Health Impacts of Climate Change
Extracting and burning fossil fuels produces significant quantities compounds that hurt our health. They range from: carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide, volatile organic compounds and small airborne particulates.
Some of the known health effects of these pollutants
- Asthma, Respiratory Allergies & Airway Diseases
- Cancer
- Cardiovascular Disease & Stroke
- Foodborne Diseases and Nutrition
- Heat-Related Morbidity & Mortality
- Neurological Diseases & Disorders
- Waterborne Diseases
City of Albuquerque Air Quality Monitoring
Fracking
Oil-Based Plastics are produced from natural gas, crude oil, cellulose, coal and salt.
Reports:
Why Health Professionals Reject Natural Gas
PSR‘s report, based on summaries of recent medical and scientific studies, clearly conveys the health threats that accompany use of methane as a fuel. Here are some of the key findings it reports:
- Proximity to fracking operations are associated with congenital heart defects, increased risk of high-risk pregnancy and premature birth, worsening asthma, and increased rates of hospitalization for cardiac, neurological and cancer-related problems.
- Methane accelerates climate change. It is more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide over its first hundred years in the atmosphere—fully 86 times more potent over its first 20 years.
- Methane has been found to leak from fracking wells, equipment, and pipelines at rates that make it worse for the environment than coal. Those leakage rates, if sustained, move us closer to climate catastrophe.
Race is the biggest indicator in the US of whether you live near toxic waste
In 2016, a study published in Environmental Research Letters found “a consistent pattern over a 30-year period of placing hazardous waste facilities in neighborhoods where poor people and people of color live.”
People of color in the US are also exposed to a 38% higher level of nitrogen dioxide, on average, than white people. Nitrogen dioxide is pumped out of power plants and exhaust pipes on cars and trucks, and is linked to asthma, bronchitis, and a host of other respiratory problems. And when a power plant emits nitrogen dioxide, it likely also emits sulfur dioxide, another respiratory irritant