Yesterday I discussed how it might be useful for the Boulder Carbon Tax Tracker project to acquire the dataset from the city’s new municipal emissions inventory. This morning, Boulder’s environmental affairs director, Sarah Van Pelt, clarified her earlier statement. It does appear, after all, that this project will have access to that data — but through the city, not directly.

Van Pelt wrote:

“The data are not proprietary but the inventory maintenance system is proprietary. I am happy to share any data that you want. Because we have a lot of data I would prefer to provide information that responds to specific questions rather than provide the entire data set that may not really get at the questions you have. In short, I’m trying to make it easier for you and others to understand the data rather than provide all of the data with no analysis or interpretation.”

As a journalist, my preference is to have the dataset so I can see for myself its patterns, organization, and intricacies. Also, I’d like to be able to offer it to independent experts for analysis.

But, for the time being, this offer from the city is a good start. So we’ll start here.

I’m looking over the data summaries Van Pelt provided yesterday, and considering what questions we might like to get answered from the latest emissions inventory.

In the meantime: What would you like to know about Boulder’s greenhouse gas emissions? Please suggest your questions in the comments below.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 11th, 2007 at 4:16 pm and is filed under Emission sources, Government, Greenhouse gas emissions, Measuring emissions, Public records. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.