The health risks of working with fossil fuels
Working with fossil fuels can expose people to health risks
I received an email today from the Mesothelioma and Asbestos Awareness Center today. They are a health resource providing information on the hazards of abestos, especially mesothelioma - a particular nasty form of cancer, primarily caused by exposure to asbestos fibres.
Australians would be well aware of the dangers of asbestos, thanks in part to Bernie Banton. Bernie was a former worker at James Hardie’s asbestos plant. Sadly he passed away last year, but not before becoming the very public face of mesothelioma, and raising the profile of asbestos-related diseases.
One of the interesting, and disturbing, things I found out from the Mesothelioma and Asbestos Awareness Center’s email was of the link between fossil fuel industries and asbestos exposure. Thanks to the heat resistance, flame retardent qualities and chemical inertness of asbestos, for some period of time it was in extensive use in the oil refining industry.
As a result, workers at affected oil refining plants have experienced a higher rate of asbestos-related diseases. A number of studies have been done in this area. A study of UK workers in oil refineries found elevated rates of mesothelioma, as did another study of workers in an Italian oil refinery.
It’s not just the use of asbestos in oil refineries that poses a health risk. Crude oil and its refined products are themselves known carcinogens. Substances such as benzene, coal tars, and shale oils are all on the known carcinogen list produced by the International Agency for Research on Cancer.
As the email I received said, “few people realize that our environmental attitudes and behaviors are harming not only the earth for our children but also the workers who toil in these hazardous environments”. Not only are fossil fuels contributing towards dangerous climate change, but they pose immediate dangers for people who have to work with it.
Renewable energy sources, like solar cells or wind turbines, can also involve the use of some dangerous chemicals during construction. But once constructed, wind turbines and solar cells continue to provide clean power without producing either climate changing carbon dioxide or other potentially carcinogenic emissions. By contrast, fossil fuels continually require extraction, refining, then combustion to produce power, with each stage resulting in its own emissions.
Not only for the climate, but also from a health perspective, renewable energy sources are clearly preferable to the traditional fossil fuels. Hopefully, we’re already heading down a path where renewable energy starts to become a larger and larger part of our energy mix. Not only would this help safeguard the health of the next generation, but it might make a difference to our generation too.
If you’d like more information on asbestos-related diseases, you may want to check out the following sites:
Categories: energy, environment, green
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October 15th, 2008 at 7:31 am
Asbestos is a nasty material, to be sure, and many countries have banned it. However, it still finds use and is present in many old buildings and industrial facilities.