“The actions we take now by extracting, transporting, and liquefying fracked gas will determine the health of generations to come.”

That’s according to Dr. Laalitha Surapaneni, an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota in the general internal medicine department and lead author of a report (pdf) published Tuesday by the nonprofit advocacy group Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR).

Surapaneni and co-author Zachary Morse’s new report, which details how liquefied natural gas (LNG) threatens both human health and the planet, comes as the Trump administration and bipartisan federal legislation continue to support its production.

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LNG is primarily composed of methane, a greenhouse gas that is 84–87 times more potent than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. The United States has seen a boom in LNG production over the past 15 years, driven primarily by the extraction process known as horizontal hydraulic fracturing or fracking—which involves injecting water and a secret mix of chemicals into rock formations.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) projected in June that the United States is on track to become the world’s leading exporter of liquefied natural gas within five years. A Food & Water Watch report that shortly preceded the IEA’s projection highlighted the more than 700 recently built or proposed U.S. facilities that aim “to capitalize off of a glut of cheap fracked gas.”

“With LNG projects, we are locking ourselves into fossil fuel infrastructure that will heat up our planet and impose a human health cost.”
—Dr. Laalitha Surapaneni, PSR

Surapaneni warned Tuesday that “with LNG projects, we are locking ourselves into fossil fuel infrastructure that will heat up our planet and impose a human health cost.”

“Our current climate crisis is a health emergency,” she said. “It is unconscionable that we continue to subject our communities to these risks when we have the technology to make a just transition to renewable energy.”

The new 10-page report followed the sixth edition of the Compendium of Scientific, Medical, and Media Findings Demonstrating Risks and Harms of Fracking that PSR and Concerned Health Professionals of New York published in June—which led experts at PSR and elsewhere to reiterate that “we need to ban fracking.”

In PSR’s latest report, a section on “The Warming Planet” emphasizes the heat-trapping abilities of methane and notes that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the U.S. Global Change Research Program, and The Lancet “have all called for a rapid, unprecedented shift away from all fossil fuels in order to prevent potentially catastrophic climate change effects.”