Want to know where the biggest greenhouse gas emitters are near you? There’s a map for that.

Two weeks ago, the EPA released the greenhouse gas emissions data for all of the country’s “large sources,” a group that includes the power plants, refineries, chemical plants, manufacturers, landfills, and factories. Collectively, they emit the equivalent of 25,000-plus tons of carbon dioxide each year. Alongside all of that data, they made a map.

The data reporting itself is the result of legislation signed by President George W. Bush in the waning days of his time in office. The GHG Reporting Program is considered a valuable, if long overdue, first step to addressing our massive national contribution to climate change. After all, you can’t manage what you can’t measure.

By law, the agency must not only gather the data but also distribute it to the public. This is where the map comes in. Let’s take a look at it.

To be blunt, the platform isn’t as user-friendly as many of us have come to expect in the point-and-click-and-wow! Google Maps era. But it does make a heck of a lot of information much more manageable to anyone who wants to take the time to figure the database out. The map system will likely prove most useful to the regulators themselves (assuming that greenhouse gases will someday be regulated). Or perhaps to ambitious activists or savvy sustainability business consultants. But on his Switchboard blog, NRDC's Peter Lehrer explains how the public will also benefit from the platform.

Why is this important? For those of us who track this issue every day, the data is unsurprising. Power plants are far and away the biggest emitters of global warming pollution, responsible for nearly 75 percent of the pie. But making the information specific, local, and easily accessible for the public brings the issue of global warming out of the clouds, so to speak, and down to earth. Knowing who the polluters are, and where they're located, is the first step toward holding them accountable.

And let's not forget the map can be fun (in the dorkiest of ways) for anyone to click around your region and see who the big atmospheric polluters are.

Zoom in on Macon, Georgia, for instance, and check out the Scherer power plant. The coal-fire plant holds the ignoble distinction of being the largest single-point source of greenhouse gases in the nation.

By clicking on the Scherer site’s icon, you can learn just how much carbon dioxide equivalent the plant spews (22,978,929 metric tons), which gases it releases (CO2, methane, and nitrous oxide), and what activity produces the emissions (electricity production).

The site lets you rearrange the data into a selection of graphs and charts to compare the emissions of various sectors. Below is our the national greenhouse gas breakdown, by sector:

But the most fun, of course, is clicking around your own town to see who locally is most responsible for warming the planet. You might be surprised by what you find, as I was when discovering that the largest greenhouse culprit in my home state of Vermont is neither a power plant nor an industrial facility, but a landfill.

Of course, proximity to these sites doesn’t necessary mean you need to pick up and move. Carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are not an immediate health threat. That said, there are often plenty of local-level toxins produced alongside greenhouse gases. To find that nasty pollution, you'll have to check out another EPA database, the Toxics Release Inventory The creation of the TRI in 1989 has been credited with forcing industries to reduce their emissions, either voluntarily or through public pressure. Hopefully, the EPA's new ghgdata site will do the same.