Fossil fuels are making us sick, and we're paying them to do it

There’s a conversation Australia keeps avoiding. It is that the same industry we collectively subsidise to the tune of $16.3 billion a year is quietly killing us.

The science is not in dispute.

As the UN Special Rapporteur on Climate Change and Human Rights, Elisa Morgera, puts it, fossil fuels are “the primary cause of climate change and the driver of other planetary crises- biodiversity loss, toxic pollution, inequalities and human rights violations.”

From the moment they are extracted to the moment they are burned, they cause harm at every stage of their life cycle. And yet Australia, one of the world’s largest fossil fuel exporters, continues to greenlight new coal and gas projects while its own medical professionals sound the alarm.

The diagnosis

In August 2024, Doctors for the Environment Australia (DEA) delivered their verdict at Parliament House: fossil fuels are a health hazard. Not a risk. Not a concern. A hazard – the same framing medicine eventually adopted for tobacco, asbestos and leaded petrol.

Globally, air pollution from fossil fuel combustion kills more people than smoking, with estimates of between 5 and 10 million premature deaths each year. The Global Climate and Health Alliance’s landmark report, Cradle to Grave: The Health Toll of Fossil Fuels, documents the full sweep of that harm – from the communities living near extraction sites, to the children breathing diesel fumes in urban traffic, to the patients filling emergency departments during extreme heat events.

In Australia, DEA found that fossil fuel pollution is already killing more Australians than car crashes, alcohol and gambling combined. That figure should be on the front page of every newspaper in the country. Instead, the industry responsible is allowed to spend millions on advertising and sponsorships, with no mandatory health warnings of any kind.

What makes the Cradle to Grave report so powerful is its insistence on seeing the full picture. This is not just a story about chimneys and carbon dioxide.

Fossil fuel exploration and production cause toxic pollution, water contamination, displacement of communities, and destruction of biodiversity and cultural heritage. The burning phase – powering our grids, heating our homes, fuelling our vehicles – drives transboundary air pollution that worsens asthma, heart disease, cancer and poor pregnancy outcomes. And decommissioning is no clean break: abandoned wells and mine sites leach pollutants into soil and water for generations.

UN Special Rapporteur on Climate Change and Human Rights; 2025 Special  Report makes clear that these are not incidental side-effects – they are human rights violations. The rights to life, health, water, food and housing are all compromised across the fossil fuel life cycle. Indigenous Peoples, women, children and low-income communities bear the greatest burden. The principle of intergenerational equity – that we have no right to saddle future generations with the consequences of our choices – demands we act now.

Paying to be poisoned

At a time when the government is scrutinising every dollar of public spending, The Australia Institute’s latest fossil fuel subsidies analysis found that federal and state governments handed $16.3 billion in subsidies to fossil fuel producers and major users in 2025-26. That is growing faster than the NDIS. The single biggest item, the Fuel Tax Credit Scheme, at $10.8 billion, flows predominantly to multinational mining companies.

Australian taxpayers are subsidising the industry that is making them sick. The UN Special Rapporteur is unambiguous on this point that fossil fuel subsidies are contrary to states’ obligations to allocate maximum available resources toward the realisation of human rights. Those funds, the report argues, should be redirected to climate finance and a just transition.

Darwin: When communities do the government’s job

If you want to understand what regulatory failure looks like in practice, look at Darwin.

Just three kilometres from residential suburbs, the Ichthys LNG plant at Bladin Point, operated by Japanese gas company Inpex, sits on the doorstep of a city of around 150,000 people. For years, locals had concerns about air quality near the facility. For years, they were told everything was within guidelines.

Then, in October 2025, Inpex admitted to the NT Environment Protection Authority it had been miscalculating its toxic emissions by more than 13,000%. The company had reported releasing 4.12 tonnes of benzene in 2023-24. The corrected figure was 556.9 tonnes.

Toluene emissions were similarly undercounted, at 136 and 112 times higher than previously reported. Documents also revealed the plant’s anti-pollution devices – incinerators designed to destroy volatile chemicals before release – had been out of operation for extended periods since 2019. There were no legal consequences

The World Health Organisation is clear: there is no safe level of benzene exposure. It is a known human carcinogen. “Knowing that they are actually 130 times higher is quite extraordinary and really frightening as a resident,” health advocate Dr Louise Woodward told Croakey Health Media “It really makes my blood run cold to think of the risk that the people of Darwin have been put through by these companies not doing the right thing but also by our Government not regulating them properly.”

Kirsty Howey, executive director of Environment Centre NT, called it a “diabolical failure” and noted pointedly that the community had been raising concerns for years: “We’ve been hearing about air quality sensors going off at the Inpex plant for years, and this has confirmed our worst fears.”

The NT Government’s response? Its deputy chief minister said Darwin had been “lucky.” Lucky.

This is the environment into which Community (CHANT) was born, a community-led initiative building a network of citizens to measure toxic air pollution (such as benzene and toluene) with a mobile air monitor that moves around the suburbs of Darwin, mapping air pollution in urban areas, because residents have concluded they cannot trust industry self-reporting or government oversight to keep them safe. Where the state has retreated, communities are filling the gap with their own sensors, their own data, their own accountability. It is admirable. It is also a damning indictment.

As researchers from QUT pointed out, there is currently no legal limit on the amount of volatile organic compounds Inpex is allowed to emit. None.

The NT Government is simultaneously investigating the company and waving through proposals for a third LNG facility at Middle Arm –  with, as those same researchers note, little mention of the extensive health concerns raised in public submissions.

This is what captured regulation looks like. This is what it costs communities.

DEA’s comparison to tobacco is deliberate. For decades, the tobacco industry funded doubt, lobbied against regulation, and wrapped itself in the language of choice and economic necessity. The fossil fuel industry has run the same play.

The treatment

Doctors do not diagnose a hazard and walk away. DEA’s report includes a treatment plan: ban all new fossil fuel projects, stop subsidies and redirect them to renewables, ban fossil fuel advertising just as we did with tobacco, and prepare the health system for the impacts already locked in.

The UN Special Rapporteur goes further, calling on states to develop binding, time-bound de-fossilisation plans, end industry influence over policy and research, and provide remedies to affected communities.

The fossil fuel industry has had six decades of warning and a very profitable run. The health bill is coming. The question is only who pays it.