Al Gore explains global AI program that is spying on thousands of facilities to monitor emissions

Former Vice President Al Gore on Thursday outlined a global effort run by "machine-learning" artificial intelligence is essentially spying on individual facilities in every country in the world to measure their emissions of greenhouse gases and target the world's largest emitters. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Gore formally introduced attendees to the initiative known as Climate Tracking Real-Time Atmospheric Carbon Emissions, or Climate TRACE. The initiative has led to a website that allows for real-time tracking of emissions in any area of the world, which Gore said is allowing climate activists, reporters and others to identify high-priority industries and regions for emissions reduction programs. "It's a non-profit coalition that uses artificial intelligence to process data from 300 existing satellites and from 30,000 land, sea and air base sensors and multiple internet data streams to use artificial intelligence to create machine-learning algorithms to zoom in on every single significant source of greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution," he said of Climate TRACE. Gore showed how Climate TRACE uses these inputs to zoom in on specific facilities and assess how much they contribute to GHG emissions.