A new scientific study has provided the most comprehensive look at how our attachment to oil and gas is killing people and making us sick. President Trump, of course, wants more oil, more drilling, less renewable energy, and fewer protections against pollution. The science shows that if he gets his way, Trump will flood our environment with even more pollution and end up making America sicker.
Of course, Trump says the opposite. In his loud, meandering style, he claims he is actually making America healthier:
“Keep the dangerous chemicals out of our food supplies, get toxic substances out of our environment and deliver the American people the facts as to really where we’re going. […] And we want to be healthy. And we want to have a lot of good things happen. And I think we’re going to have that. I think this is just the beginning.
– President Trump, Make America Healthy Again Meeting, May 22, 2025
Up is down, fact is fiction, dirty is clean.
It is exhausting to continually fact-check the most powerful politician in the country, and sometimes it feels futile, but I believe the truth is still worth fighting for. So here’s the scoop.
Oil and gas pollution is bad for you
A 2025 study from Vohra et al. published in the journal Science confirms what countless other studies have found. Oil and gas production, processing, and combustion creates air pollution that harms the health of humans exposed to it – and that’s before we even factor in dangerous climate change.
The new study uses cutting-edge science on the health impacts of air pollution combined with a comprehensive survey of pollution across the oil and gas lifecycle, from oil well to the refinery to the places where the fuels are burned. All told, just one year of air pollution from the oil and gas lifecycle causes an astounding 91,000 premature deaths. And that is in addition to over 10,000 preterm births, over 200,000 childhood-onset asthma incidences and 1,610 lifetime cancers.
One figure from this report is worth a thousand words.
Each row shows the estimated concentrations of six major air pollutants associated with three phases of oil and gas production. The Upstream + Midstream sector refers to the regions where oil and gas are extracted, stored and transported, and sure enough the pollution hotspots coincide with the Permian, Bakken, Appalachian and other large oil and gas basins.
The Downstream sector refers to facilities that refine and process oil and gas, with the Gulf Coast being the largest pollution hotspot associated with this sector.
The final End-use sector is the largest, showing the places where we use oil and gas products every day. This includes car and truck traffic along our roads and highways, in countless industrial facilities, and even in our own homes. The pollution hotspots for this sector sprawl across the country, closely tracking population patterns.
And this study doesn’t even include air pollution from coal. An earlier study showed that if you included air pollution impacts from all fossil fuels (including coal, oil and gas), premature deaths from one year of air pollution could be as high as 355,000 people.
Destroying public health
Trump’s support for dirty energy is notorious, but his second-term attacks on our health don’t stop there.
Trump’s EPA has announced plans to weaken environmental rules for at least 13 cancer-causing pollutants. Nearly 160 million Americans are exposed to the “forever chemicals” known as PFAS, but in May 2025 the EPA announced that it would abandon drinking water limits for them. Trump has even given coal plants and other polluting facilities a “two-year exemption from their Clean Air Act responsibilities.” The Union of Concerned Scientists estimates that 4.6 million people live within two miles of the polluters that received a Trump pollution pass.
Bizarrely, EPA officials have justified rolling back pollution rules by saying that we need to increase electricity derived from fossil fuels to help power AI data centers, so that AI can find more cures for pediatric cancer. No, it doesn’t make sense to us either.
We haven’t even talked about climate change yet. On February 12, 2026, Trump’s EPA revoked the scientific finding that greenhouse gas emissions endanger human health – a move that would end all climate regulations under the Clean Air Act with disastrous consequences. If Trump’s climate rollbacks are allowed to stand they would lead to an estimated 1.3 million more heat-related deaths worldwide.
To make it even more explicit, the EPA recently announced that it will just simply stop considering the benefits of saving lives when setting air pollution rules. All of this is a massive betrayal of the EPA’s mission “to protect human health and the environment”, but it could also start to expose deep fissures and contradictions in Trump’s coalition.
There are no doubt people in the MAHA movement who sincerely care about the many ways our modern economy is making us all less healthy. But increasing fossil pollution – much like firing scientists, eroding scientific integrity, elevating charlatans, dismantling the CDC, undermining vaccines, and ending health insurance subsidies – moves us in the wrong direction.
Make honesty great again
A wise man once told me not to lie, because for every lie you have to tell ten more just to cover up the first one… and then ten more for each of those, and so on and so forth. Well, after a decade of the President lying about things big and small, the problem has grown exponentially into a vast alternate reality. It’s not surprising that someone who would lie about winning the 2020 election, or accuse immigrants of eating pets, would also lie about pollution and health.
The cold truth is that ‘Drill baby, drill’ is a terrible idea, and the faster we can transition away from fossil fuels, the healthier we’ll all be.
