Purdue scientists have released a high-resolution map of American per-capita carbon dioxide emissions to Wired.com. It shows the amount of carbon dioxide produced in 100 square kilometer regions of the United States divided by the number of residents in that area. You can download the full eight megabyte ultra-high-resolution file here.
The work provides unprecedented resolution into U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. After all, a single large city like Houston can sprawl over 1,500 square kilometers. It comes as President Bush, in a major policy reversal, prepares to announce a new plan for reducing greenhouse gas emissions that critics say is not likely to go far enough in curbing greenhouse gases.
The new map follows a visualization released last week, which plotted total carbon emissions in 100 square kilometer chunks, and which some complained looked too much like a population density map. It was generated by The Vulcan Project, led by Kevin Gurney, after Wired.com readers asked for it, following our widely-read story, "Scientists Unveil High-Res Map of U.S. Carbon Footprint." We went back to Gurney with that feedback and he was kind enough to put it together.
For comparison's sake, you can find the original Vulcan Project map below.
There's a lot of information you could mine from these maps, but one thing stood out to me: the West, for all of our hippie do-gooders, isn't doing well (as a whole) from a per-capita emissions perspective. We simply don't live in dense enough situations to benefit from the efficiency gains created by urban living. Lots of infrastructure serving only a few people generates high per-capita emissions.
(I wonder how much better the per-capita footprints of California and Texas would look if the millions of undocumented immigrants living in those states were included in those areas' populations.)
How about your hometown? Does it compare favorably with where you live now?
UPDATE (12:50 pm): Just a little more food for thought after reading the comments. Check out this close-up of Los Angeles. It's not California cities that are necessarily doing the damage.
