I love interactive maps and one got my attention recently.
Christopher M. Jones and Daniel M. Kammen at UC Berkeley published a study in 2013 taking data on household carbon footprints to develop carbon profiles of zip codes, cities, counties, and states. They took the carbon profile data and produced an interactive map of the United States. If you follow that link you can mouseover zip codes to see the values of equivalent metric ton CO2 emission broken into categories of transportation, housing, food, goods, and services.
I zoomed the map in to the lower half of Minnesota to show the suburban carbon donut around the central core Minneapolis and Saint Paul.
Source: UC Berkeley CoolClimate Network, Average Annual Household Carbon Footprint (2013).
Let’s zoom in closer.
Source: UC Berkeley CoolClimate Network, Average Annual Household Carbon Footprint (2013).
You can see the central core downtowns are shown to be quite well off with regards to carbon emissions. The surrounding neighborhoods and inner suburbs also come out not too bad. Except most of Edina and a big part of Mendota Heights. What’s up with that?
For what it is worth, the Southdale area of Edina shows of the schizophrenic part of that city with a relatively great showing. It has about the same level of equivalent metric tons CO2 (40.3) as Northeast Minneapolis (40.8). Southwest Minneapolis looks like Minneapolis’ worst preforming area for this measurement at around 55, Southdale is a better carbon emission performer.