“Any harm done to the environment … is harm done to humanity,” Pope Francis told world leaders at a United Nations meeting last month, during his first visit to the United States.
It is this fundamental connection between environmental degradation and human health that has us concerned about the prospect of Congress lifting the U.S. oil export ban, worsening climate change and threatening our communities with toxic spills.
Increased temperatures will spread tropical diseases to new latitudes. Heat waves will cause more deaths. Warmer temperatures will lead to more smog and decreased crop yields. Detailing these impacts and more in 2009, The Lancet labeled climate change ‘the biggest global health threat of the 21st century.”
These aren’t just future consequences to be experienced on the other side of the globe. In Colorado, intense wildfires and historic flooding have already taken their tolls. Scientists predict even more of these disasters if climate change goes unchecked, along with decreased snowpack in our iconic mountains.
To avoid global warming’s most devastating health impacts, we must end our dependence on fossil fuels and transition to 100 percent pollution-free, renewable energy. Finalizing the Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan was a start, but lifting our decades-old ban on the export of U.S.-produced oil will place us on the opposite course.
If oil companies have a larger distribution market for oil produced in the U.S., they’ll drill more — upwards of another 3.3 million barrels per day for the next 20 years, by some General Accounting Office estimates. Even if only a fraction of all this extra oil is burned, global warming pollution could still increase by 22 million metric tons per year — the equivalent of five average-sized coal power plants.
In addition to worsening climate change, there’s the public health threat of transporting additional oil across the country. While the majority of crude oil is now shipped around the U.S. by pipeline, shipments by rail have been increasing.
Not coincidentally, oil train accidents — where toxic crude oil is spilled into our communities — have also been on the rise, with more oil accidentally dumped into our environment in 2013 than during the previous three decades combined.
This year alone, we’ve already seen three major oil train accidents. In Mount Carbon, W. Va., a rail oil spill led to evacuations and a state of emergency. In Galena, Ill., a spill threatened to pollute the Mississippi River. A spill in Heimdal, N.D., forced the evacuation of a town.
Transporting the increased oil we would produce domestically if the oil export ban were lifted could require enough trains to span the country from Los Angeles to Boston seven times over, greatly increasing the risk of even more accidents, more spills, and more damaged communities.
There’s just no way around the fact that lifting the oil export ban means more drilling, more global warming pollution, and more threats to public health.
The president is against lifting the ban, and the measure only narrowly cleared a Senate committee earlier this month. That’s why we need our senators to stand strong against the oil industry and vote to keep the ban in place — for the sake of the environment, and for the sake of human health.
Anna McDevitt is a campaign organizer for Environment Colorado.
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