Research: Top Scientists Issue Urgent Warning on Fossil Fuels

In a review published today 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.

Today’s 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.

“The science can’t be any clearer that fossil fuels are killing us,” said Shaye Wolf, Ph.D., 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.”

The review highlights that fossil fuels account for about 90% 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.

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 co-author David J.X. González, Ph.D., an 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, Ph.D., an 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.

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,” said 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.”

The 11 coauthors are Shaye Wolf, Ph.D. (Center for Biological Diversity), Robert Bullard, Ph.D. (Texas Southern University), Jonathan J. Buonocore, Ph.D. (Boston University), Nathan Donley, Ph.D. (Center for Biological Diversity),Trisia Farrelly, Ph.D. (Cawthron Institute), John Fleming, Ph.D. (Center for Biological Diversity), David J.X. González, Ph.D. (University of California Berkeley), Naomi Oreskes, Ph.D. (Harvard University), William Ripple, Ph.D. (Oregon State University), Robin Saha, Ph.D. (University of Montana, Missoula), and Mary D. Willis, Ph.D. (Boston University).