Earth Matters: New report shows devastating 'cradle to grave' health toll from extraction, transporting, and burning fossil fuels

As you may have heard last Friday amid news of all the other dystopian crap being visited upon us by the Trump regime, the Environmental Protection Agency is proposing to stop counting greenhouse gas emissions. The sick rationales behind this? EPA administrator Lee Zeldin says the gathering of such data is “costly, burdensome, and ineffective.” And besides, it’s “not directly related to a potential regulation and has no material impact on improving human health and the environment.”

The real rationale? Continuing the subsidized killing of millions and cooking of the planet so that the fossil fuel industry can keep those profits flowing.

On July 29, the EPA proposed a rule overturning its own 2009 determination in the “endangerment” finding that such emissions do have health impacts, serious and widespread. The public comment period on the proposal ends Monday, Sept. 22.

Meanwhile, this week, the Global Climate and Health Alliance — a coalition of 200 organizations representing 46 million health workers globally — released a new comprehensive report demonstrating just how wrong Zeldin’s assessment is: Cradle to Grave: The Health Toll of Fossil Fuels and the Imperative of a Just Transition. In a statement, the report’s author Shweta Narayan said, "Fossil fuels are a direct assault on health, harming us at every stage of their lifecycle and every stage of our lives, from the womb to old age."

The report traces health effects from extraction, refining and processing, transport, and storage, combustion, waste, and the legacy impacts of things like an estimated 3.5 million still polluting but not producing abandoned oil and gas wells. The effects occur in the early stages of fetal development and continue through childhood, adulthood, and old age. These include low birth weight, developmental issues, increased risks of asthma, cancers, cardiovascular disease, neurological damage like dementia, ad nauseam, ad morbum.

And, of course, the use of fossil fuels alters the chemistry of the atmosphere, which means more heatwaves, extreme weather, wildfires, disaster-linked health system breakdowns, not to mention economic damage that can harm physical and psychological health.

As the report’s title indicates, the alliance focused significant attention on the fact that the greatest harms hit low-income, Black, Brown and Indigenous populations. There’s also a geographical inequity. Places and populations that contribute little to global emissions often suffer more of the health damage. The report recommends policies that aim for “just transitions” with equity and compensation, not merely net-zero targets.

For more than two decades, environmental advocates have been calling for eliminating taxpayer subsidies to the fossil fuel industry, and the alliance added its voice to that. Calculations put the explicit and implicit global subsidies for fossil fuels at $7 trillion when factoring in not just production but also the externalized costs — health, environmental, societal. Redirecting subsidies and imposing “polluter pays” regulations on those externalities could generate all kinds of good things — including resources for health systems, environmental remediation, clean energy, and public health infrastructure.

The response from the crew of misfits running the federal government will no doubt be a reiteration of claims we are all made of carbon, so how can carbon emissions be bad.

—MB

WEEKLY ECO-VIDEO

RESOURCES & ACTION

GREEN BRIEFS

Some Charlie Kirk denialist remarks on climate change

Brad Johnson at Hill Heat has put together a horrifying and infuriating roster of remarks from soon-to-be-secularly-sainted Charlie Kirk on a whole range of topics, including Jews. But for our purposes today, the focus is on a few of his many pitiful climate-related statements, every one of which has been debunked for years if not decades—MB

“If you actually believe that climate change is an existential threat, which is complete gibberish, nonsense and balderdash—and all of you guys should be unafraid to push back against all that garbage, because it’s designed for one thing: power and control. And let me just tell you something that is a general rule, if your biggest worry in life is existential, you live a great life. If your biggest worry is the sky falling and not sanitation, nutrition, getting murdered on the way home, or being beaten, you live a very nice life. This climate change nonsense can only happen in a rich, generally peaceful society. You think that the people in the slums of India, the 300 million that don’t have access every single day to functioning toilets, you think that they’re worried about the sky falling?”

“Climate change is the wrapper around Marxism. You have Marxism at its core and you have climate change on the exterior. Climate change activism, environmentalism, pseudo-paganism — we call it a Trojan horse, a wolf in sheep’s clothing, it all sounds so cliché but it’s totally true.”

“Science does not have consensus … Science says nothing. Scientists say things. Science never talks. Science is silent … Now, again, global warming does not have consensus like the second law of thermodynamics. Global warming does not have consensus like a object at rest will stay at rest… The consensus on global warming. What an outrageous claim.”

“The amount of censorship that is now happening if you dare disagree or ask questions about the climate dogma, the climate earth-worshipping religion, is remarkable.”

“A tyrant’s fantasy is to have a massive green economy transition. You can get rid of private property. You can control people’s movements. It is fundamentally the abolition of civilization as we know it. For what? The science is not solid. The science is debated. They look at science as if it is religious, irrefutable dogma.”

“Jay Inslee is kind of the archbishop of earth worship, otherwise known as the governor of Washington.”

“When you secularize society it doesn’t stay godless. You replace it with pseudo-fabricated [sic] religions. As America becomes less Christian, as it becomes less Judeo-Christian in its values, you just go back to earth worship, the very thing the Bible was written to refute.”

“The built-in premise of the climate hoax is ‘carbon is bad.’ Well, carbon is life, actually. You can’t have anything without carbon. At all. Literally. Life is built on carbon. They say carbon dioxide is bad. How much carbon dioxide is bad? Don’t plants thrive on carbon dioxide? The earth is greener than any other time it ever has been in the history of the world.”

“This is left-wing ideologues that allowed the island to burn. That there is blood on the hands of the water worshippers. Christianity broke us free of pagan slavery... Could it be that Maui did not have to burn if they didn’t believe such wacky, goofy, pagan stuff?”

CLIMATE CHANGE CAUSED TWO-THIRDS OF HEAT-RELATED EUROPEAN DEATHS THIS SUMMER

A new rapid-analysis study of 854 cities preliminarily shows that 16,469 of the 24,404 heat-related deaths tallied in June-August were caused by climate change-boosted temperatures. The study only looked at cities 50,000 and above, and the Balkans weren’t included at all, meaning that only about 30% of the European population was included. Large cities are more affected than lower density populations by heatwaves because of all that concrete and asphalt plus the extra degrees generated by transportation operations. Even for the areas that were included, the count is probably an underestimate.

Courtney Howard, chair of the Global Climate and Health Alliance, told Chelsea Harvey at ClimateWire: “Most people who die in a heat wave aren’t reported as heat deaths. The result is that heat numbers capture only a small fraction of the real story at the bedside.”

There are measures for adapting, like green roofs, better access to air conditioning, cooling stations, and the like, but, Howard notes: "Experts do not believe that we can adapt health systems adequately to cope with the temperatures that we are currently facing. That’s why reducing fossil fuel use is one of the most important public health interventions of our time.”

Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London and a co-author of the report. told The Guardian: “The causal chain from fossil fuel burning to rising heat and increased mortality is undeniable. If we had not continued to burn fossil fuels over the last decades, most of the estimated 24,400 people in Europe wouldn’t have died this summer.”

—MB

CELEBRATING CLEAN ENERGY ON SUN DAY THIS SUNDAY

In towns and cities throughout the nation, thousands of people are expected Sept. 21 to celebrate the gains of clean energy, with a mission of spreading word about the benefits of power from the sun and from the wind that the sun generates. Some 500 events have been announced.

It’s a day of action devised by activist Bill McKibben for whom this will not be his first rodeo. A non-profit organization, Fossil Free Media. and an ad hoc coalition of advocacy groups not only to take some pleasure the advances so far and to promote an acceleration of the .ongoing green transition. Bill McKibben writes:

In Virginia, volunteers will climb rooftops to install solar panels on Habitat for Humanity homes, kicking off a national push to put 10,000 systems on affordable housing. It’s part of a $40 million drive to help low-income families save money and gain access to clean energy. In Portland Oregon, there’s a parade across one of the city’s big bridges, with giant puppets, Aztec dancers, and marching bands, followed by a "Sun Ball" celebration. A free concert in Monument Valley Utah, with Latigo, an Indigenous country-western band, performing outdoors and using solar panels and lithium batteries to power their sound. (Navajo tacos will be available.) In New Paltz New York the mayor is inaugurating a net-zero fire station; in New Hampshire the Mallett Brothers are giving a concert powered by the batteries in Ford F-150 Lightnings.

Here’s what Third Act will be doing on Sun Day.

—MB

RESEARCH & STUDIES

Showy dragonflies are being driven extinct by warming and wildfire published by Nature Climate Change.
Rare earth metals production using alternative feedstock that eliminates hydrofluoric acids published by Nature Communications.
Harms of introduced large herbivores outweigh benefits to native biodiversity published by Nature Communications.
Introduced species significantly impact native biodiversity worldwide, with extensive research on harms but relatively less focus on benefits.
Socioeconomic predictors of vulnerability to flood-induced displacement published by Nature Communications. Floods displace an average of 12 million people every year, and are responsible for 54% of all disaster-induced displacements. Displacement risk scales with the vulnerability of exposed populations, but this vulnerability is poorly understood at a global scale. The researchers show that measures of human development and rural areas explain more of the variance of displacement vulnerability than income levels measured by gross domestic product.

HALF A DOZEN OTHER THINGS TO READ (OR LISTEN TO)

Illinois’ push to train workers for solar industry jobs is paying off by Kari Lydersen at Canary Media. Kyle Barber is spreading the gospel of solar from the Scott Bibb Center at Lewis and Clark Community College in the southwestern Illinois city of Alton, on the banks of the Mississippi River. It’s one of 14 clean energy jobs hubs created by the 2021 Climate and Equitable Jobs Act (CEJA), successor to FEJA. And it shows how even in the wake of dire federal cuts to clean energy programs, a well-funded and thoughtfully implemented state program can foster a robust transition to renewables on the local level. Barber has been on the faculty at Lewis and Clark since February 2020, originally teaching classes on solar through a program funded by the Department of Energy. After the pandemic, he saw interest in the solar training program surge. CEJA allowed the school to bolster its offerings with wraparound social services and basic education, helping a wider range of students overcome barriers and prepare for careers in the industry. With one of his former students, Richie Darling, Barber cofounded a nonprofit, Solar Workforce Development, to teach courses on solar installation, marketing, technology, and other aspects of the business at CEJA workforce hubs and elsewhere around the state, including Richland Community College in Decatur, where leaders are pinning their hopes on electric vehicle manufacturing.

Vietnam remains a pivotal player in the fight against international wildlife trafficking by the Environmental Investigation Agency staff. In the first analysis of its kind since the COVID-19 pandemic, a new joint report from the Environmental Investigation Agency’s (EIA) offices in the United States and United Kingdom uncovers how Vietnam continues to be exploited by international organized crime networks to smuggle illegal wildlife products between Africa and Asia. In 2024, EIA conducted an on-the-ground investigation to assess developments following our 2021 report, Vietnam’s Footprint in Africa, which exposed the scale of the Vietnamese criminal networks involved in trafficking illegal wildlife out of Africa. While China remains one of the largest markets for trafficked wildlife products, it has strengthened its enforcement efforts in recent years, making it increasingly difficult for traffickers to move goods directly into the country. Neighboring Vietnam remains a key transit point for smuggling illegal wildlife products from around the world into China through their shared border. A Pivotal Player provides updated analysis of elephant ivory, pangolin scale, and rhino horn trafficking implicating Vietnam, drawing on evidence from a field investigation, seizure data recorded by EIA’s Global Environmental Crime Tracker, and other open-source records.

A beaver pictograph on a wall of Painted Rock on the Tule River Reservation in southern California.

Beavers restored to tribal lands in California benefit ecosystems by John Cannon at Mongabay. The relationship between beavers and people has been particularly fraught over the past several hundred years in California: A continent-wide assault on beavers (Castor canadensis) for the fur trade killed tens to hundreds of millions across North America, and they disappeared from many parts of the state. Since then, the few survivors and their descendants in California have often clashed with humans when beavers cause flooding and other issues. Recently, though, things have started to turn: In 2023, the state began a beaver restoration program through the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. Most notably, the program partnered with the Tule River Tribe, as well as the Mountain Maidu people in northern California, to move beavers to tribal lands from areas where they were causing problems for humans, primarily in the watersheds of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers. At the northern end of the Sierra Nevada, reintroduced beavers now live in a meadow called that the Mountain Maidu call Tásmam Koyóm, which means “tall grass.” The beavers’ homecoming has reinvigorated the wetland habitat, drawing in wildlife like willow flycatchers (Empidonax traillii), sandhill cranes (Grus canadensis) and river otters (Lontra canadensis). These moist grasslands can also put the brakes on the destructive fires that beleaguer the forests of dry western states like California. And the dams store water and trap silt, improving water quality downstream for fish and humans alike.

The Exotic Pet Trade Harms Animals and Humans. The European Union Is Studying a Potential Solution by Tracy Keeling at The Revelator. By the time a sugar glider named Mango entered an animal sanctuary in the Netherlands in 2023, life as a pet had taken a terrible toll. Mango lost both his brothers and his right eye due to health issues, despite being kept by a veterinarian for seven years. These days, Europeans keep tens of millions of exotic pets — as do people in other countries around the world. Although beloved by their owners, experts say most of these animals, like Mango, do not adapt well to life in captivity and often face health problems and premature death as a result of this legal trade. Globally, the business involves an estimated 13,000 species, many unsuited to being companion animals, says Michèle Hamers, EU policy officer at the nonprofit AAP Animal Advocacy and Protection. The organization runs the sanctuary where 9-year-old Mango lived — alongside fellow sugar gliders Radagast, Didache, Duizeltje, and Sushi — until his sudden death on July 21, likely from a hematoma. “Something needs to change,” says Hamers.

Colorado meadow used for Keith Sockman’s 20 year insect study. — Colorado meadow used for Keith Sockman’s 20-year insect study.

Insects Are Disappearing Even From “Untouched” Landscapes, Study Warns by the University of North Carolina. “Insects have a unique, if inauspicious position in the biodiversity crisis due to the ecological services, such as nutrient cycling and pollination, they provide and to their vulnerability to environmental change,” Sockman said. “Insects are necessary for terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems to function.These results help fill an important gap in global insect research. Although many studies on insect decline emphasize ecosystems heavily altered by humans, far fewer have looked at populations in largely untouched environments. This work shows that sharp declines can still happen in such areas, pointing to climate change as a likely driving factor.“Several recent studies report significant insect declines across a variety of human-altered ecosystems, particularly in North America and Europe,” Sockman said. “Most such studies report on ecosystems that have been directly impacted by humans or are surrounded by impacted areas, raising questions about insect declines and their drivers in more natural areas.”

The Resistance Rangers Want Your Help in Protecting National Parks by Juliet Grable at Sierra magazine. On March 1, under a clear sky, hundreds of people flocked to Colorado’s Rocky Mountain National Park—not to picnic but to protest. Two weeks earlier, the National Park Service had fired roughly 1,000 employees. A group of guides hiked up a bluff and hung an American flag upside down from its face. Protesters lined the road to the park’s entrance, carrying signs and chanting “Save our parks!” Among them were the park’s former superintendent, terminated probationary employees, and a 97-year-old who had spent many years as a park volunteer. The protest was one of nearly 150 held across the country that day thanks to Resistance Rangers—a group of 1,000 off-duty and former Park Service employees who are pushing back against the Trump administration. The group plans actions, shares information about cuts to programs and threats to public lands, and preserves disappearing park web pages. “We are advocating for our places, for the stories we protect, and for each other as people who work to fulfill that mission,” said Robin, a Resistance Ranger who was fired in February and, like some other Resistance Rangers quoted, asked that their name be changed to avoid retaliation. “One of our goals is just to raise the visibility of harms that are coming, if we can, before they hit. Because once something has happened, it is so much more complicated to un-ring that bell.”

WEEKLY BLUESKY SKEET

ECOPINION

Trump sends fracking CEO to Europe to sell climate denial—and gas by Emily Atkin at Heated. Imagine if Donald Trump had nominated a Purdue Pharma executive to lead the FDA, and that executive took a multi-day, taxpayer-funded international trip to tell world leaders that the opioid epidemic not a big deal and the best way to make citizens healthier is actually to buy more Oxycontin. A similar, non-hypothetical example of institutional corruption is playing out this week. Chris Wright, the massively wealthy former fracking executive who leads the DOE, is currently on a multi-day, taxpayer-funded trip to Europe to tell world leaders that the climate crisis is not really a big deal, and that the best way to protect their citizens is actually to buy more American gas. Given the falsehoods Wright has been spreading, and the conflict of interest Wright has in spreading them, I’m surprised this hasn’t been a bigger story. It’s a staggering example of state-sponsored disinformation and regulatory capture by Big Oil.

A scenic stretch of the Colorado River. — The Colorado River

‘No One Comes Out of This Unscathed’: Experts Warn That Colorado River Use Needs Cutting Immediately by Wyatt Myskow at Inside Climate News. Consumption of Colorado River water is outpacing nature’s ability to replenish it, with the basin’s reservoirs on the verge of being depleted to the point of exhaustion without urgent federal action to cut use, according to a new analysis from leading experts of the river. The analysis, published Thursday, found that if the river’s water continues to be used at the same rate and the Southwest sees another winter as dry as the last one, Lakes Mead and Powell—the nation’s two largest reservoirs—would collectively hold 9 percent of the water they can store by the end of next summer. After enduring decades of overconsumption of the river’s water, the lakes would have just under 4 million acre feet of water in storage for emergencies and drier years when demand can’t be met. Every year, roughly 13 million acre feet is taken from the river for drinking water and human development across the region, with conservative forecasts estimating roughly 9.3 million acre feet of inflow next year. The report is stark in its assessment of the situation: Current Colorado River levels require “immediate and substantial reductions in consumptive use across the Basin” or Lake Powell by 2027 would have no storage left and “would have to be operated as a ‘run of river” facility” in which only the inflow from the river could be released downstream.

Can We Feed 10 Billion People Without Destroying the Planet in the Process? By JuanPablo Ramirez-Franco at Grist and WBEZ via Mother Jones. Michael Grunwald set out to write his third book, he was determined not to produce a “Debbie Downer.” And he hasn’t. That’s surprising considering his latest book, We’re Eating the Earth: The Race to Fix Our Food System, wrestles with an increasingly thorny question: Can the world’s food systems be transformed in time to feed everyone without destroying the ecosystems that sustain us? The math is brutal. With the global population projected to hit 10 billion by 2050, experts warn we will need to produce at least 50% more calories than we did in 2010. That surge in demand, he writes, is the equivalent of handing a dozen extra Olive Garden breadsticks to everyone alive—every single day. But the food systems that produce, process, package, and distribute crops and meat will need to accommodate the staggering demand and are already a primary driver of the climate crisis. The industry is currently responsible for about a third of all greenhouse gas emissions. That footprint includes everything from methane in cows’ burps and decomposing food in landfills to nitrous oxide released by fertilizers.

Rooftop solar in Richmond, Calif. — Rooftop solar in Richmond, California

Rooftop solar is in a slump. Are dark days ahead? By Brian Bienkowski at The New Lede. From 2015 to 2023, California’s small-scale solar capacity, generated largely from residential rooftops and shared community panels on rooftops and solar farms — rose roughly six-fold, according to data from California’s three largest electric utilities. Nationally, small-scale solar capacity grew nearly five-fold over that time frame. [...] Now, the popularity of residential solar is seeing a steep reversal due to shifting state and federal policies driven by powerful utility interests. And while some say the decline is simply a mild adjustment, others fear the market for residential solar may be on the brink of a long-term slide. Forty-two states saw a decrease in residential solar installs last year, with residential solar capacity down 39%, according to the most recent report from the US Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory. In the first quarter of 2025, the trend continued: residential solar installs declined 13% compared to the first quarter of 2024. More than 100 solar companies filed for bankruptcy in 2024.

Bill McKibben’s Far-Too-Sunny Outlook for Solar Power by Alexander Zaitchtikat at The New Republic. Neither the sunlit path of a renewable “transition” nor McKibben’s advocacy are new, of course. He has been staking his name and reputation on this transition for the better part of two decades. What’s new is the mix of aggressive offense, scrappy defense, and oversize confidence he brings to it. Here Comes the Sun is the most programmatic of McKibben’s more than 20 books, a collection of good-news headlines and data points arranged to bolster faith in the supposition that we can solarize electricity and electrify the global economy, all without reducing global energy demand, in time to attain net-zero emissions by 2050. Every prong of this remains controversial, including across the broad spectrum of those who support phasing out fossil fuels and building out renewable energy with all deliberate speed. But McKibben treats these matters as all but settled, and he punctuates his lawyerly pitch to the general reader with gavel-rapping requests for order in the climate movement court.