If you ask children who have asthma what a severe attack feels like, they will compare it to suffocating, drowning or struggling to get oxygen through a straw. Some say it’s as if their internal organs expand and leave no room for air. Some have near-death experiences. Far too many die.
More than 6 million children have asthma in the United States. It is the most common chronic illness among kids. On average, it kills 10 people a day, primarily children, the elderly, people of color and low-income Americans. Black people are three times more likely to die from the disease than whites.
Fossil fuel pollution is a primary cause of childhood asthma. The fuels’ emissions also cause lung cancer, COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease), heart attacks, strokes, impaired cognitive functioning, premature births and deaths, impairments in mental functioning, and greater susceptibility to infection.
Back at the height of industrialization, air quality was much worse. That was before the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) began regulating pollution more than 50 years ago. But it remains a major cause of illness and death. The American Lung Association (ALA) reported last year that one in three Americans — nearly 120 million — lives where breathing is dangerous.
Now another consequence of fossil fuel consumption, global warming, is reversing the air-quality gains we made.
Researchers say heat waves, wildfires and drought are causing more emissions of particulates and more ozone. Jeremy Porter, who analyzes climate change effects for the nonprofit First Street Foundation, tells Axios that airborne particulates will increase enough over the next 30 years to wipe out the gains of the last two decades.
Now, the United Nations calls climate change humanity’s single biggest health threat. In addition to lung-related diseases and deaths, its effects include deaths and injuries due to weather disasters, the spread of diseases into new places, and food and water shortages due to drought and heat.
This is the collateral damage of the oil and gas industry’s greed. The industry’s officers, shareholders and financiers remain calloused or complacent about the human costs of fossil fuel addiction. Their profits are untouched by the nearly $80 billion that oil and gas cost Americans annually (based on a study last year of health impacts in 2016).
Too many elected officials won’t stand up to the industry and sacrifice its contributions to their reelection campaigns. The pathology of fossil-fuel addiction is the corruption of politics, leading to the corruption of morality, the environment and human health, all while harmless types of energy are readily available and less expensive.
The human cost is highest among children and adults who live near oil refineries, oil and gas wells, and highways traveled by gas-burning cars and trucks. They most often are people of color, older people and families without the means to move. The industry calls these places “sacrifice zones.” Those who are aware of the injustice call it “environmental racism.”
People who live within a half-mile of oil and gas wells experience elevated levels of carcinogens and other health threats. They are said to live within a “threat radius.” More than 17 million Americans live in those places, including over 3 million children. The locations are identified on an Oil & Gas Threat Map that lists the respiratory effects on a county-by-county level.
Public health officials in Colorado documented how people living even closer to oil and gas wells — within 500 feet — have lifetime cancer risks eight times higher than the highest risk threshold established by the EPA.
However, data like these don’t capture the real human costs in sacrifice zones. For example, one area stretching 85 miles from Baton Rouge to New Orleans contains about 200 petrochemical and fossil fuel plants, many near homes, schools, senior centers, workplaces and playgrounds. Some residents have posted yard signs that read “We live on death row.”
In St. John’s Parish, La., the cancer risk is seven times higher than the national average. “What’s happening in Louisiana’s Cancer Alley is indeed like a sacrifice, a daily human sacrifice on the altar of our global fossil fuel cult,” Human Rights Watch said in an editorial.
An Amnesty International study issued in January found that industrial complexes owned by ExxonMobil, LyondellBasell (a multinational chemical company), Shell and Intercontinental released carcinogens, including volatile organic compounds, benzene, toluene, butadiene, and ethylene oxide. In some areas, life expectancy was as much as 20 years lower than in majority-white neighborhoods just 15 miles away.
In Commerce City just outside Denver, Colo., Suncor Inc., which calls itself “sustainable,” operates two oil refineries classified as major pollution sources. Last May, Commerce City residents were told to stay inside after Suncor released toxic chemicals into the air. Suncor is one of the state’s largest emitters of greenhouse gases, producing pollution equivalent to 200,000 cars yearly. On Feb. 5, the state announced the company would have to pay $10.5 million in penalties for air pollution violations over two years.
A recent air quality study in Commerce City found its air contained carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, ozone, nitric oxide, nitrogen dioxide, methane, volatile organic compounds such as ethane, propane, benzene, hexane, and toluene, hydrogen cyanide, radioactive radon gas, and particulates. Vehicle emissions and other industries contributed to the toxins.
But for the oil and gas industry, this is the cost of doing business. Foul air is the smell of money.
Suncor would argue its benefits outweigh the costs. It boasts that it provides 5,000 jobs, pays $40 million in taxes, and creates $2.5 billion in annual economic value for Colorado. The industry reasons that more refining means more oil supply and lower prices. But Commerce City residents consider their health more important. “Why should our children and our community be sacrificed for cheaper gas prices?” one resident asked at a community meeting.
These ghettos of sacrifice remain out of sight and mind for most Americans. But in Commerce City, teachers are trained to help the many kids who suffer asthma attacks while in school. Meanwhile, the proverbial clean mountain air is clearly visible in the Rockies to the West. Or so it seems. In reality, Colorado’s coal-fired power plants, fossil-fired industries and climate-induced wildfires have fouled that air, too, with nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide, particulates and haze.
If the Founders could have foreseen this, they surely would have added unpolluted air and water to our list of God-given, inalienable rights. We literally can’t live without them, but millions of underprivileged American families are forced to try. There is no more despicable example of corruption and inequality in America today.
William Becker is executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project (PCAP), a nonpartisan initiative founded in 2007 that works with national thought leaders to develop recommendations for the White House and Congress on climate and energy policies. He is a former senior official at the U.S. Department of Energy and the author of several books, including the “100-Day Action Plan to Save the Planet,” published by St. Martin’s Griffin, and “The Creeks Will Rise: People Co-Existing with Floods,” published by the Chicago Review Press. PCAP is not affiliated with the White House.