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 :

  1. We electrify the fossil fuel machines we use to heat our homes, cook our food, and get around.
  2. 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.)
🏭 Farms, Industry & Other: 36%🔌 Dirty Power: 26%🚗 Transportation: 29%🏠 Buildings: 9%
Other 36%Power 26%Transport 29%Buildings 9%

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:

Derek Eder
Founder, DataMade
Viktor Köves
Senior Front-End Engineer, Packback
Surag Nuthulapaty
Developer
Chloe Xu
UX Strategist
Sean Watland
Senior Business Intelligence Analyst, dscout

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.

All Decarb My State illustrations were created by Josephine Ferorelli.

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