The Vulcan project brings us a map of the US and the amount of pollution that can be found.  The Vulcan project is a collaboration of a few universities, NASA, and the US D.O.E.  Check out their site for more information, they do a lot of good work.

They have released a CO2 emissions map that looks like a pretty interesting application.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the right plugin for Firefox on my MacBook Pro to run this, but it looks like it is very well done, and I hope to get it up and running on windows at some point soon.  Please comment on this if you are able to get it to work.

Google Earth maps carbon dioxide emissions (via LATimes.com)

UPDATE:

I reinstalled The Google Earth Plugin, and now this works!  I think the problem was that I reinstalled Firefox since the last time I updated Google Earth.  Anyway, it works now, and the information is very impressive.  This is a screenshot from my local area.  Carbon County is one of the worst polluters, and it’s all from industrial uses.  So Carbon county is still aply named even after all these years!  (This is Pennsylvania’s Coal region, as well as the Slate Belt, and home to many Cement Factories.)

Carbon County CO2

Gurney, K.R., D. Mendoza, Y. Zhou, B. Seib, M Fischer, S. de la Rue du Can, S. Geethakumar, C. Miller (2009) “The Vulcan Project: High resolution fossil fuel combustion CO2 emissions fluxes for the United States”, http://www.purdue.edu/eas/carbon/vulcan/research.html.