Last month, a project supported by former U.S. Vice President Al Gore named ClimateTRACE premiered at the COP29 Climate Summit in Baku, Azerbaijan with one goal in mind: make climate data as urgent and transparent as financial market information.

According to Forbes, Gore’s project is a global climate dashboard, comparable to a Bloomberg Terminal for Earth’s well-being. Investors, regulators, insurers, and policymakers now have real time information into who is polluting, how much, and where. However, it may already be over before it started.

Climate TRACE’s January 2025 update shows global emissions totaled 5.26 billion tonnes CO₂e, a modest yet significant 0.59% drop compared to January 2024. Methane, an especially potent greenhouse gas, remained stable at roughly 32.24 million tonnes, hinting that the global emissions curve might finally be starting to flatten.

None the less, the information Gore’s database will provide can very likely be used as a weapon against a variety of entities, such as fossil fuel companies. If you thought using UN climate data to justify a host of new lawsuits or legislation to bring fossil fuel production to a halt, this provides it in real time. Fortunately, the ClimateTRACE isn’t working as the climate cult had hoped … yet.

As one Forbes user notes in the comments section:

The tool is using accounting conventions that falsely enhances the role of fossil fuels and artificially diminishes the role of animal agriculture in global warming. Specifically, it

  1. Undervalues methane emissions by a factor of 3.
  2. Underestimates land use change emissions by a factor of 3.
  3. Ignores 7 of 11 emissions species, including all cooling gases co-emitted during fossil fuel combustion; and
  4. Ignores the carbon opportunity cost of the land used for animal agriculture.

When we take into account 1, 2 and 3, animal agriculture becomes responsible for 52% of global warming, while fossil fuels are responsible for 18%, between 1750 and 2020, as shown in Gerard Wedderburn-Bisshop’s paper, “Increased transparency in accounting conventions could benefit climate policy,” published in Environmental Research Letters in March 2025.