Owning Up: A Tool to Measure US Carbon Emissions by Corporations
Channel: Environmental Data & Governance Initiative
Date: 2022-04-19

On April 20, 2022, the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI) released "Owning Up: A Tool to Measure US Carbon Emissions by Corporations." The data tool and preliminary report analyzes greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions tracked by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program (GHGRP) for 2020, the most recent year data is available. 

Under the GHGRP, facilities that either directly emit or supply GHGs are required to estimate their carbon emissions each year. Facilities reporting GHGs are also required to provide information about who they’re owned by–the share each parent company has in the facility. 

Using this publicly-available information, EDGI determined not just which specific facilities, but which companies, reported the most GHGs in 2020. 

This video is a workshop presented by EDGI's Environmental Enforcement Watch on their findings using the tool. EEW's Eric Nost, Niamh Carlos, and Kelsey Melcher Burroughs provide an overview of the report, demo the data analysis tool behind it, and facilitate further exploration of what the tool can show about GHG emissions in the US.

Timecodes
0:00 - Welcome and Intro to EDGI and EEW
3:41 - Brief Intro to the EPA's Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program 
7:02 - EEW's GHG Data Analysis Tool & Preliminary Findings
9:28 - Demonstration of Tool
25:20 - Conclusion 

Access the report (including a how-to on using the data tool) here: https://envirodatagov.org/owning-up-a-tool-to-measure-us-carbon-emissions-by-corporations/

Access the data tool here: https://colab.research.google.com/github/edgi-govdata-archiving/ECHO-GHG/blob/main/ECHO_GHG.ipynb