Health care creates a tenth of US greenhouse gas emissions.
Wildfire deaths. Smoky air. Floods. Droughts. There’s no escaping the reality that global warming is rapidly exacerbating threats to human health and communities in the United States and around the world. As the top scientists have told us over and over, we need to immediately lower our greenhouse gas emissions to avoid climate change’s most catastrophic effects. Governments and businesses are particularly on the hook, but so are citizens — we are all in this together.
That includes you, doctors.
In a New England Journal of Medicine commentary published Wednesday, a pair of Boston doctors make the case that it’s high time medical professionals engage more directly in the fight to limit climate change. Lead author Caren Solomon, a physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, tells Vox she was compelled to write the piece as the urgency of the climate crisis has become clearer and clearer.
“We’re getting down to a point where people need to act immediately to try to prevent the most catastrophic consequences. Physicians have a special responsibility to do something,” she said. “And it’s only going to get tremendously worse unless we take action now.”
A separate review article on the health impact of climate change, also published in NEJM this week, spells out what’s at stake for human health. Between 2030 and 2050, a quarter of a million deaths could be caused by climate change-related health problems — such as heat exposure, mosquito-borne diseases, and flooding. Air pollution, including household air pollution, already cause 6.5 million premature deaths each year.
But that’s not all: It turns out that the business of saving lives is part of the problem. In the US alone, health care accounts for nearly a tenth of greenhouse gas emissions. Lifesaving equipment like CAT scanners, respirators, and dialysis machines have huge energy demands, currently met with fossil fuel energy. If US health care were a country, according to Solomon and her co-author Regina LaRocque, it would have a $3.3 trillion GDP and rank seventh in the world in total emissions. Hospitals also produce about a pound of hazardous medical waste per bed per day.
