Air pollution More than 90,000 premature deaths in the United States each year and disgusting thousands of people, disproportionately affecting communities of color, a new study shows.
More than 10,000 births were attributed to cell pellets. Oil and gasThe author found that 216,000 years of childhood were also linked asthma The sector’s nitrogen dioxide emissions and 1,610 lifetime cancer cases.
The most affected are in California, Texas, New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, while the per capita incidence is in New Jersey, Washington, DC, New York, California, California, and Maryland.
Analyses by University College London researchers and Stockholm Institute for Environmental Studies are the first to study every stage of the oil and gas supply chain, from exploration to end use, which creates health impacts and inequality of health burdens.
“We already knew that these communities were exposed to this unequal exposure and health burden,” said Karn Vohra, a researcher at the Geography Society of University College London who led the paper. “We can only stick numbers to the appearance.”
Although the Indigenous and Hispanic populations are most affected by exploration, extraction, transportation and storage pollution, the Black and Asian populations are most affected by emissions from processing, refining, manufacturing, distribution and use.
Although the latter group of activities generally causes less air pollution than the former, the study shows that they create the most unequal health burden, with the impact concentrated in most black areas. “Cancer Alley” in southern Louisiana and Eastern Texas.
“What makes this study so valuable is how to dissect the health effects of oil and gas throughout its life cycle – from the ground to where it burns,” Timothy Donaghy, research director at environmental group Greenpeace Previous research On the racially uneven burden of fossil fuel pollution. “As many studies have previously found, these health burdens are not shared equally, which is a classic example of fossil fuel racism.”
In order to analyze on Friday in Science Advances, the authors developed a list of oil and gas production and use phases, and from Federal Government and the University of Colorado Boulder University. They inserted this data into computer models to track pollution from each source and use epidemiological and health data to track the adverse effects of these emissions.
These disproportionate effects are unexplainable. Instead, they are attributed to historic policies such as the Red Line – discriminatory mortgage assessment practices used after the Great Depression of the U.S. government, and high permissible rates for oil and gas processing plants that are close to black communities.
The authors also found that oil and gas are responsible for all the health effects of air pollution erosion in the United States: one in five premature births and adult deaths associated with fine particle pollution are from the department, while the authors found a stunning 90% of new childhood asthma associated with nitro dioxide dioxide dioxide disease.
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The study is based on data from 2017, which is the complete data from the last year. From that year to 2023, U.S. oil and gas production increased by 40% and consumption increased by 8%, meaning that estimates may be highly conservative.
The study comes as the Trump administration works to enhance fossil fuel production and curb renewable energy production.
“Given the Trump EPA and the president’s call for reckless deregulation in ‘practice practice’, this new study should be a flashing red warning light across the country,” Donaghy said.
Eloise Marais, co-author of Geography and Research at UCL, said she hopes the study is “attracted by those community leaders and advocacy groups that are pushing for exposure to cleaner air”.
“If we stay away from dependence on oil and gas, we will experience climate change from 50.100,200 years from today, as greenhouse gases remain in the atmosphere for a long time,” she said. “But communities will get immediate health benefits.”

Health & Wellness Contributor
A wellness enthusiast and certified nutrition advisor, Meera covers everything from healthy living tips to medical breakthroughs. Her articles aim to inform and inspire readers to live better every day.