An oil field in Texas has been named one of the most pollutive sites in the world at the United Nations climate talks in Baku, Azerbaijan.
The Climate Reality Project, an organization founded by former Vice President Al Gore, indicated that out of the seven states or provinces emitting the most greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, six of them were located in China and one was in Texas, as reported by the Associated Press.
"One of the sites in the Permian Basin in Texas is by far the No. 1 worst polluting site in the entire world," Gore said, according to AP. "And maybe I shouldn't have been surprised by that, but I think of how dirty some of these sites are in Russia and China and so forth. But Permian Basin is putting them all in the shade."
Texas was ranked sixth in terms of the most greenhouse gases emitted. All of the top seven states or provinces emitted more than 1 billion metric tons.
However, the United States was listed as one of the nations that oversaw some of the biggest decreases in pollution from 2022 to 2023, alongside Venezuela, Japan, Germany and the United Kingdom. China, India, Iran, Indonesia and Russia had the biggest increases in pollution during the same time period.
Fossil fuels are known to cause both types of pollution the dataset was monitoring. Other than carbon footprint, it also looked at the release of more traditional pollutants such as carbon monoxide or ammonia into the air, hence reducing air quality.
Gore spoke about how fossil fuels were incredibly detrimental to the environment.
"It's unfortunate that the fossil fuel industry and the petrostates have seized control of the COP process to an unhealthy degree," Gore said, as reported by AP
"Next year in Brazil, we'll see a change in that pattern. But, you know, it's not good for the world community to give the No. 1 polluting industry in the world that much control over the whole process," he continued.
Samoan environmentalist and cabinet minister Cedric Schuster emphasized the importance of the talks, and the necessity of further diplomatic discussions pertaining to climate change.
"We're here to defend the Paris agreement," Schuster said, referring to the climate deal in 2015 to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), as reported by AP. "We're concerned that countries are forgetting that protecting the world's most vulnerable is at the core of this framework."
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