Researchers Claim Inhalers Cause “Substantial Planet-Warming Pollution”

You can’t make this up.

A new report has revealed inhalers play a major role in climate change.

A group of researchers have just published a medical study that claims inhalers are a “substantial” contributors to global warming.

The study cited that inhaler users create as much pollution as half a million cars.

CNN reported more details on the bizarre study:

The people who are most vulnerable to the hard-to-breathe air that comes with climate change may inadvertently be adding to the problem, new research finds.

About 34 million Americans have a chronic lung disease, including 28 million who have asthma, according to the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America – and the number is expected to grow as higher temperatures bring more weather phenomena that trigger breathing issues like droughts, floods and wildfires.

To treat conditions like asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, millions of Americans use what doctors often call metered dose inhalers, small boot-shaped devices that spray set doses of medication into the lungs in a quick burst using propellants called hydrofluoroalkanes, or HFAs.

Studies published Monday in the journal JAMA found that medication inhalers are “substantial” contributors to planet-warming pollution. It’s not the medicine itself that’s the problem; rather, it’s the HFAs.

When released into the air, HFAs trap heat in the atmosphere and have a global warming potential thousands of times more powerful than carbon dioxide, meaning even a small amount of HFA can cause problems, studies show.

In one year alone, one of the new studies says, planet-warming pollution from inhalers were the equivalent of driving more than half a million cars, or the same as electricity requirements for 470,000 homes, the study said.

Metered-dose inhalers were responsible for 98% of the climate pollution from inhalers, the study found. People with lung conditions can’t live without them, but the researchers noted some might be able to switch to an alternative inhaler that emits fewer problematic propellants.

Here’s the study:

From 2014 to 2024, 1.6 billion inhalers for #asthma and #COPD dispensed in the US generated 24.9 million metric tons of CO₂e, with metered-dose inhalers responsible for 98% of emissions and $5.7 billion in social costs. 🧵 https://t.co/OZFB3kzOQw pic.twitter.com/rekPZCVNMR

— JAMA (@JAMA_current) October 6, 2025

Fortune reported on another bizarre study that claims dogs also play a role in “climate change”:

It turns out many Americans aren’t great at identifying which personal decisions contribute most to climate change.

A study recently published by the National Academy of Sciences found that when asked to rank actions, such as swapping a car that uses gasoline for an electric one, carpooling or reducing food waste, participants weren’t very accurate when assessing how much those actions contributed to climate change, which is caused mostly by the release of greenhouse gases that happen when fuels like gasoline, oil and coal are burned.

“People over-assign impact to actually pretty low-impact actions such as recycling, and underestimate the actual carbon impact of behaviors much more carbon intensive, like flying or eating meat,” said Madalina Vlasceanu, report co-author and professor of environmental social sciences at Stanford University.

The top three individual actions that help the climate, including avoiding plane flights, choosing not to get a dog and using renewable electricity, were also the three that participants underestimated the most. Meanwhile, the lowest-impact actions were changing to more efficient appliances and swapping out light bulbs, recycling, and using less energy on washing clothes. Those were three of the top four overestimated actions in the report.

There are many reasons people get it wrong
Vlasceanu said marketing focuses more on recycling and using energy-efficient light bulbs than on why flights or dog adoption are relatively bad for the climate, so participants were more likely to give those actions more weight.

How the human brain is wired also plays a role.

“You can see the bottle being recycled. That’s visible. Whereas carbon emissions, that’s invisible to the human eye. So that’s why we don’t associate emissions with flying,” said Jiaying Zhao, who teaches psychology and sustainability at the University of British Columbia.

ADVERTISEMENT

Zhao added it’s easier to bring actions to mind that we do more often. “Recycling is an almost daily action, whereas flying is less frequent. It’s less discussed,” she said. “As a result, people give a higher psychological weight to recycling.”