MEDICAL PROS SOUND CLIMATE ALARM

Medical professionals are seeing the effects of climate change in their own practices more often and are increasingly concerned. Recently 150 of them gathered in Boston to start planning a response.

Sponsored by the New England Journal of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, and all of Boston’s teaching hospitals, the Climate Crisis and Clinical Practice Symposium aimed “to bring the issue of climate change directly to the bedside,” Dr. Aaron Bernstein told The Boston Globe’s Felice J. Freyer. He is a pediatrician and the interim chief of the Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He was one of the event’s organizers.

The gathering was the first of eight to galvanize health care systems to face the reality of climate change. Six additional symposiums are scheduled over the next year and a half in the United States. Australia will host another. 

“The climate crisis has created an unprecedented future that looks nothing like what we have experienced,” said Dr. Renee N. Salas, an emergency medicine doctor at Mass. General. “We are the ones that are experiencing this first and need to work collectively with the rest of the country.”

On January 2 the Medical Society Consortium wrote an open letter to President Trump urging him not to remove the United States from the Paris Agreement. “Our organizations represent hundreds of thousands of our country’s doctors, nurses and other health care providers,” wrote Dr. Mona Sarfaty, the organization’s executive director. “We are seeing, right now, the harms to our health that global warming is creating. We foresee much greater health harms to all Americans, especially our children and grandchildren, if we do not join with the rest of the world to respond to the climate crisis—because climate change is a public health emergency.”

“Climate change exacerbates chronic and contagious disease, worsens food and water shortages, increases the risk of pandemics, and aggravates mass displacement” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus wrote in an article titled “Climate Change is Already Killing Us” in Foreign Affairs. “The broad environmental effects of climate change have long been discussed as long-term risks; what’s clear now is that the health effects are worse than anticipated—and that they’re already being felt.” He is director-general of the World Health Organization.

Heat stress is one of the health problems that is on the rise. It can lead to heart attacks, kidney stones, and preterm birth, The Globe’s Freyer reported. “Cholera, dengue, Lyme disease and valley fever are all increasing in incidence and also expanding their range. With warmer springs and later winters, the pollen season is getting longer and also more severe, because carbon dioxide prompts plants to release more pollen. That increases asthma attacks, as does air pollution.

“The heat also affects the way medications work. Drugs for depression, heart disease, and kidney failure can be less safe in hot weather. People taking beta blockers for high blood pressure are more likely to faint in hot weather. EpiPens and albuterol can be rendered ineffective by extreme heat if left inside cars.”

Dr. Gaurab Basu, a primary care physician at the Cambridge Health Alliance who attended the Boston symposium, expressed concern about the many people doing physical labor outside, especially in urban “heat islands,” where asphalt and concrete can make the temperature 10 or 15 degrees higher than elsewhere. They could be injuring their kidneys day after day without knowing it. Basu told the group about a 27-year-old patient who developed end-stage kidney disease caused by chronic exposure to heat. The man, an immigrant, had worked on sugar farms in El Salvador. Doctors, she said, need to “add a climate lens” to their diagnostics.

Mental health also can suffer from climate change. Extreme heat "makes all mental illnesses worse,” said Dr. Gary Belkin, a psychiatrist and visiting scientist at the Harvard climate group. Emergency room visits for mental crises and psychiatric hospitalizations go up during heat waves.

Climate change can even affect the availability of medical supplies, Freyer reported. Bernstein had ordered intravenous fluids for an infant who had become dehydrated. He was shocked to receive an alert that IV fluids — a common, life-saving treatment — were being rationed. The reason: Hurricane Maria, which scientists believe was more intense due to climate change, had shut down the Puerto Rican plant that makes them.

Politicians reluctant to act on climate change say that doing so would threaten our prosperity. They obviously are not considering the cost of health problems. It is time for Congress to put a price on carbon that reflects ALL the costs that emissions impose on us.

HOUSE REPUBLICANS DEVELOPING CLIMATE LEGISLATION

House Republicans have started putting together a legislative package to counter climate change, a sign that their voters are increasingly concerned about the problem and want to see the party take action.

“Trees, plastics and favorable tax policy are at the core of House Republicans’ new push,” Amy Harder wrote in an Axios post. Arkansas Congressman Bruce Westerman is working on legislation, called the Trillion Trees Act, that would, among other things, create a national target for increasing the number of trees grown in the U.S. “for the purpose of sequestering carbon,” according to a summary of the bill viewed by Axios. The party will be working on the legislation into the spring.

However, any eventual plan would not set any targets for reducing carbon pollution, reported Rebecca Beitsch in The Hill. House Democrats recently outlined a plan requiring the U.S. to rely on 100 percent clean energy by 2050.

Coordinating the GOP proposals, which will be fleshed out in coming months, is Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California, the top Republican in the House. “Republicans are doubling down on a small-government agenda,” Harder wrote. “They’re eschewing carbon pricing, and they're criticizing the far more aggressive and sweeping policies pushed by some Democrats as ineffective and harmful to America’s economy.”

House Republicans have convinced their most conservative members to support the plan, The Washington Examiner’s Josh Siegel reported. “Climate denial is a bad political strategy,” said Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz, a member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus and of the House Climate Solutions Caucus. “At some point, you have to be for something to fix it.”

The lawmakers want to make permanent and expand the 45Q tax credit that is available to companies sequestering CO2, with a new component emphasizing the importance of capturing carbon from the sky long after it was emitted.

To speed up the development of clean energy, the GOP proposes doubling federal investment in basic research and fundamental science from $16 billion to $32 billion over 10 years. Leading that effort is Oklahoma Congressman Frank Lucas, the top Republican on the House Science and Technology Committee. He rejects the idea that Washington should pass a carbon tax as a “stick” to push clean-energy technologies, as opposed to continuing to rely on “carrot” policies incentivizing new tech, Harder reported.

House Republicans also want to provide lower tax rates for U.S. companies exporting clean energy technology. “One of the top priorities,” Politico reported, “will be ‘promotion of cleaner, more efficient fossil fuels to meet global demand,’ according to slides presented to a closed-door GOP Conference meeting last week.”

They want to promote the use of natural gas and nuclear power, and they see potential in agriculture, pushing for farming techniques that reduce or capture carbon. 

A number of Republicans, including GOP icons such as James Baker and George Shultz, are taking a different tack. They have come together under the banner of a group called the Climate Leadership Council (CLC) to promote what they consider a proposal that is based on long-time Republican principles. It is simple: Put a price on fossil fuel emissions and give all the revenue back to the American people. 

Recently, Shultz and Ted Halstead, the CLC’s CEO, issued a report listing 12 reasons why its leaders believe an economy-wide fee on carbon emissions outperforms two other options: a regulatory scheme or subsides. These 12, the report says, “demonstrate the overwhelming economic, environmental and political superiority of carbon pricing as the cornerstone of America’s climate policy. While complementary policies will always be needed, pricing should be the primary driver.”

Democrats have been busy, too. On January 28 the majority staff of the House Committee on Energy & Commerce released a discussion draft of the Climate Leadership and Environmental Action for our Nation’s (CLEAN) Future Act. The draft legislative text can be found here, along with a section-by-section overview here. Among its provisions:

• New requirements for EPA to set emissions standards for cars, trucks, locomotive and aircraft engines;

• EPA must issue new rules delivering 90 percent reduction of methane emissions from oil and gas sources below 2012 levels by 2030; and

• Each state must develop its own plan for reaching net-zero emissions.

In addition, Democrats in the House have just introduced an ambitious five-year infrastructure plan with a major focus on climate. House Transportation Committee Chairman Peter DeFazio of Oregon said the plan will be a radical departure from previous highway-focused transportation bills. Instead, the proposal will put clean energy and climate "resilience" at the center. "We're looking at every sector under my jurisdiction and attempting to meet the goals of the Green New Deal," he told reporters. 

Young evangelicals urging action on climate

Young American evangelicals increasingly believe that the climate is changing, that humans have something to do with that, and that we need to take action. “They’re reading the Bible and they’re saying, ‘Wait a minute, something is not jibing, and we need to rethink this,’ ” said Randall Balmer, a religion professor at Dartmouth College who studies evangelicals and spoke with Boston Globe reporter Laura Krantz.

About a quarter of all American adults identify as evangelical Protestants, according to a 2014 poll by the Pew Research Center. One in six of those is between the ages of 18 and 29. To capture the energies and attention of these people hungry for change within their faith community, Ben Lowe founded Young Evangelicals for Climate Action.

“More and more, we have younger evangelicals who are pretty disillusioned and disenfranchised with that traditional political alliance,” Lowe told Krantz. The organization educates young people on Christian college campuses and in churches, as well as political leaders through legislative meetings and advocacy.

Last fall, when Republican Congressman Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania introduced the Market Choice Act to create a carbon tax, Kyle Meyaard-Schaap, the national organizer and spokesperson for YECA, said, “A price on carbon is long overdue, and needs to be one of the first steps we take to tackle the climate crisis at a national level. We’ve long advocated that durable climate policy must be bipartisan. We applaud Rep. Fitzpatrick and co-sponsors Reps. Rooney (R-FL), Carbajal (D-CA), and Peters (D-CA) for their courage and their commitment to rising above partisan acrimony and putting forward a common sense solution to help us move toward a 100% clean energy economy.”

YECA developed a Faithful Action Pledge: “We are young evangelicals striving to live out what Jesus said was most important: loving God fully and loving our neighbors as ourselves. Climate change is already impacting our neighbors and God’s creation here in the United States and around the world. For the sake of ‘the least of these,’ we believe God is calling us to faithful action and witness in the midst of the current climate crisis. Therefore, we commit ourselves to living faithfully as good stewards of creation, advocating on behalf of the poor and marginalized, supporting our faith and political leaders when they stand up for climate action, and mobilizing our generation to join in.”

Chelsey Geisz is a YECA member at Wheaton College, sometimes called “the Harvard of Christian colleges” and the alma mater of Billy Graham. "I'm not encountering anyone at Wheaton, even among my most conservative friends, who disagree with climate change," she told Meera Subramanian of InsideClimate News.

Katharine Wilkinson, author of Between God & Green: How Evangelicals Are Cultivating a Middle Ground on Climate Change, believes that YECA is influential. “My sense is that they are probably doing some of the most promising and savvy work in this space, particularly because they are focused on the population where I think there’s actually an opening,” she told Grist’s Kate Yoder.

“The best messengers are sons and daughters, they’re grandkids, they’re young people who grew up in the church,” Meyaard-Schaap said. “They see someone like them who they love and respect, who’s involved in the story and can invite them into it in a way that resonates with them.”

Lindsay Mouw, 25, is working with YECA in her native Iowa and told The Boston Globe, “I think it’s important for us as evangelicals who care about climate to really be involved in the political scene and make sure we are electing people who promote the sustainability of the Earth.”

She is doing her utmost to persuade older evangelicals to press lawmakers to act. “You’re right to say that younger evangelicals are probably particularly more attuned to the issue and probably give it a higher priority than maybe some of our older members,” said Galen Carey, vice president of the National Association of Evangelicals, a group that considers climate change a problem but does not lobby lawmakers on the issue. “But we’re not giving up on our older members either. We want everyone to recognize what a concern it is.”

We urge evangelicals--young, old, and in between--to join us in building support for pricing carbon emissions, whether via Congressman Fitzpatrick’s bill or some other measure.

To hear young evangelicals explain why they are committed to helping fend off climate change, go to: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCd5UiteryKHLFq9GDdmB-Og 

NEW BIPARTISAN GROUP TO PROMOTE ACTION ON CLIMATE

With the impacts of climate change increasing and scientists warning that the global response is too slow, 60 prominent political figures and celebrities have created World War Zero to mobilize the planet’s citizens. 

“When America was attacked in World War II we set aside our differences, united and mobilized to face down our common enemy,” former Secretary of State John Kerry said recently in announcing the effort. “We are launching World War Zero to bring that spirit of unity, common purpose, and urgency back to the world today to fight the great threat of our time.”

WWZ aims to offer a unifying story that can anchor other efforts, focused on the economic benefits of climate action and the national-security and public-health risks of climate change.

The bipartisan coalition will push for immediate policy changes. The goal is to hold more than 10 million “climate conversations” in the coming year with Americans across the political spectrum. In January, Kerry and other coalition members will hold town meetings across the country. Members will head to 2020 battleground states, to military bases where climate discussions are rare, and to economically depressed areas that WWZ leaders say could benefit from clean-energy jobs.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, the former Republican governor of California, is another WWZ leader. He pointed out that his state’s economy is growing at a healthy clip despite having some of the nation’s most ambitious environmental laws. “It just shows you the power that we have by going green and the kind of jobs we created,” Schwarzenegger said on NBC’s “Meet the Press’’ with Chuck Todd. “And I think that’s what we want to do: We want the whole United States to go in that direction, the whole world to go in that direction.”

Kerry said while individual members might promote specific climate policy proposals, like a tax on carbon dioxide pollution, or the Green New Deal, the coalition is not aimed at promoting any particular plan.

“We are bringing together unlikely allies who may not agree on everything, but who have enlisted in this effort to do everything they can to mobilize people to tackle climate change on every front.”

Katie Eder, founder of The Future Coalition, a network for youth-led organizations that helped organize climate strikes around the country in September, supports the Green New Deal and is a WWZ member. She told The New York Times’ Lisa Friedman that people who care about climate change need to look past their differences. “While I may be disagreeing with some of the things that other folks involved in World War Zero believe, that doesn’t mean we can’t work together,” she said. “Collaboration is our key to survival.”

Other coalition members, some of whom are from overseas, include former Presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter; retired military officers such as General Stanley McChrystal and Brigadier General Stephen Cheney; Cindy McCain; former Ohio Governor John Kasich; and celebrities Emma Watson, Leonardo DiCaprio, Ted Danson, and Sting.  

Despite the enormity of the climate challenge, Kerry saw reason for encouragement. “Something extraordinary is happening in America,” he told Robinson Meyer of The Atlantic. “States have passed renewable-portfolio laws, so you’ve got [37] states that are locked in already to moving towards Paris, no matter what the president does. You also have the mayor of every major city in America signed on to the mayor’s commitment to try to live by the Paris Agreement. So you have this dichotomy in America, where the president of the United States has said I’m out, but, frankly, the majority of the American people are still saying, We’re in.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made a similar point last week. She and 14 other members of the House and Senate traveled to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Madrid. “Congress’s commitment to take action on the climate crisis is iron-clad,” she said. “By coming here we want to say to everyone, ‘We’re still in. The United States is still in.’”

“It is doable,” Kerry told Meyer, “but you don’t see a very specific set of proposals for how you do it. For instance, bringing the auto manufacturers into the White House and sitting them down and saying: ‘Okay, we’ve got to move this faster. I want to know what the hurdles are. I want to know how we take them out of your way. I want to know what kind of incentives we’re going to need for people to be able to afford to buy the electric car.’ Then you’ve got to bring the utility people in.”

Schwarzenegger rejected the Trump administration’s argument that China must do more to curb emissions before the United States acts.  He told The Times’ Friedman: “I always say to myself, what is happening here? America never ever in its history has said, ‘Let some other country do something first.’ We should lead.”

Climate change poses greater threat to children's health

Many of us fear that our children and grandchildren are inheriting a damaged planet. In fact, younger generations are already taking a hit. 

A new report from the medical journal The Lancet, found that children are especially vulnerable to CO2 emissions. Failing to limit these emissions would lead to health problems caused by infectious diseases, worsening air pollution, rising temperatures and malnutrition, New York Times reporter Kendra Pierre-Louis wrote.

The report compared human health consequences under two scenarios: one in which the world meets the commitments laid out in the Paris Agreement and reins in emissions so that increases in global temperatures remain “well below 2 degrees Celsius” by the end of the century, and one in which it does not.

“With every degree of warming, a child born today faces a future where their health and well-being will be increasingly impacted by the realities and dangers of a warmer world,” said Dr. Renee N. Salas, a clinical instructor of emergency medicine at Harvard Medical School and lead author of the United States policy brief that accompanied the report. “Climate change, and the air pollution from fossil fuels that are driving it, threatens the child’s health starting in the mother’s womb and only accumulates from there,” she said.

Children are especially vulnerable, partly because of their physiology. “Their hearts beat faster than adults’ and their breathing rates are higher than adults’,” said Dr. Mona Sarfaty, the director of the program on climate and health at the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University, who was not involved in the report. As a result, children absorb more air pollution given their body size than an adult would in the same situation.

But unless nations halt emissions, air pollution, which, according to the report, killed seven million people worldwide in 2016, will quite likely increase. The burning of fossil fuels also releases a type of fine air pollution called PM 2.5 that can damage the heart and lungs when inhaled. Exposure to PM 2.5 air pollution is correlated with health problems such as low birth weight and chronic respiratory diseases like asthma.

Research published in The New England Journal of Medicine after the passage of policies designed to improve air quality “shows that the children who grew up when the air was better quality literally had more functioning lung tissue,” Dr. Sarfaty told The Times.

Part of the exposure risk that children face is simply that they spend more time outside than adults. Coupled with their differing physiology, it makes them more susceptible to fine particulate pollution. These same factors also mean they are more likely to suffer from the effects of extreme heat associated with climate change. 

As heat waves become more severe, parents and coaches “may not realize that the children are more exposed and therefore more vulnerable,” Dr. Sarfaty said. A 2017 report that she helped prepare found that, in the United States, heat-related illnesses are the leading cause of death and disability in young athletes.

Air pollution became so severe in Delhi, India, recently that five million masks were distributed at schools. Officials were forced to declare a public health emergency and have closed city schools four days so far this month. "I didn't realize how bad it would get," one resident told BBC. "Do we really want our kids to grow up in such an environment? No one really cares; no one wants to improve the situation."

A Supreme Court-mandated panel imposed several restrictions in Delhi and two neighboring states, as air quality deteriorated to "severe" levels. Dangerous particulate levels in the air are about 20 times the World Health Organization (WHO) maximum. Delhi's Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal said the city had been turned into a "gas chamber."

In addition to the emissions associated with burning fossil fuels, the report said future generations would be exposed to a growing source of fine-particulate pollution: wildfires. As temperatures rise, wildfires are becoming more frequent, in part because hotter temperatures dry out vegetation, making it easier to ignite. The smoke, like the smoke that comes from burning fossil fuels, threatens human health.

According to the report published in The Lancet, since the middle of this decade there has been a 77 percent increase in the number of people exposed to wildfire smoke worldwide. 

One way to reduce the threat to our children’s health is to increase the price paid so that it reflects such costs. In effect, we are subsidizing the damage to their lungs, brains, and other organs. Urge those who represent you on Capitol Hill to support one of the carbon tax bills now before the House and Senate.