The top 100 carbon dioxide-producing facilities in California generated 101,890,944 metric tons of CO2 in 2007, according to data recently released by the California Air Resources Board. We¹ve mapped that data to show where the 100 largest polluters are located. Power plants and oil refineries appear to be the largest culprits.

DISCLAIMER FROM AIR RESOURCES BOARD: This is the first year of reporting, and these numbers are self-reported and have not been verified. The air resources board has accredited the first batch of third-party verifiers and we will begin that process in 2010. Thus, these numbers are subject to change and could contain errors.The measurements reported here are CO2E, “carbon dioxide equivalent,” as some greenhouse gas emissions might be other gases, like methane, which have different “global warming potentials.” Almost all emissions reported are CO2.

CO2 conversions are from the EPA Greenhouse Gas Equivalencies Calculator.

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Carrie Ching is an award-winning, independent multimedia journalist and producer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. For six years, she led digital storytelling projects at the Center for Investigative Reporting as senior multimedia producer. Her multimedia reports have been featured by NPR.org, The Huffington Post, Rolling Stone, Grist, Time.com, Fast Company, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, KQED, PBS NewsHour, Salon.com, Mother Jones, Public Radio International, Poynter, Columbia Journalism Review and many other publications. Her specialty is crafting digital narratives and exploring ways to use video, audio, photography, animation and interactive graphics to push the boundaries of storytelling on the Web, tablets and mobile. Her work has been honored with awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, Investigative Reporters and Editors, Best of the West, the Online News Association, Scripps Howard, The Gracies, and was part of the entry in a Pulitzer-finalist project. Prior to her time at CIR she was a magazine and book editor, video journalist, newspaper reporter and TV comedy scriptwriter. She was on the 2010 Eddie Adams Workshop faculty as a multimedia producer working with MediaStorm to teach digital storytelling techniques to photojournalists. She completed a master’s degree in journalism at UC Berkeley in 2005.