Should Fossil Fuels be Considered Weapons of Mass Destruction?

Donald Trump just issued an executive order declaring fentanyl a “weapon of mass destruction” citing in part the tens of thousands of deaths per year it causes in the U.S. Fentanyl deaths in the U.S. peaked in 2023 at about 74,000. These deaths are a tragedy.

However, the combustion of fossil fuels causes more deaths per year in the U.S. due to polluted air (not even accounting for their contribution to climate change). Relying on the same justification applied to fentanyl, fossil fuels ought to also be considered weapons of mass destruction. So now I am awaiting for the executive order so declaring. Of course, it is not coming anytime soon, revealing the naked hypocrisy and corruption of this administration.

The linked podcast offers another compelling reason to think of fossil fuels as WMDs. In it, Tzeporah Berman advocates for a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty attending to fossil fuel extraction rather than simply emissions.

“Published…in Science Advances, the paper found that fine particles (PM2.5), nitrogen dioxide, ozone and other hazardous air pollutants are attributable to 91,000 premature deaths, 10,350 preterm births and 216,000 childhood-onset asthma and 1,610 cancer cases every year in the [US].“

“Globally, PM2.5 is associated with approximately 7 million deaths around the world every year and causes the average person to lose approximately 2.3 years of life expectancy – or a combined 17.8 billion years.”
(source)

From Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: “Can we all be energetically wealthy? Not if we’re burning coal and oil. The stocks of fossil fuels are finite and their continued combustion is lethal. This would be true even if climate change was a hoax. Air pollution kills between 7 million and 9 million people each year; that is six or seven times the death toll from traffic accidents and hundreds of times the death toll from war or terrorism or all natural disasters combined.”