Full Title: Fossil Fuel Racism: How Phasing Out Oil, Gas, and Coal Can Protect Communities
Author(s): Tim Donaghy, Charlie Jiang
Publisher(s): Greenpeace, Gulf Coast Center for Law & Policy, Red Black & Green New Deal
Publication Date: April 13, 2021
Full Text: Download Resource
Description (excerpt):
Fossil fuels — coal, oil, and gas — lie at the heart of the crises we face, including public health, racial injustice, and climate change. This report synthesizes existing research and provides new analysis that finds that the fossil fuel industry contributes to public health harms that kill hundreds of thousands of people in the U.S. each year and disproportionately endanger Black, Brown, Indigenous, and poor communities. President Joe Biden and the 117th Congress have a historic opportunity to improve public health, tackle the climate crisis, and confront systemic racism at the same time by phasing out fossil fuel production and use.
Each stage of the life cycles of oil, gas, and coal — extraction, processing, transport, and combustion — generates toxic air and water pollution, as well as greenhouse gas emissions that drive the global climate crisis. Exposure to fossil fuel pollution is linked to negative health impacts for people living near these pollution sources. The impacts of climate change are also strongly linked with rising health risks and threaten the ability of humans to live in various regions of the planet. The public health hazards from air and water pollution, and risks associated with climate change, fall disproportionately on Black, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian, and poor communities.
This report gives an overview of recent scientific studies and analyses of the harms due to fossil fuels and their disproportionate impact on Black, Brown, Indigenous, and poor communities in the United States. The report also contributes new analysis of the disproportionate impacts of toxic pollution from petroleum refineries and petrochemical facilities on Black, Brown, and poor communities. The report reviews impacts from each phase of the fossil fuel life cycle — extraction, processing, transport, combustion — and climate change impacts.