On the back of yesterday’s unfortunate news, here’s a glance of what information it could have gathered…

Project Vulcan quantifies the CO2 emissions (2002) in the US using CO2 inventory data collected by the EPA.  The data allows one to view the amounts of CO2 at a certain point in time, over time, AM/PM, etc.   Check out the video/pres of this here.  Using Google Earth (which is an awesome application by itself), you can choose to see the CO2 emissions by various categories (i.e. aircraft, commercial, electricity production, etc.)  The project is funded by NASA/Department of Energy, in collaboration with researchers at Purdue University, Colorado State University and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. 

There is also another project in progress called Hestia which will try to quantify CO2 emissions for the entire planet Earth!

Imagine what all this data can do for our knowledge, carbon management strategies, international law and public policy.