Well, hey, would could solve this with Medicare For All, since people wouldn’t be getting much in the way of healthcare, right? Vox is on the case of something that no one had ever thought about before, so, hey, why not link it all up?
Doctors are frightened by climate change. Their industry is a big part of the problem.
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. (snip)
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.
Easiest thing to do is just kill everyone, right? Meh. Warmist always find a way to ruin everything.
Anyhow, what can doctors do?
- Hospitals can commit to 100 percent clean energy, or carbon neutrality (yeah, let’s run hospitals with unreliable, expensive energy, which will drive up prices more)
- Doctors can educate policymakers and the public about the health impact of climate change (and this reduces the so-called carbon footprint of the medical sector how, exactly? This is just spreading awareness)
- Heath care can divest from fossil fuel companies (and this will drive up medical costs, and, weird how this looks just like what the far left is pushing, right?)
- Physicians need to get ready for increasing environmental health threats linked to climate change (how does this decrease their own carbon footprint?)
So, basically, they can do things that will do almost nothing. How about all the doctors giving up their own expensive fossil fueled vehicles?
