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.
“Our study is able to put numbers to this health burden,” he said, noting that most other studies have focused on health outcomes from burning fossil fuels, or were focused on specific geographic regions. “This shows us how bad it is from exploration, extraction and refining all the way to consumption.”
The greatest harm came from the latter stages in the life cycle of oil and gas, the researchers found, such as exhaust from factories and vehicles, a type of air pollution that alone accounted for 96% of the incidents they linked to the oil and gas sector.
California ranked at the top of the list of the states most affected, followed by Texas, New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Even when the rankings are adjusted for population, California comes in at No. 4.
“It still means that Californians have a high vulnerability to all of these pollutants,” Vohra said.
The researchers used advanced computer models to map air pollution that stems from oil and gas activities around the country. With this information, along with existing health data from government agencies and other sources from 2017 — the most recent year for which comprehensive data were available — they developed estimates of the number of early deaths, preterm births, asthma cases and other outcomes.
The data allowed the scientists to give estimates only down to the county level in each state, so the findings can’t be used to compare one neighborhood with another within those boundaries.
In California, Los Angeles County sits at or near the top of the list in each category of harm measured, Vohra said.
— Among adults age 25 and over, there were 10,022 early deaths due to fine particles from oil and gas emissions in California, 3,674 of which were in L.A. County.
— Among California seniors age 65 and older, there were 7,273 deaths from illnesses linked to nitrogen dioxide, mainly vehicle exhaust. Of those, 2,815 were in L.A. County.
— For preterm births linked to particles from oil and gas activities, there were 2,319 in California and 867 in L.A. County.
— Ozone-related chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD, led to 137 early deaths in California. Of those, two were in L.A. County.
— There were 40,974 new cases of asthma in children under 18 in California in 2017. Of those, 14,452 were in L.A. County. (The study found that 90% of new childhood asthma cases in the U.S. were linked to nitrogen dioxide from oil and gas sector air pollution.)
— The researchers also attributed 298 cancer diagnoses statewide linked to a lifetime of exposure to hazardous air pollutants in 2017 — 130 of which were in Los Angeles County.
The data, Vohra said, also revealed broad racial disparities.
For example, the researchers found that upstream air pollution from oil and gas, such as from drilling, disproportionately hurt Native Americans and Latinos, while the health harms from latter-stage pollution, such as from combustion engines, disproportionately affected Black and Asian American communities.
“Much of the disparity in exposures and health outcomes stem from a legacy of zoning practices, such as ‘redlining,’ that relegated certain populations to live near pollution hotspots such as industrial areas or high-traffic roadways,” the research team said in a statement. “Permitting of large factories that produce products from oil and gas is another contributing factor.”
Warmsley has been working to raise awareness about how air pollution from oil drilling hurts residents in South L.A. since 2000. She’s currently the co-chair of the oil drilling committee for the nonprofit advocacy group Strategic Concepts in Organizing and Policy Education, or SCOPE, which is part of a coalition of anti-drilling groups called STAND-LA.
Warmsley grew up around West 59th Street and South Vermont Avenue — a densely populated residential district sandwiched between the 110 Freeway and the 1,000-acre Inglewood Oil Field, the largest urban oil field in the U.S. She remembers being awakened by the rumble of freight trains each night, the sight of plumes spilling from nearby smokestacks and smelling a mysterious foul odor in the air.
Warmsley still lives in the area.
“You wake up and there’s always dirt on your car — even after washing it — or there’s fuzz on the windows,” she said. “They need to clean up our environment.”
One of the reasons that the researchers in Europe chose to study air pollution and inequality in the U.S. was to equip residents like Warmsley with science-based information that they can use to persuade elected officials to see long-standing environmental problems as a public health crisis, said Eloise Marais, a professor of atmospheric chemistry and air quality at University College London and a senior author on the study.
The other goal, Marais said, was to help make the case for ending America’s reliance on polluting fossil fuels.
The study comes as California performs an about-face on the subject of oil extraction and fossil fuel consumption.
After accusing oil companies of gouging motorists at the gas pump, pushing to cap oil company profits and calling for an end to the state’s reliance on fossil fuels, Gov. Gavin Newsom, facing shifting political winds in the U.S., has softened his tone of late.
“We are all the beneficiaries of oil and gas,” he said at a recent news conference. “So it’s always been about finding a just transition of pragmatism in terms of that process.
Even with the more measured rhetoric, Newsom and other state Democrats have pushed back against new projections from USC showing that gas prices could surpass $8 a gallon by 2026. The increase, the USC team said, would come as a consequence of state regulations, tax policies and reductions in refining capacity that would result from shutting down oil refineries in Los Angeles and other parts of the state, USC professor Michael A. Mische wrote in the analysis.
Warmsely said that although she welcomes the new report from the European researchers, she’s not convinced that oil companies are sensitive to the dangers their industry poses to communities like hers.
“They’re making millions at the expense of our loved ones,” she said of oil companies.
She’s also frustrated with city officials in Los Angeles, who have banned new oil wells and set their own 20-year timeline to phase out oil extraction in L.A.
“That’s too long,” Warmsley said. “It’s time to go.”
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