There’s some rare good news on the energy pollution front, confirmed by groundbreaking new use of satellite imagery.

Emissions of sulfur dioxide, the acid rain precursor that ravages respiratory health, have fallen in half since 2005 over what has been one of the most coal-heavy areas of the eastern United States, reported scientists using the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) on NASA’s Aura satellite. See if you can see the change in just past six years–the fade in orange coloring–on these before (top) and after satellite images. The black dots represent power plants and their relative size (click on the images to enlarge):

Here’s NASA’s report on the findings. This trend, in the Appalachian Mountain states of West Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania,