This article drew the blog's attention to a new report
"Climate Change is a medical emergency," said Dr.
Hugh Montgomery, commission co-chair and director of the UCL Institute for
Human Health and Performance. "It thus demands an emergency response…Under
such circumstances," he said, "no doctor would consider a series of
annual case discussions and aspirations adequate, yet this is exactly how the
global response to climate change is proceeding."
Mike Childs, the head of policy for the Friends of the
Earth-UK, said "When health professionals
shout 'emergency', politicians everywhere should listen."
The message from one of the world's foremost institutions on
public health has given powerful new evidence to the argument that “radical
action is urgently required" to avoid further climate catastrophe.
In a report by The Lancet, a report—titled Health and
climate change: policy responses to protect public health explains that the
negative impacts of human-caused global warming have put at risk some of the
world's most impressive health gains over the last half century. What's more,
it says, continued use of fossil fuels is leading humanity to a future in which
infectious disease patterns, air pollution, food insecurity and malnutrition,
involuntary migration, displacement, and violent conflict will all be made worse.
The Lancet Commission on Health and Climate Change, a collaboration
between international climate scientists and geographers, social and
environmental scientists, biodiversity experts, engineers and energy policy
experts, economists, political scientists and public policy experts, and health
professionals argues the "catastrophic risk to human health posed by
climate change" has been grossly "underestimated" by others. The
Commission argues that human health would vastly improve in a less-polluted
world free from fossil fuels. "Virtually everything that you want to do to
tackle climate change has health benefits," said Dr. Costello. "We're
going to cut heart attacks, strokes, diabetes."
In a companion paper, commission members Helena Wang and
Richard Horton explained why human health impacts are an important part of the
larger argument regarding climate change:
“When climate change is framed as a health issue, rather
than purely as an environmental, economic, or technological challenge, it
becomes clear that we are facing a predicament that strikes at the heart of
humanity. Health puts a human face on what can sometimes seem to be a distant
threat. By making the case for climate change as a health issue, we hope that
the civilisational crisis we face will achieve greater public resonance. Public
concerns about the health effects of climate change, such as undernutrition and
food insecurity, have the potential to accelerate political action in ways that
attention to carbon dioxide emissions alone do not.”
The health community has responded to many grave threats to
health in the past," said another commission co-chair, Professor Peng Gong
of Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. "It took on entrenched interests
such as the tobacco industry and led the fight against HIV/AIDS. Now is the
time for us to lead the way in responding to another great threat to human and
environmental health."
SOYMB however notes that despite the diagnosis that the planet
requires emergency treatment, this report falls sadly short of the necessary cure and
merely prescribes some palliatives already described by many experts as
quack-remedies such as the carbon tax. Even if implemented it would still simply
mean keeping the patient on life-support. We suggest something far more
effective which is cutting out the
cancer – ending the cause of the disease - and we all know what that is - capitalism.
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