Greenhouse Gas Inventory - Climate Pollution Reduction Grant (CPRG)

This project has been funded wholly or in part by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under assistance agreement 00E03476 to the Metropolitan Council. The contents of this repository do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the EPA, nor does the EPA endorse trade names or recommend the use of commercial products mentioned in this repository.

This repository contains essential data, code, and documentation for the greenhouse gas (GHG) inventory, as completed for the Twin Cities MSA Priority Climate Action Plan (PCAP), submitted to the EPA on March 1, 2024. You can find the full PCAP on the EPA website.

Repository details

File structure

This is a Quarto book project. Top level Quarto files include

#> .
#> ├── _quarto.yml                # Quarto configuration
#> ├── metcouncil-cprg-ghg.bib    # references auto-imported from Zotero
#> ├── style/                     # Quarto template, CSS styling, font files
#> ├── assets/                    # chapter numbering, captions, and filtering helpers

All scripts in R/ are ready to run at will.

#> R/
#> ├── _export_plotly.R
#> ├── _leaflet_helpers.R
#> ├── _load_pkgs.R
#> ├── _quarto_helpers.R
#> ├── cprg_colors.R
#> ├── global_warming_potential.R
#> ├── plot_county_emissions.R
#> ├── remove_caches.R
#> ├── ...

Common datasets, like spatial geometries, population, county population proportions, GHG emission factors, and other data, live in _meta/data/. Each usually as associated metadata, noted with [dataset_name]_meta.RDS

#>_meta/data/
#> ├── cprg_county.RDS
#> ├── cprg_county_emissions.CSV
#> ├── cprg_county_emissions.RDS
#> ├── cprg_county_emissions_meta.RDS
#> ├── cprg_county_meta.RDS
#> ├── cprg_county_proportions.RDS
#> ├── cprg_county_proportions_meta.RDS
#> ├── cprg_population.RDS
#> ├── ...

Documents are organized by sector and document purpose.

#> _transportation/
#> ├── _transportation.qmd     # main sector documentation
#> ├── data-raw/               # raw data, R code to process and save to data\
#> ├── data/                   # cleaned, compressed data. RDS files only
#> ├── data_streetlight.qmd    # data source report for StreetLight
#> ├── data_transportation.qmd # compiled sector data report
#> ├── qc_transportation.qmd   # quality control document

Several prefixes are used to denote document purpose

• qc_{sector}.qmd indicates a quality control report
• data_{sector}.qmd indicates a combined data report for given sector
• data_{source}.qmd indicates an individual data source report. These are added as child documents in the data_{sector} document.

Within each sector folder is a data-raw/ folder. This is where you should put any processing/calculation code and raw data. The code in data-raw/ will save output datasets in data/. Generally, only .RDS data should be saved in data/

Building the Quarto book/site

Clone or fork the repository and ghg-cprg.Rproj in RStudio. RStudio will prompt you to install packages through {renv} with renv::restore(). Once package installation is complete, open R/render_for_publication.R and run the last two lines, previewed below.

rstudioapi::terminalExecute("quarto render --cache-refresh --to html")
rstudioapi::terminalExecute("quarto preview")

quarto render renders all the Qmd documents into HTML in /docs. quarto preview launches a live server previewing the book/site in your web browser.

Citation management

We created a shared Zotero group library. metcouncil-cprg-ghg.bib is the BibTex export. If you would like access through your own Zotero account, please contact @eroten or @pawilfahrt.

Data and project files

All data required to render the Quarto document and perform essential calculations are stored in .RDS files within each sector folder.

Where possible, we access data directly from source providers through APIs and programmatic downloads. However, some datasets were compiled manually from various sources. All data processing code live within each sector folder in /data-raw/.

To better manage our GitHub data storage, we have not included most of the raw data in this repository. See more details on specific datasets below. We can share our raw data downloads upon request.

Sector	Data source	Availability
Energy - Electricity and natural gas	Individual utility reporting documents	Many of these documents are large PDFs downloaded directly from utility websites.
Transportation	StreetLight Data	StreetLight Data© is a subscription based service. If you have access to the Minnesota DOT Regional Subscription, you can find the exact analyses we used on StreetLight Insight. Otherwise, the processed data are available in _transportation/data-raw/analysis_runs/
Transportation	MnDOT tables	MnDOT county/route system VMT and volume trends with vehicle type distribution reports are available on the MnDOT website
Transportation	WisDOT tables	WisDOT traffic counts and vehicle type distributions are available on the WisDOT website
Waste - solid waste	MPCA SCORE	MPCA score data were downloaded from their interactive Tableau
All	MPCA GHG Inventory	Minnesota state emisssions data downloaded from their interactive Tableau
All	Wisconsin statewide emissions	Downloaded from Wisconsin DNR website
All	EPA Local Greenhouse Gas Inventory Tool	Available on the EPA website.
All	EPA GHG Emissions Factor Hub	Available on the EPA website

Testing

To ensure consistency, there are a set of tests located in tests/. These are run before rendering in R/render_for_publication.R.

Contributing and Code of Conduct

Contributions are welcome. Please review our contribution guide before making a pull-request. Met Council employees should also review the internal contribution guide.

Please note that the ghg-cprg project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By contributing to this project you agree to abide by its terms.