News from a Changing Planet -- #10
(Come for the public health discussion, stay for the George Eliot quote!)
The coronavirus is presenting a public health crisis and I know that the landscape is shaky and unpredictable and the uncertainty is unnerving! However, we are, already, every day, living in the middle of another public health crisis, caused by climate change and the things that cause climate change — the burning of fossil fuels.
Air pollution from fossil fuel-related activities causes about 5.7 million premature deaths annually around the world. In the U.S., there are an estimated 90,000 to 360,000 premature deaths every year from fossil fuel pollution. Compared to 2016, 10,000 more Americans died prematurely in 2018 from one air pollutant, PM 2.5 (fine particulate matter), largely because of the Trump administration's rollbacks of Clean Air Act enforcement. (After improving for decades, overall air quality has been declining since 2016 because of these same rollbacks.) Air pollution is linked to asthma, as well; in the U.S., 6 million children and 17 million adults have asthma. Non-white communities are disproportionately exposed to air pollution: asthma rates are eight times higher for black children than white children, and 3 times higher for black adults. Air pollution from wildfires can also have negative health effects, certainly among those directly exposed, but also often to people far away: the EPA determined that ozone pollution from the 2016 wildfires in Saskatchewan (in western Canada) got all the way to Maryland and Pennsylvania by the summer of 2017, raising ozone levels above the legal standards.
Extreme heat events, made more frequent and intense by climate change, also make air pollution worse, by increasing the secondary creation of pollutants. Heat is also deadly: the CDC estimates that 600 people die from extreme heat every year in the U.S., but that is likely an underestimate, given that heat-related deaths are very hard (and somewhat subjective) to definitively classify. If the climate warms by 3ºC, nearly 6,000 people could die every year in New York City alone, according to one study. Certain populations are also disproportionately affected by heat: the elderly, people who work outside (farmworkers, construction workers), and the poor (who often don't have access air conditioning), particularly those who live in cities, because of the urban heat island effect, which causes daytime temperatures in cities to be as much as 5.4ºF warmer than their surrounding environments during the day, and up to 22ºF hotter at night. Nights are warming faster than days in all seasons, but this can be especially deadly in summer, because if nights are hot, the body doesn't have a chance to cool down. Humidity makes everything worse, too: Warmer air can also hold more moisture, which makes it even harder to cool down.
(Pollutants from fossil fuels also end up in our drinking water. Coal ash pollution, which I've written about before, can cause liver and kidney damage, a variety of cancer, heart disease, and other health impacts.)
In a warming world that still burns fossil fuels, these factors will put even more stress on our health care system, and force doctors to send their patients back into environments that are sickening them.
(And the health care sector itself is responsible for a lot of greenhouse gas emissions -- about 10 percent of US emissions, and about 5 percent globally. It's not that surprising, given that the health care industry represents about 18 percent of U.S. GDP and we haven't been able to separate growth in GDP from growth in greenhouse gas emissions. But some the sources are surprising: a significant portion is from inhaled anesthetic gases, 95 percent of which are vented out of hospital roofs because the body only metabolizes 5 percent. These gases often produce nitrous oxides, which are a powerful greenhouse gas. Kaiser Permanente, the California health care system, stopped using desflurane (an anesthetic gas) because of how much it contributed to global warming. There are other inhaled anesthetic gases that have a much smaller warming effect. (The greenhouse gas impact of all of these gases has not been factored into the overall emissions impact of the healthcare industry, so the emissions are probably higher than what is stated above.))
Of course, these impacts are different than the spread of a viral disease. They happen over longer periods of time, and can be difficult to attribute to environmental factors like heat or air pollution. But when we talk about our health care system, or insurance, or Medicare for All, the effects of climate change on all of our health should be part of that conversation too.
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In other news, I wrote a story for Air Mail Weekly about Jeff Bezos' recent pledge of $10 billion to fight climate change. It made me feel a lot of things! Excited, skeptical, and then frustrated by my own and others' impulse to be cynical. (The headline and summary paragraph are misleading! Don't let them put you off! I didn't write them!)
I also wrote an explainer for the New York Times' Climate FWD: newsletter about why it's so hard to get to 100 percent renewable energy.
There have been a lot of articles about how the coronavirus is resulting in lower greenhouse gas emissions because people aren't traveling, and because China shut down many of its factories. But the rebound effects, combined with the collapse of global oil prices (oil and gas are cheaper and there’s a lot of supply, so people
may use more), could mean more greenhouse gas emissions over the long-term.
And finally.. I'd like to share a very beautiful passage from George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss which captures so much of what I feel about nature and loss. This book was first published in England in 1860, after the world had been transformed by the Industrial Revolution and coal, a transformation that led to the crisis we now find ourselves in.
"We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it, if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again every spring that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we sat lisping to ourselves on the grass, the same hips and haws on the autumn hedgerows, the same redbreasts that we used to call ‘God’s birds’ because they did no harm to the precious crops. What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known and loved because it is known?”
Tell me what you'd like to read about, or ask me any questions you have! I'd love to hear from you. Order your copy (or audiobook! read by me!) of Inconspicuous Consumption: The Environmental Impact You Don't Know You Have. Find more of my work here.
Tatiana