Air Pollution From Oil and Gas Causes 90,000 Premature US Deaths Each Year, Says New Study (theguardian.com)
- Reference: 0178883568
- News link: https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/08/26/1750253/air-pollution-from-oil-and-gas-causes-90000-premature-us-deaths-each-year-says-new-study
- Source link: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/22/air-pollution-oil-gas-health-study
> More than 10,000 annual pre-term births are attributable to fine particulate matter from oil and gas, the authors found, also linking 216,000 annual childhood-onset asthma cases to the sector's nitrogen dioxide emissions and 1,610 annual lifetime cancer cases to its hazardous air pollutants. The highest number of impacts are seen in California, Texas, New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, while the per-capita incidences are highest in New Jersey, Washington DC, New York, California and Maryland.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/22/air-pollution-oil-gas-health-study
Shocking, but... (Score:4, Insightful)
Let's also work out the number of years added to everyone's life by oil & gas, giving us access to cheap energy and a range of products that improve the quality of our lives. Sure, we have better alternatives now and we should move on, but if we "just stop oil" as some people are suggesting, we'll see premature deaths on a biblical scale.
Also FTFY: "with disproportionately high impacts on low income communities ". The original phrase sounds like a dog whistle.
Yeah but we've got wind & solar (Score:2)
and if we had a functioning civilization we'd have nuke too, but well....
e.g. there's little or no reason for us to accept those deaths anymore, let along the trillions in externalized costs from the oil industry. We didn't fight $7t in middle east wars for "freedom".
And no, it's not a dog whistle. A dog whistle is when you say something that communicates to a specific group something you do not want the wider audience to be aware of. The fact that poor communities are more likely to live in pollut
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> and if we had a functioning civilization we'd have nuke too, but well....
So rally up some investors and start building reactors, what's stopping you? Maybe you can get around the fact that it's not profitable by taking a lead from yesterday's Peter Thiel-funded biotech story and also sell NukeCoins or cooling tower NFTs.
And the waste problem? Eh, just put it in the shrimp. Everybody just expects them to be radioactive now anyway.
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> So rally up some investors and start building reactors, what's stopping you?
Probably the NRC.
For a very long time the NRC had members that would flat out refuse to issue permits no matter how well funded a project was, or how detailed the application spelled out safety and profitability. There's been some applications sitting with the NRC for years, decades even, before the people that submitted the application just ran out of money to keep the application alive. It sounds like attitudes have changed enough that we might finally have the NRC do their job of reviewing applications
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I'll agree that there's room in the marketplace for nuclear, but it's more like how there's always some third party Amazon seller offering to sell you a box of cereal for $20, if you really want it badly enough.
There are customers willing to pay what nuclear energy costs to bring to market, but the 1950s dreams of "too cheap to meter" were just that - dreams. If your goal really is to produce abundant cheap power, you have to go with the energy sources where both the fuel and byproduct disposal costs are a
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> The fact that poor communities are more likely to live in polluted areas is just facts. You not liking facts doesn't make them not facts...
That's not the important criticism. The important criticism is that just because it's targeting poor black communities doesn't mean it is racism. It could be simple economics or it could be classism. The article with it's "most affected by" fails to go beyond correlation to actually reach causation. I don't specifically see why the poor rural white communities of the Appalachians should not also be affected by pollution from transport and exploration of oil.
However, the article might also be right. Maybe so
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You're missing the point: fossil fuels are racist .
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I don't think that's really what's meant by that.
I think it's really, "the use of fossil fuels rewards the producers of a resource that greatly benefits to this day from institutional racism."
Fossil fuels of course can't be racist. They're fuel.
Even using them doesn't make you racist. But there is good evidence to show that using them does disproportionate harm to racial minorities that ended up living where they did because of the pressures of institutional racism.
However, if that makes you feel unco
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It has nothing at all to do with racism. It's all economic.
It's just that Progressives have to attach 'racist' to everything they deem needs to go away as yet another reason to get rid of it. It's getting tiring and voters are starting to reject race being brought in to every argument.
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> Even using them doesn't make you racist. But there is good evidence to show that using them does disproportionate harm to racial minorities that ended up living where they did because of the pressures of institutional racism.
In this particular study somehow native Americans were least exposed while Asians get the shortest end of the stick beating out Hispanics and Blacks in exposure. Yet in every metric I've ever seen Asians consistently come out ahead of every other ethnic group including whites in crime, median income and life expectancy. This seems to directly cut against your racism theory.
If you combine the studies assertion **96%** of the pollution being **end use** and compare the end use map on pg4 of the study with a
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> Let's also work out the number of years added to everyone's life by oil & gas
Go ahead. Show your work. Avoid false dichotomies in the process like the one you've presented here.
> giving us access to cheap energy
While you're at it, make sure to include the cost of cleaning up the mess. Oh, that's currently infinite since we don't actually know how to accomplish it? Well, why didn't you say so? Cognitive dissonance? You don't say.
> and a range of products that improve the quality of our lives.
Is the production of those products sustainable, or can everyone who is going to potentially be alive (if not killed by the pollution) longer than those of us who are enjoying them now just d
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It's not even necessary to run the numbers. Anyone can eschew the benefits of industrial society and go live in a yurt or the local equivalent. Very few choose to do that and even the past movements in the U.S. that did go off to form their own separate communities have tended not to last. The exceptions tend to be religious communities that have existed for hundreds of years. Meanwhile there are no end of people trying to move into more industrialized countries from less industrialized ones.
Humans aren'
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You and your argument salads could use a little less vinegar.
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This is shockingly ignorant.
Pre-industrial life expectancy was less than half of what it is today.
I'd love to see fossil fuels relegated to the dustbin of history, but if you think modern human lifespans aren't dependent on hospitals with... power... you're a fucking idiot.
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I agree, petroleum is such a wonderous and useful set of molecules that has contributed so many useful materials and processes that it's almost criminal that we take billions of gallons every day throw it in a big pile and light it on fire so we can "make thing hot". It's caveman-like.
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This is a valid argument and one that does tend to work well with folks that otherwise don't care much about pollution. Akin to burning furniture grade wood or so on.
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My estimate is that approximately 7 billion people are alive today who would not be alive without oil and gas.
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> if we "just stop oil" as some people are suggesting
I'm seeing anyone suggest that. Phase it out as soon as practically possible is definitely achievable.
Don't worry (Score:2)
I'm sure most of those deaths can be prevented with some number tweaking.
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Seeing as how they were categorized with number tweaking, you're probably right.
Link to paper (Score:2)
Paper [1]https://www.science.org/doi/10... [science.org]
How about linking to the original source in the summary as the norm?
[1] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adu2241
Fake News! (Score:2)
...I sniff gas every single day on the way to my beautiful golf courses and I'm the smartest person in the world, everyone knows it! Wind and solar are wasteful and ugly, just like Rosie Odonnell! Real men sniff and create gas!
Used fuel still has a total kill count of zero. (Score:2)
Used fuel (aka nuclear waste from a nuclear power plant) has a total kill count of zero. Yet it is treated as some kind of gotcha by the fossil fuel industry and their allies in the antinuclear movement.
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In the case of nuclear fuel it's an externality that we have forced the industry to deal with or at least pay for and rightfully so, if we had left it up to private industry to deal with the waste with no laws i'd imagine the list of Superfund sites would include quite a bit more radiation in them. We have in fact managed the waste cycle somewhat responsibly (although an actual storage site and/or reprocessing would go a long ways)
If we had made fossil fuel producers, buyers and user cover the cost of its
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> If we had made fossil fuel producers, buyers and user cover the cost of its externalities (ie, carbon tax) we'd be looking at quite a different arrangement of energy today.
Except that carbon taxes are just putative, they don't actually solve the problem. Plus, when you have something that is as essential to the economy as fossil fuels, higher costs become just an inflationary pressure on currency itself, rather than an actual deterrence to fuel use.
Also, as has been mentioned many times before, in a democracy, raising the cost of fuels is political suicide.
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Punitive, not putative. Damn you, autocorrect.
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But that's only half the story, collecting the tax. Can't judge it without judging what you use that money for like developing more grid capacity, using the cost of fuels to build more renewable energy or fund more reactors or in the form of energy credits for most Americans. It's still a tax, the utility the dollars it provides is the way you have to judge if it's cost is worth it.
Carbon tax exists in a world where it is more politically attainable than direct action. I like direct action better but car
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That's the thing, Republicans aren't big fans of taxes in general.
And Democrats? Well, many of us have been burned too many times by "We totally swear to use the money for... *checks notes* umm... Oh look, a squirrel!"
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> Used fuel (aka nuclear waste from a nuclear power plant) has a total kill count of zero. Yet it is treated as some kind of gotcha by the fossil fuel industry and their allies in the antinuclear movement.
So much could come from used fuel, including more fuel. When a fuel rod is "spent" there's still a lot of fuel in it, but it has two problems. First is that there's fission products eating up a lot of neutrons. Second is the fuel was thinned out by some of it being consumed. One possible way to get more life out of the fuel rods taken from light water reactors is use them in heavy water reactors that conserve more of the neutrons. After that though it's "doubly spent" and so needs to go somewhere other
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> We have "nuclear medicine" because we have nuclear power.
Na. We have "cheap" nuclear medicine because we have research reactors.
Most were discovered outside of nuclear reactors, but made economical with them. Linear accelerators and cyclotrons still produce some of them even today.
Close the EPA (Score:1)
The EPA no longer wishes to even recognize the harms that may come from pollution. Their basic core function at this point is likely to be questioned and deregulated. I'm surprised Trump doesn't just close down the EPA. They should end the farm bill and stop paying for CRP while they're at it. Then we can see how many of these "stewards of the land" actually care to do so. The rivers will be pure puke at this rate. It's like mainlining libertarian dreams now. Filled with pure unadulterated vindictive hypocr
quite sure capitalists (Score:2)
manage that before lunch
Those are rookie numbers. (Score:3)
We gotta pump those numbers up!
10.9 million people died per year on average in WWII.
6.25 million people died per year of the Black Death during its peak years.
2.3 million people die of old age per year in the US alone.
Come on, big oil. You're not even trying here!
Obvious nonsense is obvious (Score:2)
Everyone (except for journos needing clickbait, of course) realizes this is clearly nonsense, right?
More of the same (Score:2)
"We determine the health burden of air pollution from each major O&G lifecycle stage by estimating specific adverse health outcomes associated with O&G activities with known statistical relationships between air pollution exposure and health risk (23รข"29)."
In other words they are not actually collecting and analyzing correlations between pollution levels and health they are calculating impacts from a table of assumptions.
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Apparently electrocutions kill 1,000 people in the US annually as well. I'm sure that BP and ExxonMobil can sponsor a story showing how that number is going to go up if we all get electric cars.
Of course, you should be questioning that study just from reading who sponsored it... just like you should with this one.
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Let us know when you have any evidence that refutes the study.
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Speak for yourself. I intend to live forever or die trying.
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> Speak for yourself. I intend to live forever or die trying.
I'm also working on a plan for immortality. So far, so good.