‘Any harm done to the environment … is harm done to humanity,” Pope Francis told world leaders at a United Nations meeting in September, during his first visit to the United States.

It’s 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. Lifting this ban will worsen climate change and threaten our communities with toxic spills.

The risks climate change poses to human health are many. Increased temperatures will spread tropical diseases to new latitudes. Heat waves will cause more deaths across the world. Warmer temperatures will lead to more health-threatening smog and decrease crop yields. Detailing these impacts and more in 2009, The Lancet, one of the world’s most respected medical journals, 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. Extreme weather is wreaking havoc across the country, including here in Maine. The average annual temperature has increased by 3 degrees between 1895 and 2014, with particularly hot summers. Moreover, precipitation has increased by 6 inches during that same time period.

Scientists predict more record summer heat and poor air quality days across the state if climate change goes unchecked. These are all catastrophes that scientists say will become more frequent and severe as the planet warms.

Perhaps even more alarming, just last month, a new study found that burning the Earth’s remaining fossil fuels would melt all of Antarctica – causing sea levels to surge more than 160 feet and plunging not only Portland but also New York, Boston and Washington, D.C., underwater.

It is not just our environment that is threatened by a changing climate. Maine’s public health is also at risk. The warming temperatures have created more suitable habitat for tick populations, causing an increase in Lyme disease, and the pollution fueling these changes has caused some of the highest rates of asthma in the United States.

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. Lifting the decades-old ban on the export of U.S.-produced oil represents the opposite course.

If oil companies have a larger distribution market for oil produced in the United States, they’ll drill more – upward of another 3.3 million barrels per day for the next 20 years, by some Government Accountability Office estimates. Even if only a fraction of all this extra oil is burned, global warming pollution could still increase 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 transported across the U.S. by pipeline, shipments by rail have been increasing. To keep up with increased demand, oil trains have grown larger and now tow more tanker cars than ever before.

Not coincidentally, oil train accidents – where toxic crude oil is spilled into our communities – have also been on the rise. In 2013 alone, more oil was accidentally dumped into our environment than during the previous three decades combined.

This year we’ve already seen three major oil train accidents. In Mount Carbon, West Virginia, a rail oil spill led that state’s governor to declare a state of emergency. In Galena, Illinois, a spill threatened to pollute the Mississippi River. A spill in Heimdal, North Dakota, forced residents to evacuate their homes.

With all of this in mind, it’s clear that lifting the oil export ban means more drilling, more global warming pollution and more threats to public health.

But there is a way to prevent lifting the oil export ban in the first place, and that includes U.S. Sens. Susan Collins and Angus King here in Maine. The movement to lift the ban is gaining steam, but it is by no means a foregone conclusion. President Obama is against it, and the measure only narrowly cleared a Senate committee last month.

That’s why we need Collins and King and enough of their Senate colleagues 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. For as Pope Francis declared, and as the public health community has long held, the two are inseparable.

 

Copy the Story Link