How Al Gore used AI to track 660M polluters

Former Vice President Al Gore’s latest project gives polluters nowhere to hide.

The nonprofit Climate Trace, which Gore co-founded, on Wednesday launched a tool that uses AI to track fine particulate pollution from more than 660 million sources worldwide.

Many people are aware that burning fossil fuels warms the planet, but fewer know that burning them creates fine particulate matter that kills as many as 10 million people every year.

“For some time, I’ve been trying to bring more attention to the global public health crisis that’s related to what some refer to as conventional air pollution, or PM2.5,” Gore told TechCrunch. “It has been difficult for people to get precise information about what pollution they’re breathing, where it’s coming from, what the quantities are.”

Climate Trace was set up as a nongovernmental project to track greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. The group began work on the new tool after Gore’s experience working alongside people in Memphis, Tennessee, who were trying to block the construction of a crude oil pipeline that would run through their community and across their drinking water aquifer. As he dug into the issue, he saw how the plumes from a nearby refinery would drift over the neighborhoods.

“I asked our coalition at Climate Trace, could we track these pollutants around the world?” he said.

The result gives people access both to raw data on major polluters and visualizations of where PM2.5 pollution drifts near large cities. Eventually, the plume visualizations will be available worldwide, Gore said.

People have intuitively known about the ill effects of soot for years, but it was only recently that Climate Trace and its partners at Carnegie Mellon University were able to wrangle global data on the issue into something that was both sensible and defensible. 

“The very idea of tracking 662 million sites around the world, I mean without AI, people couldn’t have imagined doing something like that,” he said. “But of course, as we’ve all seen in the last couple of years, AI can do stuff that is quite extraordinary.”

Scientists have only recently come to appreciate the wide-ranging health effects of fine particulate pollution. Though researchers have long known about its role in lung cancer and heart disease, for example, in the last decade or so they’ve shown that exposure to PM2.5 can increase the risk a range of other deadly ailments, including low birth weight, kidney disease, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, dementia, type 2 diabetes, and more. Even at legal levels, fine particulate pollution causes tens of thousands of excess deaths in the U.S. annually.

Much of the early work into the health impacts of PM2.5 was pioneered by Joel Schwartz, the scientist who’s research decades ago led to the ban on leaded gasoline. Gore hopes greater awareness of fossil fuels’ health effects will spur broader action, similar to what happened with leaded gasoline. 

“I think that it creates a set of conditions and incentives that could very well make it more likely that we can accelerate the transition away from carbon-intensive facilities,” he said. “It makes it more likely to build political support for the conversion of these facilities to much less emitting technologies.”