2023 Environmental Chemistry

                        News article        Scientific paper                  I chose an Axios article that discussed the estimated monetary health impacts from oil and gas production based on a peer-reviewed Environmental Research publication. The published paper, titled “Air pollution and health impacts of oil and gas production in the United States,” was released in May 2023 and highlights airborne harmful chemicals and their adverse effects to human health. Climate impact was also monetarily measured as a comparison, but more studies in this research were linked to epidemiology and human mortality. The significance of this article was that different fuel combustion processes--generating nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxides, ammonia, and particulate matter—are known to impact air quality and therefore cause adverse effects to both humans and the envi...

  News Article:  https://apnews.com/article/science-texas-trending-news-climate-and-environment-0eb6880f7c4532a845155a3bd44c2e4b Scientific Article: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acs.estlett.1c00173 September 11th, 2023 Ellen Gross The main issue discussed in these articles is the many large methane leaks throughout the Permian Basin: an area of West Texas central to oil-and-gas production in the United States. As nearly 40 percent of the United States oil-and-gas production stems from this area, the companies in control of production sites there benefit extremely from continued production, despite new studies demonstrating the methane pollution these sites are leaking into the atmosphere. Major news sources like AP News have begun to publish articles discussing this issue like the one I will evaluate here, “Hidden Menace: Massive methane leaks speed up climate change” published in July of 2022. The article cites a study published in ACS Publications , “Intermittency...