About Decarb My State
Tired of waiting for Congress to act on the climate crisis? Then, decarbonize [?] your state.
Decarb My State allows Americans to picture exactly where their state’s carbon pollution comes from, and how to eliminate it.
Ok then, how do we end climate pollution?
Decarbonization is simple—in every state, we can eliminate most emissions using clean electrification [?]:
- We electrify the fossil fuel machines we use to heat our homes, cook our food, and get around.
- We clean all our electricity, mostly by building wind and solar. (And we need to double the electricity we produce today, to power our new electric machines.)
Clean
Electrification!
...and then there's everything else
Decarbonization is also inevitable. Wind, solar, and batteries are getting so cheap, they’re starting to outcompete fossil fuels. And they’re only going to get cheaper.
The problem: decarbonization is going to take too long to avoid the worst effects of climate change. We need to speed it way up, using climate policy. And with climate action blocked in Congress, the path forward is through the states.
Our Team
This is an all-volunteer project made with love by folks from ChiHackNight and Win Climate.
Our team includes:
Dylan Halpern, Robert Herrera, Howard Kier, Juan-Pablo Velez, , Elisa Rudolph, Joyce Ohiri, Samantha Goodman, Shelby Barron, and Jack Madans.
The initial code for this project was forked from Who benefits from climate ambition? by Data for Progress, Sunrise Movement and DataMade.
Images of appliances and cars come from Electrify Now. Images of power plants are from Sim City 2000 by Maxis and Electronic Arts.
Our Inspiration
Our visual storytelling approach was inspired by a recent talk by Juan-Pablo Velez titled “What does it actually take to decarbonize a state?”
The idea of using clean electrification [?] as the lynchpin of decarbonization is heavily inspired by the book “Electrify”, by Saul Griffith from Rewiring America. It's amazing, read it.
Data and Sources
All of the data used on this website are from publicly available and trusted government and nonprofit sources. Below is a description of the primary datasets and their publishers. For more details on how we discovered and worked with this data, take a look at our GitHub issue tracker for data and our data folder of this open source project.
U.S. Emissions By State
Climate Watch - U.S. States Greenhouse Gas Emissions 1990 to 2018
World Resource Institute
Mar 2021
U.S. Building Footprints And Electrification
U.S. Building Footprints
Microsoft Maps
Mar 2021
U.S. Building Stock Characterization Study
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL)
Dec 2021
Vehicles By State
State Motor-Vehicle Registrations
U.S. Department of Transportation
Feb 2021
Power Plants By State
Environmental Justice Screening and Mapping Tool (EJScreen)
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
Jan 2021
State Renewable Generation Targets
Electric generation by source 2001-2021
U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA)
Apr 2022
Source Code
All the code for this site is open source and available on GitHub under the MIT license.
Technologies used:
This website is hosted on Netlify.
Contact us
Found a bug? Report it on our issue tracker!
Have a suggestion or question? Contact us at info@decarbmystate.com