Top 20 carbon-emitting American counties revealed

Numbers 1 and 2 on the list of the top-20 largest carbon emitting US counties - Harris, TX (home of Houston) and Los Angeles county.

Yeah plus LA county should have pretty environmentally friendly power generation, so those huge emissions have to mainly be coming from cars sitting in traffic.  They need to do something about that.

But like the rest of the Vulcan project numbers it's a little tricky because they don't give the populations of these counties, and obviously the larger the population, the larger the carbon emissions. 

Well, Jefferson county (home of Birmingham) is not surprisingly the most densely populated county in Alabama, though it still only has 662,000 residents.  64% of its energy comes from coal (zip code 35224), though its energy-related CO2 emissions aren't far above the national average (~9%).

My guess is that the high population density creates some heavy traffic, and that combined with the coal power emissions creates the high levels of CO2.  Perhaps there are some coal burning power plants located within Jefferson county.