PLOTTING CHANGE
Google adds Oklahoma City to environmental impact tool
Google adds Oklahoma City to its environmental impact tool
Oklahoma City could take more than half of its estimated emissions out of the air if it fully implemented solar resources that are available, tech giant Google estimates.
The company estimates more than 6 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent per year could be eliminated from an estimated 11.6 million tons of the pollutant if that were to occur.
The calculations are estimated by Google's Environmental Insights Explorer, an online tool it created about a year ago in work it was doing with the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate & Energy.
It is designed to make it easier for stakeholders in various cities to access climate- relevant datasets and to act upon them to improve sustainability measures.
While more than 9,000 cities around the world have made commitments to comply with the Paris Agreement, which presents a formal plan and timeline to phase out reliance on fossil fuels, less than 20% have been able to complete, submit or monitor greenhouse gas inventories, Google officials have stated.
But carbon datasets like those created by Google's tool are a useful way for them to help identify where they may be able to cut emissions, they added.
When it was launched, the tool only provided data for a limited number of cities in the U.S.
This month, Google expanded the number of U.S. cities the tool evaluates by 15, including Oklahoma City.
Its building emissions and solar potential values are generated from 265,000 buildings, while it calculates transportation emissions using an estimated 708 million trips that started, ended or were made through Oklahoma City in 2018.
“We launched the application last year so that cities could measure and make plans to reduce carbon emissions across their communities,” said Nicole Lombardo, a partnership leader within
Google's environmental insight team who works with stakeholders in various communities to interpret the tool's data.
Lombardo said Google found that cities were challenged by costs to acquire and analyze the data.
“By making this tool available to communities across the globe, our hope is to get them out of the data gathering mode and into one of action,” Lombardo said. “It helps cities build policies and measure their progress over time.”
An organization that spends a considerable amount of time evaluating Oklahoma City's emission issues and air quality is the Association of Central Oklahoma Governments.
Eric Pollard, air quality and clean cities coordinator with ACOG, said his organization has a good understanding of emissions from specific point sources like
buildings through work accomplished by the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality.
He added, though, ACOG has less data on emissions from vehicles and that information in that area provided through Google's tool will be helpful. “We don't have as good of an understanding of that, and it is becoming even more important because transportation emissions generally are trending to where they are even more of a source than buildings as electricity generation gets cleaner,” Pollard said.
He said ACOG tracks the average age of vehicles on Oklahoma roads, noting the estimate now is about 10 years.
“That is one of the reasons why we are promoting alternative fuels, including electric vehicles, because we know that will bring down our emissions and improve overall fuel efficiency as a state,” he said. “We will be looking carefully at that transportation data.”
Visit insights. sustainability. google and put Oklahoma City in the search bar to evaluate additional information provided through the application.