When the Climate TRACE database came online in 2020, Time Magazine named it one of the 100 best inventions of the year. Backed by leading universities, environmental non-profits, and former Vice President Al Gore, this independent organization helped put AI-powered carbon monitoring on the map. Now, researchers claim there’s a major error in its data. Research published Tuesday in the journal Environmental Research Letters compared vehicle CO2 emissions data from Climate TRACE with estimates from the Vulcan Project, a government-funded research effort that maps carbon emissions across North America in fine detail . The study, led by Northern Arizona University professor Kevin Gurney—who also leads the lab behind Vulcan—found that Climate TRACE underestimates vehicle CO2 emissions in U.S. cities by an average of 70%. “While the Vulcan on-road data is not perfect, with uncertainty of about 14%, this is far lower than the differences found when we compared 260 city vehicle CO2 emissions in the U.S.…