ORGANIZATION
Climate TRACE
The AI-powered emissions monitoring coalition co-founded by Al Gore in 2019, tracking over 660 million pollution sources globally — Gore's operational demonstration of what democratic AI looks like in practice.
Climate TRACE is an international coalition of nonprofits, universities, and technology firms that uses satellite imagery, sensor data, and machine learning to independently measure greenhouse gas emissions from individual facilities worldwide. Co-founded by Al Gore in 2019 and launched publicly in 2021, the system now tracks over 660 million pollution sources — the first publicly available inventory of global emissions at the facility level. Climate TRACE represents Gore's most fully developed practical answer to a question his framework has been asking for decades: what does AI deployed in service of democratic governance actually look like? The design principles — transparency, independence, verification, accountability — constitute a template for the kind of public-interest AI infrastructure that the You On AI's governance debate keeps circling without building.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The system's technical architecture is instructive. Satellites provide visual and thermal imagery of industrial facilities. Ground sensors provide atmospheric composition data. Machine learning models correlate the two, inferring emissions rates from observable