for a public dialogue between India’s Parliament and Ministry of Environment and Forests. Doubly so because much of CARMA’s information cited by the Minister comes from the Indian Government itself. The Power Ministry’s website (cited above) provides CARMA with over 200 plant-level reports on CO2 emissions and power production. These official reports include many plants operated by India’s National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC). In this important sense, much of CARMA’s information on Indian plants has indeed been officially confirmed. CARMA’s contribution has been to map the facilities, link them to their parent companies (including NTPC), merge them with comparable data on power plants in other countries, and make all the information available to web visitors with a few keystrokes.

In the global movement to promote transparency about carbon sources, India has clearly established its leadership among developing countries. We can only hope that China will soon join India in this effort. With a few admirable exceptions (particularly the CLP group, as we have reported in a recent blog, China’s power companies have not disclosed their enormous, rapidly-growing carbon emissions.

The draft statement will undergo revision this week, but that process will likely result in a document with three general points: 1) Rich countries, but not poor countries, should commit to legally-binding greenhouse gas reductions. 2) Rich countries should put up more money to help poor countries adapt to coming climate change. 3) Let’s agree now to tentatively agree to a (tentative) post-Kyoto treaty sometime (tentatively) in 2009.

What’s a good antonym for urgency? I vote for negligence, because that’s effectively what the U.N. process is generating. Don’t get me wrong. Adaptation is needed under any scenario, and the North should finance much of it (about $50 billion annually, according to Oxfam). But the fact that adaptation is flying off the lips of every developing world delegate — as if it were a substitute for the emission cut targets they collectively refuse — tells us something about the inadequate sense of urgency and limited appreciation for the risks posed by climate change.

Let’s face the facts: We have already ensured that human societies will be playing the climate adaptation game for centuries to come. Whether that adaptation is slow and manageable or swift and chaotic depends upon our one opportunity to get emission cuts reasonably right in the short-term, and that simply cannot happen without real and binding limits for every major economy. Even modest growth in per capita emissions in populous countries like China and India will negate significant cuts in the rich world. The Bush administration is wrong to use this fact as an excuse for American inaction and delay, but the arithmetic stands.

For those in the development community — many of whom are here in Bali and, perhaps, inclined to sympathize with the developing world position — it may help to ask a similar question in a different context. What would we give to go back to the Congo’s jungles and snuff out HIV before it spread around the world? How many of us, if given the choice, would choose adaptation — millions dead and mountains of medicine to simply keep people alive — over prevention? The human costs of rapid climate change will dwarf anything HIV could ever generate, and yet, when given the opportunity to take preventive action, some act as if the decision is a nuanced one. If developing societies believe climate adaptation can substitute for emission cuts, they will soon find themselves in a pitched battle against the laws of chemistry and physics. I think we know who will bend first.

I do not mean to present a false choice. The truth is that both short-term adaptation and serious, binding, and global emissions reductions can and should happen, but that arrangement (the “Grand Bargain” between North and South that must eventually come) is nowhere to be seen. Indeed, by refusing to accept the premise of legally binding emissions cuts, developing country governments are preventing the needed discussion from even beginning.

No doubt, the complete lack of leadership on the part of the Bush administration deserves much of the blame for the impasse. But equally disconcerting is the paradoxical fervor with which the developing countries — especially India and China — continue to push for a global South of more or less uncontrolled greenhouse gases. It is clear that they will suffer first and worst in such a world and face only greater challenges with time. The sad truth is, emission cuts in the North alone are not enough to avert a climate crisis, as David Wheeler and I showed in our recent CGD working paper: Another Inconvenient Truth.

Even the emission targets that are bandied about in passing are woefully inadequate given the state of the atmosphere. For example, the most recent UNDP Human Development Report, which plainly states that climate change “may be the gravest threat ever to have faced humanity,” recommended that developing countries commit to emission reductions of 20% from 1990 levels by 2050 as part of a global effort to reduce emissions by 50% over the same period. That recommendation was roundly dismissed by China and India as unacceptable.

And yet, the reductions advocated in the report are incredibly modest in terms of their climatic benefit. A 50% reduction in global emissions by 2050 is expected to reduce the risk of “dangerous climate change” (more than 2 degrees Celsius warming over pre-industrial times) to merely a 50/50 proposition — just the flip of a coin. And the definition of “catastrophic” used here doesn’t include the possibility of tipping points and temperature thresholds that, if triggered, could produce run-away climatic changes regardless of human efforts to stem the tide.

All of this makes me wonder: Are we, as a species, even close to appreciating the probabilities we’re playing with? The state of the discussion here in Bali suggests we are not. Perhaps the arrival of some big names (Nobel Laureate Al Gore, for example) will serve to shake things up a bit and force some concessions. But, until I see a consensus document that suggests otherwise, I remain seriously bummed.

[Note: I am not a complete downer. More to come later this week on some of the new and encouraging research that has emerged at the conference.]

When it crashed, ForumOne, which built the CARMA website for CGD, quickly swapped in a bigger server rack and in 20 minutes we were back on-line.Within 36 hours of its launch CARMA attracted more than 150,000 visits, twice the traffic hosted by the CGD main site in the entire month of October, and generated more than 200 mainstream media reports and a similar number of blog postings. Coverage ranged from the prestigious science magazine Nature to the liberal blog Daily Kos. Juliet Eilperin, reporting in the Washington Post, was among the first reporters to seek comment from utility companies identified in CARMA as major sources of CO2 pollution, including Southern Co., one of the biggest CO2 polluters in the United States, and the sixth biggest source of CO2 emissions in the world. Strikingly, the companies did not dispute CARMA’s findings.

So far, out of the 50,000 plants listed only one meaningful discrepancy has been identified: China Light and Power (CLP), which sold me electricity when I lived in Hong Kong, informed us that its massive Castle Peak power plant, which I could see from my window, emitted significantly less CO2 than the CARMA estimate, because it is running at much less than full capacity. CLP presented audited records to support this assertion and the CARMA team quickly made adjustments. An AP story that ran in the International Herald Tribune strengthened CARMA’s credibility by highlighting the overall reliability of the data, and CGD’s readiness to make corrections when needed.

Meanwhile, in Australia CARMA prompted a rather different response.

CARMA data for Australia show that the country’s coal-reliant power sector emits 226 million tons of CO2 per year, an amount that gives Australia the world’s highest per capita power-related CO2 emissions — more than 11 tons per person per year. That dubious distinction, coming barely a week before national elections in which climate change has emerged as a major issue, prompted a fire-storm of reporting and analysis in the Australian press. Within 24 hours Greenpeace activists had occupied Munmorah, a coal-fired plant in New South Wales, chaining themselves to the conveyor belt that feeds coal into the plant and painting “coal kills” on one of the buildings. The Sydney Morning Herald reported that the protest ended after Greenpeace obtained assurances from Australia’s two major parties about reductions in coal use.

By Friday we were beginning to see a second round of stories, as bloggers and journalists around the world dug into the database to find the largest source of CO2 pollution in their jurisdiction. Others found surprising facts. One such surprise: when the site was launched on Wednesday I was attending a workshop where one of the organizers spent part of the afternoon playing with CARMA on his I-Phone. “Did you know that South America was 80 percent hydro power?” he asked. Nope. But now I do, and thanks to CARMA that information is now available to the entire world, along with the surprising information (noted in Eilperin’s WP article) that a single Southern Co. plant (Scherer, in Juliette, Georgia) produces more CO2 than the entire power sector of Brazil combined.

What explains this huge outpouring of interest? David Wheeler, a CGD senior fellow who leads our Confronting Climate Change initiative and has extensive experience in the use of public information disclosure to reduce pollution in developing countries explained it like this: sometimes there are pressures that build up in society, like the pressures on tectonic plates in the Earth.

Friction — special interests, corruption, and social and political Inertia — prevent the necessary adjustments, that is, stop the plates from sliding past one another. Information, injected in the right way and at the right time can be like a lubricant that enables the plates to suddenly slip. That happened this week: it’s reasonable to assume every CEO of every power company on Earth now knows just how much CO2 pollution his firm is discharging, and how this compares with his competitors. With this knowledge, the Earth moved. In the weeks ahead, power company investors, creditors, insurers, board members and customers will have the same information.

Of course, globally we are very far from having made the adjustments that will be necessary to avoid catastrophic climate change. Societies around the world are already beginning to face the dire consequences of rapid global warming, from the drought in the U.S. state of Georgia and the wild fires in California, to the melting of Andean glaciers that provide water to Lima, Peru, and the increased severity of cyclones in Bangladesh (which was being battered as CARMA was released). These effects are being felt first and most severely by poor people in the developing world even though most of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are the result of actions over the past century in the rich countries of the northern hemisphere. It is concern about this crucial north-south connection that is at the heart of CGD’s work on the issue.

Early next month representatives of the nations of the world will gather in Bali to continue the slow and difficult process of forging a global consensus on what to do about global warming. Few observers hold out much hope of serious progress. But pressure for action is mounting. And now, thanks to CARMA, we know the exact source locations of about 25 percent of the global emissions of CO2, the major greenhouse gas, and the identities of the firms that are responsible.

The debate about who is responsible for climate change will never be quite the same.

Although not all of CLP’s verified emission reports were plant specific, the company came forward with some previously unavailable data that allowed us to revise our original information for a handful of the company’s plants. In the case of Castle Peak, our original figure was revised downward. In the case of the Yallourn plant, our original estimate was revised upward. The net effect of these changes and others was to adjust CLP Group’s total present emissions from 75.3 million to 67 58.9 million tons. They also pointed out that we had incorrectly included a very small plant in the database that was no longer operational — we have removed it.

We also made adjustments after receiving verified emissions data from two small, related Polish companies (Dalkia Lodz and Dalkia Poznan). The net effect of those changes was to revise their aggregate CO2 emissions from 6 million to 4.5 million tons. We applaud both companies for bringing their independently verified emission reports to our attention, and, in the case of CLP Group, making available information that had not previously been public. We believe they set an excellent example for the rest of the power sector, and we hope more companies open up their plants to independent audits and subsequent posting on CARMA.

The attention has generated so much web traffic at CARMA.org, that we are temporarily disabling the download data feature. [UPDATE: This feature has been restored.] You may notice problems moving about the site as well. We are working like crazy to ease things. If you still experience difficulty using CARMA, please bookmark the site, and return later. We think this work is critical — and apparently thousands of others do as well! Thanks again for your interest, and we apologize for the temporary difficulties.

UPDATE (2:15 PM EST): We have switched to a larger and faster server, and CARMA is once again revealing the world’s carbon footprint in detail. Many thanks to those in the CARMA Community who offered up their servers as mirror hosts during our moment of need. Very gracious of you.

Our goal is to put anyone in the world just a few clicks away from complete, tailored information about carbon emissions for any plant, any company, and any locale. CARMA provides data for all power facilities and companies, whether they are entirely coal-fueled or completely reliant on renewable energy sources. We hope that CARMA will equip millions of concerned global citizens – consumers, investors, political leaders, managers, professionals, and community organizers – with the information they need to take action and build a low-carbon future.

Our own professional experience, as well as plentiful research, has shown that public disclosure of critical information can have powerful effects on environmental performance. We believe that the time is ripe for rapid reduction of carbon emissions, and CARMA is intended to be our contribution to this effort. We’re particularly concerned at the Center for Global Development, because global warming threatens to undermine the poverty-reduction efforts of many developing countries.

CARMA includes more than 50,000 power plants, 4,000 power companies, and nearly 200,000 geographic regions in every country on Earth. Users can view carbon emissions data for the year 2000, the present, and future plans. And all of CARMA’s data is updated quarterly to reflect changes in plant ownership and planned construction. We encourage you to learn more About CARMA, explore the site, sign up for our newsletter, tell your friends, and link to our blog — the main source for analysis and news from the CARMA team. And we want to hear from you. How are you using the data? How can the site be improved? Let us know.

We hope you find CARMA useful in the fight to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and slow global warming. The information is available to make it happen — now it’s up to all of us to take action. Let’s get to work.