The Obama Administration EPA today issued a landmark proposal to cut global warming pollution from old coal power plants, dubbed the Clean Power Plan. 
Operating under the authority EPA has under the Clean Air Act, the rule will require reductions in carbon dioxide over time and give states a variety of flexible ways to achieve the targets…
Pausing for a second here to say that the Climate Investigations Center, in future blogs, will expose how polluters are fighting this EPA rule, who will inevitablely sue the EPA to stall and derail this like they have on other environmental laws. We will look at the leading role of Peabody Coal, ACCCE, American Electric Power, Southern Company and other carbon kingpins in delaying climate solutions…
But for now, we thought it would be helpful to show you what corporate pollution looks like.
Most people have a hard time visualizing invisible gases like carbon dioxide (duh), which is convenient for polluters. For beginners, millions of tons of carbon dioxide are dumped in the atmosphere daily from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas. These gases make the atmosphere act like a thicker blanket than normal, holding in more of the Sun’s radiant heat. This causes global warming, supercharges the weather and we have climate chaos.
The animations on the right show you what carbon dioxide looks like coming out of power plants across the U.S. every single day, the very pollution the EPA is trying to reduce. The one on the top is a simulation of power plant pollution over the course of one day. The bottom one adds a 3-D effect of the interaction of these plumes of carbon dioxide with weather systems as they roll through. Totally cool eh!? If it wasn’t so unnerving.
These animations were created by a team led by our old friend Dr. Kevin Gurney at Arizona State University’s School of Life Sciences, who runs Project Vulcan, a one of a kind massive data project creating visualizations of greenhouse gas emissions.
Go to the full Power plant CO2 emissions VIDEO
More Project Vulcan images here
Full Project Vulcan video on YouTube ‘Revolutionary’ CO2 maps zoom in on greenhouse gas sources
Get in touch with Kevin here.