Fossil fuel racism in the United States: How phasing out coal, oil, and gas can protect communities

Fossil fuels — coal, oil, and gas — lie at the heart of the interconnected crises we face, including climate change, racial injustice, and public health. Each stage of the fossil fuel life cycle — extraction, processing, transport, and combustion — generates toxic air and water pollution, as well as greenhouse gas (GHGs) emissions that drive the global climate crisis. Addressing the harmful effects of energy decisions, including unequal risk distribution across various governance levels, supply chains, and political jurisdictions, is a complex task for policymakers and society. A deeper understanding of how harms are embodied within fossil fuel life cycles is needed. This paper provides a narrative review of recent studies within the United States (U.S.) that document both public health harms and disproportionate impacts along the fossil fuel life cycle. In the U.S. the public health hazards from air and water pollution, and risks associated with climate change, fall disproportionately on Black, Brown, Indigenous, and poor communities. “Sacrifice zones” and systemic racism are deeply intertwined within the fossil-fuel based economy. We argue systemic racism subsidizes the fossil fuel industry by enabling it to externalize the costs of pollution and environmental degradation onto communities of color. We position “fossil fuel racism” as a subset of environmental racism and argue that this framing is useful because it shifts analytical and political focus to the systems and structures which are actively protecting and promoting continued production of fossil fuels. We discuss the implications of this body of research for climate policy, and outline how poorly designed “carbon-centric” policies—which focus narrowly on GHGs reduction—could fail to alleviate the racialized disparities or potentially worsen it for some communities. We emphasize the need to move beyond carbon-centric approaches to climate solutions to more integrative approaches to policy design that can improve public health, tackle the global climate crisis, and rectify our legacy of fossil fuel racism. Specifically we call for a managed phase out of fossil fuel production and the enactment of wider programs of social, economic, and democratic reforms via a Green New Deal. Adequately addressing the climate crisis and fossil fuel racism require political and policy solutions that disrupt the power and actions of the fossil fuel industry and their state allies.