TechCrunch: “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…”