The promise of convenience and consumerism embedded in the late-1940s petrochemical industry boom shrouded an inconvenient truth. The products the chemical industry marketed as miracle, low-cost solutions for harried housewives—“long-wearing” nylons, self-service meats in sanitary cellophane, easy-flow paints—are made from climate-polluting fossil fuels and chock full of hazardous chemicals.
A longstanding failure to recognize the connections between climate and chemical pollution, a team of scientists and policy experts argue in a new peer-reviewed commentary in the journal Environmental Innovation and Societal Transitions, threatens to destroy the conditions that support life on Earth.
A magazine advertisement from 1955. Credit: Smithsonian National Museum of American History
Fossil fuel-derived chemicals permeate a dizzying array of consumer, agricultural and industrial products. Many of these chemicals contribute to a range of chronic diseases, including cancer, metabolic disorders like diabetes and obesity, and diverse reproductive and neurological problems, research shows. Their manufacture, use and disposal has contaminated the air, water and soil around the world, creating a global crisis on par with the climate and biodiversity crisis, the authors argue.
Discussions around climate change and reducing greenhouse gas emissions tend to focus on the oil and gas used for power and transportation, and the need to transition to different sources of energy, said Xenia Trier, the paper’s lead author and an associate professor of environmental analytical chemistry at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark.
“What we have talked less about is the oil and gas that goes into making the chemicals and materials that surround us,” she said.
Trier and her colleagues knew they had to jumpstart that discussion when they saw that fossil fuel industry forecasts didn’t predict decreases in production, because they were shifting from selling oil for energy and transportation to selling it for expanded production of chemicals and plastics.
“As we try to lessen our dependence on oil and gas as an energy source, the oil and gas industry is turning to material production to replace the demand drying up from oil and gas as an energy source,” said Gretta Goldenman, a study coauthor, expert on international chemical regulation and founder of Milieu Law & Policy Consulting.
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The oil and gas industry’s scenario for growth is making more plastics and more chemicals, Goldenman said. “So how do you stop that? How do you turn that around? That’s the question we’re asking.”
Petrochemicals are expected to account for more than a third of the growth in global oil demand, according to the International Energy Agency, driven largely by the demand for plastics. Plastic production has increased “almost exponentially” and is projected to triple by 2060, a