Top Scientists Issue Urgent Warning on Fossil Fuels.
Top Scientists Issue Urgent Warning on Fossil Fuels
In a new review, Mary Willis, Jonathan Buonocore, and other environmental health experts detail how fossil fuels are harmful to humans, wildlife, and the environment, and identify ways to transition to clean, renewable energy.
In a new review published in the peer-reviewed journal Oxford Open Climate Change, top scientists issued an urgent warning that fossil fuels and the fossil fuel industry are driving interlinked crises that threaten people, wildlife, and a livable future.
The review synthesizes the extensive scientific evidence showing that fossil fuels and the fossil fuel industry are fueling not only the climate crisis but also public health harms, environmental injustice, biodiversity loss, and the plastics and agrochemical pollution crises.
The review focuses on the United States as the world’s largest oil and gas producer and dominant contributor to these fossil fuel crises. It presents the solutions already available to phase out fossil fuel extraction and use, and transition rapidly and fairly to affordable clean, renewable energy and materials across the economy.
“From higher rates of preterm birth to increased mortality risk, the science is remarkably consistent: fossil fuel usage is linked to a wide range of adverse health outcomes,” says coauthor Mary Willis, assistant professor of epidemiology at SPH. “Many of these health issues are felt even worse in marginalized communities, exacerbating already stark health disparities.”
The review highlights that fossil fuels account for about 90 percent of human-caused carbon dioxide emissions, heating the climate, acidifying oceans, and fueling unprecedented climate disasters. Air pollution from fossil fuel combustion is responsible for millions of premature deaths worldwide and hundreds of thousands of premature deaths in the United States every year. The climate crisis causes additional deaths and physical and mental health harms from escalating climate disasters, disease transmission, food insecurity, and displacement of people.
“The science can’t be any clearer that fossil fuels are killing us,” says Shaye Wolf, climate science director at the Center for Biological Diversity and lead author of the report. “Oil, gas and coal will continue to condemn us to more deaths, wildlife extinctions and extreme weather disasters unless we make dirty fossil fuels a thing of the past. Clean, renewable energy is here, it’s affordable, and it will save millions of lives and trillions of dollars once we make it the centerpiece of our economy.”
Based on their findings and decades of research, the authors urge governments to immediately stop fossil fuel expansion and phase out existing fossil fuel development to limit the damages from the climate crisis.
“Fossil fuel pollution impacts health at every stage of life, with elevated risks for conditions ranging from premature births to childhood leukemia and severe depression,” said coauthor David J. X. González, assistant professor of environmental health sciences at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health. “We’ve got to work fast to end fossil fuel operations near our homes, schools and hospitals and trade fossil fuel infrastructure for healthy, clean energy.”
While fossil fuels harm everyone, the review details disproportionate harms of fossil fuel extraction, processing and use on communities of color and low-income communities.
“Decades of discriminatory policies, such as redlining, have concentrated fossil fuel development in Black, Brown, Indigenous and poor white communities, resulting in devastating consequences,” said Robin Saha, associate professor of environmental studies at the University of Montana. “For far too long, these fenceline communities have been treated as sacrifice zones by greedy, callous industries. The most polluted communities should be prioritized for clean energy investments and removal and cleanup of dirty fossil fuel infrastructure.”
Fossil-fuel-induced climate change and pollution are also accelerating extinction risk. Up to one-third of animals and plants could be lost forever in the next 50 years if fossil fuels go unchecked. To protect biodiversity, the review highlights the importance of siting renewable energy infrastructure in the built environment and increasing protections for ecosystems that provide vital carbon storage, among numerous other benefits.
The review further shows that the fossil fuel industry is increasing the production of plastics, creating pervasive pollution that contaminates the air, water, soil, food systems, wildlife and human bodies.
The review recommends ambitious targets to reduce primary plastics production and plastic chemicals of concern while incentivizing safe and sustainable plastics alternatives and nonplastic substitutes, as well as sustainable agricultural practices to limit fossil-fueled petrochemical pollution from pesticides and fertilizers.
“We have cataloged the impacts that fossil fuels have on health, climate, and environment—from the point of extraction through transportation and eventual use,” says coauthor Jonathan Buonocore, assistant professor of environmental health at SPH. “These harms are pervasive throughout the energy system, and piecemeal measures to reduce pollution from individual sectors, fuels, or emissions sources will not be adequate to truly eliminate these risks – but changing the energy system can be.”
The review also discusses a key barrier to transitioning from fossil fuels to clean energy: The fossil fuel industry’s decades-long, multibillion-dollar disinformation campaign to conceal the dangers of its products and block policies to phase out fossil fuels.
“The fossil fuel industry has spent decades misleading us about the harms of their products and working to prevent meaningful climate action,” says Naomi Oreskes, professor of the history of science at Harvard University. “Perversely, our governments continue to give out hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies to this damaging industry. It is past time that stops.”
Additional coauthors of the review are Robert Bullard, Distinguished Professor of Urban Planning and Environmental Policy at Texas Southern University; Nathan Donley, environmental health science director at the Center for Biological Diversity; Trisia Farrelly, senior research scientist at the Cawthron Institute; John Fleming, senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity; Naomi Oreskes, Henry Charles Lea Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University; and William Ripple, Distinguished Professor of Ecology at Oregon State University.