Experts issue “urgent warning” on burning of fossil fuels

A review of research into the fossil fuel industry has led an interdisciplinary group of scientists to warn that the environment, future liveability and people’s health are at risk if urgent action is not taken to stop carbon emissions.

The US-focused review has just been published in the peer-reviewed journal Oxford Open Climate Change.

The United States is the world’s largest oil and gas producer. After China, the country is also the second largest emitter of carbon dioxide (CO₂), responsible for 4.8 billion tons in 2022 according to the Worldometer.

“The science can’t be any clearer that fossil fuels are killing us,” says lead author Shaye Wolf, climate science director at the US environmental advocacy group, Center for Biological Diversity.

“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.”

The review found that 90% of human-caused CO₂ emissions come from fossil fuels. These are contributing to a warming climate, ocean acidification, extreme weather and ecological crises.

The US review also highlights that human health is also at direct risk from CO₂ emissions.

“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,” says co-author David J.X. González, assistant professor of environmental health sciences at the University of California, Berkeley School of Public Health. “We’ve got to work fast to end fossil fuel operations near our homes, schools and hospitals.”

Experts in Australia speaking with Cosmos stress that the problem and its effects aren’t limited to the US.

Pep Canadell, executive director for the Global Carbon Project at Australia’s national science agency CSIRO, says this aspect of the review is important “everywhere in the world.”

“We now have ways to model this based on real data on admission in hospitals and premature deaths due to pollution.”

Thousands of people die each year in Australia due to air pollution. Canadell says this number has soared in recent years.

Not just a US issue

“The atmosphere is common,” Canadell says, “which means that whether emissions are the ones we produce ourselves, or in Indonesia, or from the other end of the world in Portugal, they all get mixed and lead to a uniform rise of the mean global temperature.”

On average, Australia is already 1.5°C warmer than in 1900, says Canadell. He points to the rise of extreme heat waves, more severe whether events and unpredictable rainfall as indicators of climatic shifts on the continent caused by global carbon emissions.

“We can already pick up some signals of impacts,” Canadell says. “One is the regions in Australia where the mean rainfall is already changing: southwestern Australia, southern Australia and southeast Australia. We’ve seen a very clear decline over the last 30 to 40 years in rainfall, particularly in winter.

“The other thing that we also see is short duration, extreme rainfall – anything that lasts just few hours – are becoming more extreme.”

Canadell also points to impacts which are not so immediately perceived but are already underway such as sea level rise and ocean heat waves which are impacting marine and coastal ecosystems and communities such as those of the Pacific island nations where scientific data on climate change impacts is less developed.

Jeremy Moss, a professor of political philosophy at the University of New South Wales and expert on climate justice, says he is in “furious agreement” with the warnings made by the authors of the US-based review.

“We know exactly what the sources [of carbon emissions] are… emissions are growing faster than ever before,” Canadell adds. “They’re not declining or stabilising – the opposite of where we need to go for any chance of the Paris agreement.”

Moss identifies 3 key issues. The first is the proven causal connection between fossil fuel emissions and climate harm.

“Secondly,” Moss says, the fossil fuel “industry, both in the US and here, makes a huge contribution to climate change via non-emitting causes such as lobbying and public influence. Those things should be counted when we add up the contribution to climate harm.”

These fossil fuel companies have had a long time to develop “huge spheres of influence in society, in governments, everywhere in the world”, Canadell says.

He comments that fossil fuels were important to shaping the modern world over 200 years. But increased knowledge about climate change necessitates that these old methods of energy production “will no longer be at the centre stage”.

Moss’s third key issue is that “there’s a range of things you can do about climate change which will be altered if you include as a contribution to climate change the kind of indirect contributions that fossil fuel companies.”

Is enough being done?

Canadell and Moss agree with the report’s emphasis that the steps needed to reduce emissions are not being taken.

“We see the challenge of decarbonising the energy system as aggressively as is needed,” Canadell says. “It also goes beyond fossil fuels into land use, agriculture and everything else.”

“Australia certainly makes a contribution to overall impacts of climate change throughout the globe, which are being felt in our region, such as increased frequency and intensity of harmful weather events, sea level rise and so on,” Moss explains. “Australia makes quite a big contribution via both domestic emissions and emissions which can be traced back to the fossil fuels that we export as one of the largest fossil fuel exporting countries in the world.”

According to Canadell, emissions from fossil fuels exported from Australia are about twice as much as emissions from fossil fuels actually burned in the country itself.

“We want to see a more genuine pursuit of decarbonisation pathways that are now being established in many countries around the world,” Canadell stresses. “We know exactly what we need to do and the speed at which we need to do it.”

Review lead author Wolf, says of the US: “Clean, renewable energy is here, it’s affordable, and it will save millions of lives and trillions of dollars once we make it the centrepiece of our economy.”

Canadell says having a goal of net zero emissions by 2050 is a starting point, but missed deadlines for milestones and not having a plan to enlarge the supply of energy makes meeting that goal increasingly difficult.

“If all we electrify all the things that can be electrified have a renewable energy grid, then we can very quickly move to net zero emissions. The top is transport where we know that we can go very far by electrification. You may have a residual at the end that might need biofuels, hydrogen.

“Now, are we moving fast enough? Probably not.”

Cosmos has sought comment from the Australian Institute of Petroleum and the Australian Energy Producers Association.