Last week, the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change released its 2020 report. NPR has a story about the report. The report from the Lancet finds that heat waves, air pollution, and extreme weather caused by climate change are damaging human health, now. The NPR story quotes Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association: “It’s preventable. We don’t have to live this way.”
The Lancet report contains this statement: “Many carbon-intensive practices and policies lead to poor air quality, poor food quality, and poor housing quality, which disproportionately harm the health of disadvantaged populations.” Fossil fuels are polluting our air, making our food quality worse, leading to poorer housing quality, and all of these harm lower wealth people and disenfranchised communities more.
The NPR report also notes that Dr. Renee Salas, one of the lead authors for the Lancet report section on the United States, states that governments that want to support public health must stop financially supporting the fossil fuel industry. Subsidies for fossil fuels are actually subsidizing poor health.
We spend tens of billions of dollars on fossil fuel subsidies, write-offs, tax breaks, and etc. We then turn around and spend more billions of dollars on all the health problems and disease caused by air pollution from burning fossil fuels: heart disease, strokes, asthma, emphysema, dementia, diabetes, cancer, and many others. Climate change is already causing increased wildfire hazards, deadlier hurricanes, more flooding, and heatwaves, all of which are already damaging our health, our houses, and our crops.
As Dr. Benjamin stated, we don’t have to live this way. We can choose clean renewable energy and clean transportation, we can choose to have less disease and avoid the worst of climate change. Will you join us in advocating for clean air, better health, and thriving communities? The EPA is about to release information on grants for reducing diesel emissions. Keep watching our blogs for when this is released, and then let your school and elected officials know about it so they can apply for a grant.
For more details and in-depth understanding of the Lancet Report, read or listen to the NPR story here.
Read the Lancet Countdown report here.
12/7/2020
