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NASA, Google may launch emissions tracking program
(Agencies)
Updated: 2009-12-17 22:03
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COPENHAGEN: NASA, the wonder agency of the 1960s, and Google, the go-to company of the early 21st Century, are trying to give the world the ability to monitor both the carbon dioxide pollution and the levels of forest destruction that contribute to global warming.
"Just having the thing flying around there imaging would just about make everybody act differently," said professor Steve Pacala, director of the Princeton Environmental Institute. "The idea that you could pull a fast one would be different."
Google, meanwhile, has rolled out a new program call Earth Engine which essentially is a massive storehouse for satellite and other data that forest countries will be able to access for free by the time of the next UN climate conference in Mexico next year.
Deforestation is the biggest climate change culprit in much of the developing world, and industrial countries plan to pay billions of dollars to poor countries to stop deforestation. The Google system could help many keep track of what forests are saved.
The relaunch of the NASA satellite is awaiting White House approval and is going through the budget process for next year.
"I'm optimistic," White House science adviser John Holdren told reporters at climate talks Wednesday.
Until another satellite actually gets into the air, the way the world knows about carbon dioxide involves a lot of guesswork, math and monitoring machines and a good amount of trust.
Experts' estimates of carbon dioxide emissions are based on fuel going into power plants and complex formulas based on power plant efficiency. But those estimates are also dependent on reliable information about fuel and efficiency, so they could be skewed by inaccurate input. In the United States and some other places, there are monitors on many power plants, which mean better accuracy.
An individual coal-fired power plant produces "a dome of carbon dioxide" and a satellite like NASA's could measure the emissions, said Princeton's Pacala, who also chaired a study by the US National Research Council on what NASA should do after the launch failure.
Another satellite is a must, Pacala said.
Being able to tell what individual power plants spew is crucial to the cap-and-trade programs to reduce carbon emissions, like the one being proposed in the United States. Under that, companies buy credits -- essentially the right to pollute -- from companies that cut pollution. To carry that out, you need good international figures, Kimball said.
Because NASA already designed the original satellite, a new one could be up in the air only 28 months after White House approval, NASA's Freilich said.
Measuring carbon is also crucial to a forest plan being negotiated at the UN talks. It calls for rich nations to pay poor ones for reducing their deforestation. That's a challenge because most of the deforestation is in countries with wide corruption and few systems to monitor the loss of forests.
