Tech and climate news — former US vice president Al Gore’s latest project gives polluters nowhere to hide. The nonprofit Climate Trace, which Gore co-founded, launched a tool that uses AI to track fine particulate pollution from more than 660 million sources worldwide. The target isn’t just carbon. It’s the soot that kills as many as 10 million people every year.
By Maplestime Tech Desk | Canada | September 19, 2026
Sources: TechCrunch, Climate Trace | Last updated: September 19, 2026
Key Takeaways
- Climate Trace, co-founded by Al Gore, launched an AI-powered tool tracking PM2.5 pollution from more than 660 million sources worldwide
- Fine particulate pollution from burning fossil fuels kills as many as 10 million people every year
- The tool offers raw data on major polluters plus visualizations of where pollution plumes drift near large cities
- The project grew out of Gore’s work with Memphis residents fighting a crude oil pipeline through their community
- Data partners at Carnegie Mellon University helped make the global dataset defensible
From Memphis to 660 Million Sources
Climate Trace was set up as a nongovernmental project to track greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. The new tool began after Gore’s experience working alongside people in Memphis, Tennessee, who were trying to block the construction of a crude oil pipeline 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?” Gore 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.
“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.”
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 both sensible and defensible.
The 10-Million-Death Crisis Nobody Talks About
Many people know that burning fossil fuels warms the planet. Fewer know that burning them creates fine particulate matter — PM2.5 — 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.”
Scientists have only recently come to appreciate the wide-ranging health effects of fine particulate pollution. Researchers have long known about its role in lung cancer and heart disease, but in the last decade they’ve shown PM2.5 exposure can increase the risk of low birth weight, kidney disease, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, dementia, and type 2 diabetes. Even at legal levels, fine particulate pollution causes tens of thousands of excess deaths in the US annually.
The Leaded Gasoline Playbook
Much of the early work into the health impacts of PM2.5 was pioneered by Joel Schwartz, the scientist whose research decades ago led to the ban on leaded gasoline. Gore hopes greater awareness of fossil fuels’ health effects will spur broader action — similar to what happened with leaded gasoline.
“I think that it creates a set of conditions and incentives that could very well make it more likely that we can accelerate the transition away from carbon-intensive facilities,” Gore said. “It makes it more likely to build political support for the conversion of these facilities to much less emitting technologies.”
That is the real strategy here. Climate Trace isn’t just building a map — it’s building the evidentiary case for shutting polluting facilities down. When 660 million polluters are visible, “we didn’t know” stops being a defence.
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Maplestime will provide updates from Climate Trace and the fight against fossil fuel pollution as announcements are made.
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