9 Earths
9 Earths
This earth shows the 6,160 places where people are right now drilling for oil and gas buried deep underground, as well as 205 places where they are planning to start soon. Burning fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas for energy is the main cause of climate change, because of the heat-trapping gases this releases. It also makes the air unsafe to breathe. Already, millions of people around the world die each year because of breathing in polluted air from cars, power plants and gas boilers. Even though we can use renewable energy instead, many governments and businesses still want to keep digging up coal, oil and gas for another thirty years.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) concluded in 2021 that we cannot start any new oil or gas fields if we hope to bring global greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050. The report was requested by the UK government. That was four years ago. Today, governments still plan to produce more than double the amount of fossil fuels in 2030 than would be consistent with keeping warming to 1.5°C, the globally recognised ‘acceptable’ upper limit of global temperature rise. Even allowing existing oil, coal and gas power stations to continue operating for their normal lifespan would make reaching this goal impossible. This means we need to start closing these power plants early, not building more. The air pollution from burning oil and gas is already a major health crisis today. In the United States alone, the pollution causes 90,000 premature deaths every year, with Black, Asian, American Indian and Hispanic groups most affected. It also leads to more than 200,000 cases of childhood asthma and 1,600 lifetime cancer cases every year.