Study: Air pollution from oil and gas hits people of color hard

Report is the first to quantify health effects from every stage of fossil fuels' life cycle.

- BY TYRONE BEASON

THE RESEARCHERS found that air pollution contributes to 216,000 new cases of childhood asthma a year in the United States. Above, a refinery in Harbor City.

Iretha Warmsley was born and raised in South L.A.'s Black community, and for as long as she can remember, air pollution from oil and gas has been both a fact of daily life and a harbinger of death and disease.

"My father died of cancer. My uncles died of cancer. My grandfather — most of family died of cancer, or they have some type of asthma or lupus," Warmsley said. "I feel like more of us are contracting these diseases."

A new study from Europe offers fresh evidence of an injustice that Warmsley and many other people of color who live near polluting industries and traffic-clogged freeways in Los Angeles and across the U.S. have long suspected: Black, Latino, Indigenous and Asian Americans are more at risk than white Americans from air pollution generated at every stage in the life cycle of oil and gas — from exploration, drilling and refining all the way to "downstream" pollution that comes from the burning of fossil fuels in factories and vehicles.

Air pollution from fossil fuels causes an estimated 91,000 premature deaths per year, with the greatest burden falling on Black and brown communities, according to the study, published Friday in the journal Science Advances by a team from University College London and the Stockholm Environment Institute.

The researchers also found that air pollution contributes to 10,350 preterm births and 216,000 new cases of childhood asthma a year nationwide, as well as scores of instances of cancer.

It’s the first study to comprehensively quantify the health effects of air pollution from every stage of oil and gas activity across the U.S. and analyze the racial inequities associated with them, said the study's lead author, Karn Vohra, a geologist who's now at the University of Birmingham in England.