Rapidly phasing out fossil fuels and limiting energy consumption to tackle climate change is “a strategy doomed to fail” according to former UK prime minister Tony Blair.
In the foreword of a new report, Blair urges governments to rethink their approach to reaching net zero emissions.
Instead of policies that are seen by people as involving “financial sacrifices”, he says world leaders should deploy carbon capture and storage, including technological and nature-based approaches, to meet the rising demand for fossil fuels.
But speak to many academic experts on climate change and they will tell a very different story: that there is no strategy for addressing climate change that does not involve ending, or at least massively reducing, fossil fuel combustion.
“There is a wealth of scientific evidence demonstrating that a fossil fuel phase-out will be essential for reining in the greenhouse gas emissions driving climate change,” says Steve Pye, an associate professor of energy at UCL.
“I know because I have published some of it.”
Ed Hawkins, a climate scientist at the University of Reading, agrees.
“Rapidly reducing our reliance on fossil fuels, and not issuing new licenses to extract oil and gas, is the most effective way of minimising future climate-related disruptions,” he says.
“The sooner those with the power to shape our future recognise this, the better.”
Fossil fuels are responsible for 90% of the carbon dioxide heating the climate. The amount burned annually is still rising, and so is the rate at which the world is getting hotter. Scientists now fear we are approaching irreversible tipping points in the climate system, hence their support for an urgent replacement of fossil fuels with renewable energy.
Blair is confident that an emergency response on this scale can be avoided by absorbing CO₂ immediately after burning fossil fuels, from the smokestacks where the greenhouse gas is concentrated.
Not all of the emissions responsible for climate change would be prevented. UCL earth system scientist Mark Maslin says that natural gas, which would linger as an energy source thanks to carbon capture, still leaks from pipelines and storage vessels upstream of power plants.
Commercial applications of the technology also have a poor track record. Just two large-scale coal-fired power plants are operating with CCS worldwide – one in the US and one in Canada.
“Both have experienced consistent underperformance, recurring technical issues and ballooning costs,” Maslin says.
Blair might baulk at what he perceives to be the expense of ditching fossil fuels. But economic modelling led by Oxford University’s Andrea Bacilieri suggests his concern is misplaced. A rapid phase-out of fossil fuels could save US$30 trillion (US$1 trillion a year) by 2050 she concludes, compared with allowing power plants and factories to keep burning them with CCS.
Developing CCS will be necessary to help manage an orderly transition from fossil fuels according to Myles Allen, a professor of geosystem science at Oxford University. But it is not a substitute for undergoing that transition, he says.
“Above all, we need to make sure the availability of CCS does not encourage yet more CO₂ production.”
Keeping the public on board
Is Blair right to fret about a public backlash to lower energy use? Academics suggest multiple reasons to think otherwise if the alternative is prolonging the use of fossil fuels.
Replacing a gas boiler with a heat pump that runs on electricity, for example, can lower a household’s energy consumption without a deliberate effort. That’s because renewable appliances convert power to heat more efficiently (how much depends on how well insulated the home is).
In fact, it’s dependence on fossil fuel that is preventing many households from making this switch. The high wholesale price of gas determines the cost of electricity for UK consumers.
“Crucially, the public wants and needs the government to show clear and consistent leadership on climate change,” they say.
Meanwhile, what can corrode public acceptance of sacrifices is the high-consuming behaviour of a minority (think pop stars in rockets, as Westlake recently argued). And, arguably, the statements of powerful people like Blair.
New research even suggests the politics that Blair and many others like him favour might also play a role here. Felix Schulz (Lund University) and Christian Bretter (The University of Queensland) are social scientists who study how ideology affects personal views on climate policy.
They identified respondents in six countries (the UK, US, Germany, Brazil, South Africa and China) who shared Blair’s neoliberal worldview, which the pair define as a belief that individuals are primarily responsible for their own fortune, and need to take care of themselves – as well as an abiding faith in the free market.
“We observed a strong link between a neoliberal worldview and lack of support for the climate policies in our study,” they say.
Schulz and Bretter urge us to consider how someone’s ideology ultimately shapes their understanding of the problem and its solutions as well.
What makes Pope Francis and his 183-page encyclical so radical isn’t just his call to urgently tackle climate change. It’s the fact he openly and unashamedly goes against the grain of dominant social, economic and environment policies.
While the Argentina-born pope is a very humble person whose vision is of a “poor church for the poor”, he seems increasingly determined to play a central role on the world stage. Untainted by the realities of government and the greed of big business, he is perhaps the only major figure who can legitimately confront the world’s economic and political elites in the way he has.
However his radical message potentially puts him on a confrontation course with global powerbrokers and leaders of national governments, international institutions and multinational corporations.
The backlash has begun even before the encyclical has been officially published. US presidential candidate Jeb Bush, a Catholic, feels the pope should stay out of the climate debate, joining other Republicans, fossil fuel lobbyists and climate denier think-tanks in seeking to discredit Pope Francis’s intervention.
What makes the pope so radical?
There are several meanings of the word “radical” that can be applied to the Pope and in particular his forthcoming encyclical.
First, radical can be understood as going back to the roots (from Latin radix, root). The majority of Catholics live in the Global South; in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. Francis is the first pope from the Global South, and naming himself in honour of Saint Francis of Assisi, “a man of poverty and peace who loved nature and animals”, signalled to the world a commitment to going back to the roots of human existence.
The pope knows the plight of the majority world. Before he became Archbishop of Buenos Aires, he was a priest in the vast, poor neighbourhoods, the villas miserias or slums, of Argentina’s capital.
Improving the lives of slum dwellers and addressing climate change is, for Pope Francis, one and the same thing. Both require tackling the structural, root causes of inequality, injustice, poverty and environmental degradation.
Even as the quality of available water is constantly diminishing, in some places there is a growing tendency, despite its scarcity, to privatize this resource, turning it into a commodity subject to the laws of the market. Yet access to safe drink- able water is a basic and universal human right, since it is essential to human survival and, as such, is a condition for the exercise of other human rights. (p. 23)
This stands in stark contrast to, for example, Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, the chairman of Nestlé, the world’s largest food and bottled water company, who thinks water is a normal commodity with a market value, and not a human right. Nestlé is far from unusual. Its stance is backed up by the official water privatisation policies of the World Bank, IMF and other international institutions.
In fact, the encyclical is a radical – for a pope and international leader, unprecedented – attack on the logic of the market and consumerism, which has been expanded into all spheres of life.
The document states:
Since the market tends to promote extreme consumerism in an effort to sell its products, people can easily get caught up in a whirlwind of needless buying and spending. Compulsive consumerism … leads people to believe that they are free as long as they have the supposed freedom to consume. But those really free are the minority who wield economic and financial power. (p. 149-150)
The pope rejects market fundamentalism, instead arguing that “the market alone does not ensure human development and social inclusion.”
The strategy of buying and selling “carbon credits” can lead to a new form of speculation which would not help reduce the emission of polluting gases worldwide. This system seems to provide a quick and easy solution under the guise of a certain commitment to the environment, but in no way does it allow for the radical change which present circumstances require. Rather, it may simply become a ploy which permits maintaining the excessive consumption of some countries and sectors. (p. 126)
The pope’s right. The same criticisms of carbon markets have been made by myself and others.
Climate change is a global problem with grave implications: environmental, social, economic, political and for the distribution of goods. It represents one of the principal challenges facing humanity in our day. (p. 20)
While the pope is not a politician – or maybe precisely because he is not one – he commands high moral and ethical authority that goes beyond traditional partisan lines. His encyclical speaks truth to power, and he might be the only person with both the clout and the desire to meaningfully deliver a message like this:
Many of those who possess more resources and economic or political power seem mostly to be concerned with masking the problems or concealing their symptoms, simply making efforts to reduce some of the negative impacts of climate change. However, many of these symptoms indicate that such effects will continue to worsen if we continue with current models of production and consumption. There is an urgent need to develop policies so that, in the next few years, the emission of carbon dioxide and other highly polluting gases can be drastically reduced, for example, substituting for fossil fuels and developing sources of renewable energy. (p. 21)
The bosses of Shell, ExxonMobil and other fossil fuel companies will not like this message, as it threatens their fundamental business model, and it also stands in contrast to the underwhelming ambitions of the G7 leaders who recently pledged to phase out fossil fuels only by 2100.
The time for bold, radical action on the environment as well as poverty eradication has come. This seems to be Pope Francis’ message: “The same mindset which stands in the way of making radical decisions to reverse the trend of global warming also stands in the way of achieving the goal of eliminating poverty.” (p. 128)
We need to think beyond the current, taken-for-granted logic that believes only markets and consumerism can solve the world’s social and environmental problems. The pope himself believes the situation is so grave that only a new, “true world political authority” will be able to address these problems.
This article was updated on 18 June to include quotes from the final encyclical rather than the earlier draft leaked to L’Espresso magazine.
Climate activists and supporters displayed placards during a global climate strike rally, part of the Fridays for Future movement, in Dhaka, Bangladesh, on April 11, 2025. (Photo: Mamunur Rashid/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
“If, in fact, a majority of people in your community care about climate change, and yet elected officials aren’t responding to that, that’s a deficit in democracy,” one of the project’s organizers said.
According to a global survey, 89% of people worldwide want their government to do more to address the climate crisis, yet current national policies put the world on track for 3.1°C of warming.
To explore this disconnect, Covering Climate Now (CCNow) launched the 89% Project on Monday to encourage coverage of “climate change’s silent majority” and ask some key questions.
“If, in fact, a majority of people in your community care about climate change, and yet elected officials aren’t responding to that, that’s a deficit in democracy,” CCNow co-founder Kyle Pope told Common Dreams. “Why is that? What’s to be done about it? Where do we go from here?”
‘A Media Problem’
The 89% Project is designed as a yearlong initiative that kicks off with a joint week of coverage coinciding with Earth Day. Another week of coverage will take place in the fall in the leadup to the United Nations climate conference (COP30) in Belém, Brazil. In between, CCNow will host webinars and gatherings, promote the project on social media, and analyze the coverage to see what newsrooms are focusing on and what support they may need to continue telling climate stories going forward.
Already, major media outlets have signed on to participate, with The Guardian and Agence France-Presse acting as lead partners. Other core partners include The Nation, Rolling Stone, Scientific American, TIME, Canada’s National Observer, Germany’s Deutsche Welle, Italy’s Corriere della Sera, Japan’s Asahi Shimbun, and Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism. However, media outlets don’t need to sign up ahead of time in order to participate. They simply need to publish a story related to the 89% theme during the coverage week, include a logo and tagline with their article, and email their coverage to editors@coveringclimatenow.org.
CCNow encourages stories “focused on the people who comprise the 89%: Who are they? How do their numbers vary across countries, genders, and ages? What kinds of climate action do they want governments to take, and what are the main obstacles to such action?” its website explains.
“It’s also for newsrooms to internalize and newsrooms to say, OK, our audience really cares about this. We can’t silo it. We can’t get distracted by other things.”
The project builds on the work CCNow has been doing since it first broke onto the scene five years ago with a week of climate-focused coverage in September 2019 that generated some 3,400 pieces from over 300 partners. CCNow’s emergence coincided with the apex of Greta Thunberg’s Fridays for Future school strike movement and a growing awareness globally of the climate crisis and its stakes.
In the five years since, Pope said there has been a decline in outright “climate silence” from newsrooms, as well as “both-sidsing” the issue despite an overwhelming scientific consensus that the Earth is heating due to human activity. However, he has noticed a persistent pattern of “leaving climate out of stories where it should be.” For example, the bulk of coverage of January’s catastrophic Los Angeles wildfires did not mention climate.
The impetus for the 89% Project grew partly from frustration over hearing the same refrain from newsrooms.
“They kept telling us, oh, well, this is a topic that’s really divisive. This is a topic that most people want to avoid. This is a topic that is very politically split. And then when we looked at data, surveys from all over the world, we kept seeing that that wasn’t true, that in fact, a majority of the people on the planet care about this,” he told Common Dreams.
The project was also inspired by a “confluence” of studies that emerged in 2024 finding that an “overwhelming majority” of people worldwide wanted climate action. These included the study that the 89% figure is drawn from, which was published in Nature Climate Change in February of 2024 and was based off of a Global Climate Change Survey included in the 2021-22 Gallup World Poll, which was administered to 129,902 people in 125 countries.
Another example CCNow held up was a U.S.-based survey, published in late January by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication and conducted after the November 2024 election, which found that more than 70% of registered U.S. voters favored climate policies such as regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant, staying in the Paris agreement, and increasing solar and wind energy.
CCNow first began to discuss the 89% Project in the fall of 2024 and announced it publicly in late January.
The primary goal, according to Pope, is to encourage the mainstream newsrooms to change their thinking around whether or not their audience wants to hear climate stories.
“Our orientation is, we look at everything from a media point of view, and we sort of saw it as a media problem,” Pope said.
He hopes newsrooms will learn the importance of maintaining climate coverage even as other breaking stories demand their attention.
“It’s also for newsrooms to internalize and newsrooms to say, OK, our audience really cares about this. We can’t silo it. We can’t get distracted by other things,” he explained.
Pluralistic Ignorance
While the 89% Project is aimed at convincing media organizations that their audiences want climate coverage, another goal is to make those audiences aware of each other.
“One of the really remarkable things about this polling is the 89% doesn’t think they’re in the majority,” Pope said. “They think that their concern about climate makes them an outlier. That’s not true. You’re not an outlier. You’re just like most people in your community.”
For example, the 89% study also found that 69% of people would be willing to give 1% of their monthly household income to help combat climate change, yet they only thought 43% of their fellow citizens would be willing to do the same.
“Almost everybody dramatically underestimates the level of concern and support for action on climate change.”
Anthony Leiserowitz, who directs the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, told Common Dreams that the academic term for this is “pluralistic ignorance.”
“It basically refers to the fact that most of us don’t know what’s in other people’s heads,” he said, whether this is family members, strangers we’ve just met, or the larger groups of people with whom we share a country and planet.
“What we see consistently,” he continued, “and this is true across the board, of the general public as well as people in Congress, and news editors, and corporate leaders, and on and on, is that almost everybody dramatically underestimates the level of concern and support for action on climate change.”
What the 89% Project has the chance to do, Leiserowitz said, “‘is to actually help hold a mirror up to society and help them see themselves.”
In a way, the project is fulfilling a hope laid out by the paper’s authors.
“Importantly, these systematic perception gaps can form an obstacle to climate action,” the study authors wrote. “The prevailing pessimism regarding others’ support for climate action can deter individuals from engaging in climate action, thereby confirming the negative beliefs held by others. Therefore, our results suggest a potentially powerful intervention, that is, a concerted political and communicative effort to correct these misperceptions.”
And Leiserowitz said he thought it was important that the media step up to make this effort.
“The media is one of the primary ways that anybody who knows about, learns about, becomes engaged with this issue,” he said. “Most people are not going out and reading the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] report on their own or conducting climate science experiments in their backyard. That’s not how they’re going to learn about it.”
Therefore, he said, CCNow’s effort to “really encourage and build a community of practice around reporting on climate change is super, super important. The world cannot deal with this issue unless we’re talking about it.”
Democracy Deficit
Another potential consequence of making the 89% aware of each other is making them aware of the extent to which their political leaders are failing to represent them.
Pope anticipated the coverage might prompt readers to think: “Maybe we should all start questioning our elected officials more. Why aren’t you taking climate into account? If we all believe in this, why aren’t you doing this?”
The 89% Project is global in scope—and Pope said it was not motivated by the victory of climate-denying President Donald Trump in the November 2024 U.S. election.
“Americans have been growing increasingly concerned and even alarmed about climate change over the past decade. So nobody was voting for this.”
However, Pope said, the project did become “more urgent as this new administration has taken a hold and has really gone on the attack on climate policy.”
One thing coverage may bring out is the gap between U.S. public opinion and Trump actions such as withdrawing from the Paris agreement, declaring an energy emergency to encourage more oil and gas drilling, gutting environmental regulations, and defunding climate science.
Pointing to Yale’s post-election survey cited by CCNow, Leiserowitz said, “This is not what people want.”
“It’s pretty clear this election was not a referendum on climate change,” he added. “Americans have been growing increasingly concerned and even alarmed about climate change over the past decade. So nobody was voting for this.”
While Pope acknowledged that “U.S. politics right now toward climate are particularly odious,” about half CCNow’s collaborators are based in other countries, and they also report a false assumption that climate action is more controversial than the data suggests.
“This general idea that this is a divisive issue, that it’s a hot-button topic, that it’s something that our audience finds political, those themes you see over and over again,” he said.
In the U.S. under Trump, but in other countries as well, the democracy deficit between public opinion and government action goes hand-in-hand with a government attack on democratic freedoms to call for climate action. Trump has also targeted members of the press for their reporting decisions, such as banningThe Associated Press from White House briefings over its refusal to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America in its style guide.
Pope said that running joint coverage weeks was a good way to encourage newsroom collaboration amid tight resources. Could there also be safety in numbers against government repression?
Pope said that a unified front was harder to attack, though he noted that climate journalists have faced threats and social media trolling for years, and that the Trump administration was likely to continue those attacks regardless. However, he urged against panic.
“I think one of the reasons that the 89% framing is appealing to us is it’s not a fear-based idea,” he said. “In fact, it’s the opposite. It’s like we’re all in this together, and a lot of us, not just people in the climate movement, not just people who work in this area, but a lot of just our neighbors really care about this. So let’s not cower.”
This story is part of The 89 Percent Project, an initiative of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now.
Neo-Fascist Climate Science Denier Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.Orcas discuss Donald Trump and the killer apes’ concept of democracy. Front Orca warns that Trump is crashing his country’s economy and that everything he does he does for the fantastically wealthy.
Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds arrives as coking coal is unloaded at Immingham Port, northern England, as he visits the site in Lincolnshire to view raw materials destined for British Steel at Scunthorpe, being off-loaded, April 15, 2025
THE CRISIS at Scunthorpe steelworks, rightly if belatedly being addressed in the immediate term by state intervention, is the consequence of privatising critical national infrastructure so decisions on its future rest on the profit-and-loss calculations of private companies.
Right-wing media and parliamentarians, who are pro-privatisation and pro-war, want to avoid this conclusion. So we are seeing a propaganda campaign to blame it on other causes, each of which advances the right’s agenda.
One is that it is the result of pursuing “net zero” policies aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, a planned and publicly directed green transition is essential to Britain’s industrial future: it is leaving it to the market which places jobs and industry at risk.
Turning our backs on the climate crisis cannot be an option as extreme weather events and crop failures grow more serious with each passing year. Labour should face pressure not to drop its already much reduced climate commitments, but to invest in measures that directly help people — restoring its original ambitious plans to insulate 19 million homes in a decade, cutting emissions and lowering household energy bills, for example — to stop the climate-denialist right claiming green policies lower living standards.
The other is to turn Jingye’s record at British Steel into a “security risk” because the company is Chinese, scaremongering over other Chinese investments in Britain and calling for trade decoupling in line with the new cold war being pushed from Washington.
Here, socialists must take a clear position that distinguishes our opposition to any company not accountable to the British people controlling assets of strategic importance from a China-bashing narrative that raises international tensions and risks advancing the US-led war drive.
That doesn’t mean defending the behaviour of a firm like Jingye, which seemed designed to force the closure of the Scunthorpe blast furnaces and whose negotiations with government involved demanding huge sums of money while offering little in return.
But it does mean identifying the parallels between its conduct and, say, that of the Indian conglomerate Tata, which has also taken hundreds of millions in public money while refusing to save the blast furnaces at Port Talbot, a move set to cost thousands of jobs. The common factor is not the country of origin, but the lack of democratic accountability of companies not owned by the British public.
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers contractors in protective gear remove hazardous materials from a home destroyed in the Eaton Fire on March 26, 2025 in Altadena, California. (Photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images)
“We’ve got to work fast to end fossil fuel operations near our homes, schools, and hospitals and trade fossil fuel infrastructure for healthy, clean energy,” said one co-author.
“The evidence is clear that fossil fuels—and the fossil fuel industry and its enablers—are driving a multitude of interlinked crises that jeopardize the breadth and stability of life on Earth.”
That’s the first line of the abstract for an article published Monday by top scientists who reviewed “the vast scientific evidence showing that fossil fuels and the fossil fuel industry are the root cause of the climate crisis, harm public health, worsen environmental injustice, accelerate biodiversity extinction, and fuel the petrochemical pollution crisis.”
The new paper in the peer-reviewed journal Oxford Open Climate Change highlights the diverse impacts of “every stage of the fossil fuel life cycle” and stresses that the “industry has obscured and concealed this evidence through a decadeslong, multibillion-dollar disinformation campaign aimed at blocking action to phase out” its deadly products.
“The fossil fuel industry has spent decades misleading us about the harms of their products and working to prevent meaningful climate action,” said co-author Naomi Oreskes, professor of the history of science at Harvard University, in a statement. “Perversely, our governments continue to give out hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies to this damaging industry. It is past time that stops.”
“The most polluted communities should be prioritized for clean energy investments and removal and cleanup of dirty fossil fuel infrastructure.”
While the researchers focused on the United States, “as the world’s largest oil and gas producer and dominant contributor to these fossil fuel crises,” their review—including proposed “science-and-justice-based solutions” for an economywide effort to “forge a path forward to sustaining life on Earth”—applies to the whole world, which is quickly heating up due to emissions from coal, gas, and oil.
The article features sections on the fossil fuel-driven climate crisis, public health harms, environmental injustice, biodiversity loss and extinction, petrochemical pollution, and industry disinformation. Each section lays out the “problem” and “solutions.”
The climate emergency section includes details such as “the production and combustion of oil, gas, and coal are responsible for nearly 90% of human-caused carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and approximately 79% of total greenhouse gas emissions,” and “failures in political will to implement necessary climate action have made the 1.5°C benchmark nearly impossible to achieve without overshoot,” referring to a primary goal of the 2015 Paris agreement.
Although the current U.S. administration has demonstrated its alliance to the fossil fuel industry—including with President Donald Trump’s recent energy emergency declaration—the scientists still emphasized what’s possible in the country.
“In the USA, powerful policy levers are available to governments and civil society at the local, state, national, and international levels to phase out fossil fuels and transition to a clean, renewable energy economy,” they wrote. “These levers include regulation (e.g. applying and enforcing existing laws), legislation (e.g. polluters pay laws, fossil fuel subsidy reform, land use laws limiting drilling), and litigation (e.g. holding fossil fuel companies accountable, defending existing law).”
They also warned that “last-ditch efforts to prolong the fossil fuel industry are proliferating. These include counterproductive false solutions, like carbon capture and storage (CCS), which would perpetuate fossil fuel use while capturing only some of the resulting emissions, and hydrogen made from fossil fuels.”
The public health section notes that “air pollution from fossil fuel combustion accounts for 8.7 million (equaling 1 in 5) premature deaths per year worldwide and 350,000 premature deaths per year in the USA. In a single year, air pollution from oil and gas production in the USA resulted in 410,000 asthma exacerbations, 2,200 new cases of childhood asthma, and 7,500 premature deaths in 2016.”
Co-author David J.X. González, an assistant professor of environmental health sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, said Monday that “we’ve got to work fast to end fossil fuel operations near our homes, schools and hospitals and trade fossil fuel infrastructure for healthy, clean energy.”
“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 paper points out that “climate change is increasing incidence of physical and mental health impacts and mortality through multiple pathways: worsening extreme events including heatwaves, severe storms, floods, droughts, and wildfires; shifting ranges of disease vectors; threats to food security; and displacement and forced migration, which restrict access to healthcare and other basic services.”
“These harms, though broadly felt, also disproportionately impact marginalized communities which are already disproportionately burdened by other socioenvironmental hazards, as well as susceptible populations including young children, people with certain disabilities, people experiencing homelessness, pregnant people, people with chronic diseases, and older adults,” the publication continues.
University of Montana associate professor of environmental studies Robin Saha, another co-author, said that “decades of discriminatory policies, such as redlining, have concentrated fossil fuel development in Black, Brown, Indigenous, and poor white communities, resulting in devastating consequences.”
“For far too long, these fenceline communities have been treated as sacrifice zones by greedy, callous industries,” Saha added. “The most polluted communities should be prioritized for clean energy investments and removal and cleanup of dirty fossil fuel infrastructure.”
The paper’s other co-authors are Robert Bullard of Texas Southern University, Boston University’s Jonathan J. Buonocore and Mary D. Willis, Trisia Farrelly of the Cawthron Institute, William Ripple of Oregon State University, and the Center for Biological Diversity’s Nathan Donley, John Fleming, and Shaye Wolf.
“The science can’t be any clearer that fossil fuels are killing us,” declared Wolf, the paper’s lead author and the center’s climate science director. “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. Clean, renewable energy is here, it’s affordable, and it will save millions of lives and trillions of dollars once we make it the centerpiece of our economy.”
