Pesticides aren’t just making us sick, they’re cooking the planet
I am writing this as a pediatrician who has spent more than a decade documenting how pesticides directly and adversely affect children’s health. But there’s a second story hiding inside the one I usually tell, and it rarely makes it into the debate: the same industrial farming system built on synthetic pesticides and nitrogen fertilizer is also quietly cooking the planet.
The recent record-breaking warming of the Pacific Ocean, deaths from heat in Europe, wildfires around the world, and the heat dome roasting the U.S. create an urgent need to understand every major driver of climate change, including those we don’t usually talk about.
It turns out that global food systems produce 16 billion metric tons of CO2-equivalent a year, or roughly a third of all human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. Two agricultural inputs in particular, pesticides and synthetic nitrogen fertilizers, deserve far more scrutiny than they usually receive in either conversations about health or climate.
Pesticides and climate change represent a vicious cycle. Researchers have recently described a pattern that is dangerously sweeping in its consequences.
- Pesticides are produced from fossil fuels, and the production is energy-intensive. Manufacturing one kilogram of pesticide active ingredient requires, on average, about ten times more energy than manufacturing one kilogram of nitrogen fertilizer.
- Pesticides keep emitting after they’re applied. Many volatilize into the air as compounds that contribute to ozone formation, and widely used soil fumigants dramatically increase soil nitrous oxide emissions. Pesticides also disrupt the soil microbial communities. This degrades one of agriculture’s most important natural carbon removal systems.
- Worsening climate change weakens crops and potentially produces more insects and more resilient weeds. This combination requires even more pesticides and fertilizers.
- Final result: steadily worsening climate change and more and more dangerous chemicals in our food, our water, and in all our bodies.
Nitrogen fertilizers act as super pollutants. When intensive pesticide use degrades the soil, heavy fertilizer use becomes vital just to keep crops growing. Synthetic nitrogen fertilizer is manufactured by combining atmospheric nitrogen with hydrogen from natural gas under extreme heat and pressure, a process that alone accounts for roughly 39% of the fertilizer’s climate footprint.
But similar to pesticides, the bigger problem happens after it hits the field. Soil microbes convert applied nitrogen into nitrous oxide, a gas with roughly 273 times the warming power of carbon dioxide. A recent United Nations Environment Program assessment found agricultural nitrous oxide emissions rose 40% between 1980 and 2020, and dubbed it a “super pollutant” for its dual role in warming the planet and tearing open the ozone layer.
In addition, farmers routinely apply far more nitrogen than crops can use, up to 5.8 million excess metric tons in 2023 alone in the corn-soybean belt, producing emissions equivalent to putting 8 to 14 million additional gasoline cars on the road. The unused nitrogen doesn’t just disappear. It leaches into groundwater and runs into waterways, fueling algal blooms and eutrophication that generate still more greenhouse gas.
The soil problem: Healthy soil is one of the planet’s largest carbon reservoirs, but chemically intensive farming depletes this reservoir rather than building it. The contrast in carbon capture between current conventional farming and organic/regenerative farming is dramatic. Organic systems sequester soil carbon at roughly fourteen times the rate of conventional farming. Regenerative practices, done right, could sequester up to 23 gigatons of CO2 by 2050, and no-till alone has been linked to CO2 reductions of up to 47%.
The chemical seed companies frequently state that Roundup Ready GMO crops also make no-till farming easier and more prevalent by allowing farmers to kill weeds with chemicals rather than a plow. But even that fix is unraveling. As glyphosate-resistant weeds have spread, tillage intensity has climbed back up since 2008, and a widely cited analysis found the underlying chemical-based no-till carbon claim itself may be an artifact of shallow soil sampling rather than a real net gain. The fix for the soil may be less durable than the industry claims, and it comes bundled with the very chemical dependency driving the health crisis.
And the health crisis is not hypothetical. A 2025 University of Nebraska Medical Center study found that a 10% increase in agrichemical mixture exposure was associated with a 36% rise in pediatric brain and central nervous system cancers and a 23% rise in leukemia. A 2026 Iowa report tied the state’s now second-highest-in-the-nation cancer rate in part to pesticide exposure. These are not the same chemicals coincidentally showing up in two different bad-news stories. They’re the same business model.
The climate case against this system isn’t speculative. It rests on a growing body of life-cycle and field-emissions research spanning manufacturing, application, and downstream ecosystem effects. Because these emissions are diffuse, spread across millions of farms rather than concentrated in a handful of smokestacks, they’ve escaped the regulatory scrutiny we give to power plants and vehicle fleets. That’s starting to change as researchers build a fuller accounting of the agrochemical supply chain. Policy still hasn’t caught up.
We are not bound by a choice between feeding people and keeping the planet, and the people on it, healthy.
Reducing unnecessary nitrogen applications, tightening oversight of pesticides, and investing in regenerative practices will help us rebuild soil carbon and reduce dependence on pesticides and fertilizers. The two fights, health and climate, were never separate. It’s long past time we started treating them that way.
(Opinion columns published in The New Lede represent the views of the individual(s) authoring the columns and not necessarily the perspectives of TNL editors.)
Featured image by Henrique Sá on Unsplash.
