Welcome back to Drilled, I'm Amy Westervelt.

Today we're digging into one of the big reasons fossil fuel companies can get away with bad

behavior, the story they tell about how critical they are to our quality of life.

One researcher has been doing a lot to debunk that idea recently.

Julia Steinberger, professor of social ecology and ecological economics at the University of

Leeds.

Dr. Steinberger has had a few really interesting papers published in the last few months.

You might have seen the coverage of her study that found that wealthy people have the

largest energy footprints.

Maybe that's no surprise, but there were some really interesting findings in terms of how

those energy footprints get to be so big, mainly because they spend more on transport.

There's boats, planes, vacations, all the most energy intensive things.

Another key finding in that study was around any quality.

In a nutshell, the energy inequality gap grows even faster than the well-scab.

That feeds into the study we're going to focus on today, which found that fossil fuel

use has very little impact on life expectancy.

All of it contradicts a lot of the narrative's big oil has been telling for the past century,

and points to the fact that a redistribution of energy consumption would be good for both

the planet and human health.

We'll hear more from Dr. Steinberger about all of that after a quick message from this

episode's sponsor.

So, if there's an economic growth period that we need more cars, more automotive capacity,

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