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To achieve the dual goals of minimising global pollution and meeting diverse demands for environmental justice, energy transitions need to involve not only a shift to renewable energy sources but also the safe decommissioning of older energy infrastructures and management of their toxic legacies. While the global scale of the decommissioning challenge is yet to be accurately quantified, the climate impacts are significant: each year, more than an estimated 29 million abandoned oil and gas wells around the world emit 2.5 million tons of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. In the US alone, at least 14 million people live within a mile of an abandoned oil or gas well, creating pollution that is concentrated among low-income areas and communities of colour. The costs involved in decommissioning projects are significant, raising urgent questions about responsibility and whether companies who have profited from the sale of extracted resources will be held liable for clean-up, remediation and management costs. Recognising these political goals and policy challenges, this article invites further research, scrutiny and debate on what would constitute the successful and safe decommissioning of sites affected by fossil fuel operations – with a particular focus on accountability, environmental inequality, the temporality of energy transitions, and strategies for phasing out or phasing down fossil fuel extraction.
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This content will become publicly available on March 13, 2026
“The Kids Ask ‘Are We Safe?’”: Oil Refining's Unjust Environmental Health Impacts on Children
Despite knowing about climate risks for decades, oil and gas companies continually increase production. Infants, children, and adolescents are most vulnerable to intensifying air pollution and other upheavals of climate emergency. Here, we illustrate localized impacts of global processes by focusing on the Suncor Oil Refinery in Commerce City, Colorado, the state's only oil refinery and a major polluter. The Suncor facility illustrates broader structural and environmental health vulnerabilities of living and/or attending school near fossil fuel infrastructure. Drawing on community‐based, in‐depth interview data from 53 participants, we show how children have been affected by the facility's pollution. In 93% of interviews, worries over children's health problems—including respiratory problems, chronic illnesses such as asthma and cancer, developmental disorders, nosebleeds, and dizziness—emerged as primary concerns and consistent and harmful sources of stress and ongoing trauma. Rather than being adequately protected by regulations, children instead face excessive asthma rates, other health issues, and contested illness responses from medical providers. Their parents, teachers, and other caretakers face exceptional structural limitations to protecting them. We establish key localized harms of oil refining and answer the call for more rigorous examinations of how fossil fuel‐based systems impact children's quality of life.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1828902
- PAR ID:
- 10609155
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley Online LIbrary
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Sociological Inquiry
- ISSN:
- 0038-0245
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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