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.
Techcrunch event Join 10k+ tech and VC leaders for growth and connections at Disrupt 2025 Netflix, Box, a16z, ElevenLabs, Wayve, Sequoia Capital, Elad Gil — just some of the 250+ heavy hitters leading 200+ sessions designed to deliver the insights that fuel startup growth and sharpen your edge. Don’t miss the 20th anniversary of TechCrunch, and a chance to learn from the top voices in tech. Grab your ticket before Sept 26 to save up to $668. Join 10k+ tech and VC leaders for growth and connections at Disrupt 2025 Netflix, Box, a16z, ElevenLabs, Wayve, Sequoia Capital, Elad Gil — just some of the 250+ heavy hitters leading 200+ sessions designed to deliver the insights that fuel startup growth and sharpen your edge. Don’t miss the 20th anniversary of TechCrunch, and a chance to learn from the top voices in tech. Grab your ticket before Sept 26 to save up to $668. San Francisco | REGISTER NOW
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.”
... continue reading