Gina McCarthy: ‘We can solve America’s health crisis, if we fix our climate crisis’ By Mark Hillsdon
Gina McCarthy has been exaggerating the “climate crisis” since her days at the EPA a decade ago. With over 4 million people dying of interior air pollution globally every year, McCarthy stays unaware.
Gina McCarthy: ‘We can solve America’s health crisis, if we fix our climate crisis’
February 14, 2024
Industry Insight from Ethical Corporation Magazine, a part of Thomson Reuters.
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Summary
Nearly 120 million people in the U.S. live in areas with unhealthy levels of air pollutionAmerica is All In report shows energy transition could help save 35,800 premature deaths from 2024-2035Health professionals have vital role explaining link between health and climate change to patientsIndoor air pollution a problem with 40 million U.S. homes using gas with poor ventilationHealth Care Without Harm addressing healthcare sector's 8.5% contribution to all U.S. emissions
February 8 - From extreme heat to polluted air, made worse by raging wildfires and the threat of new viruses escaping from habitats that have been plundered and destroyed, the link between climate change and human health is a strong one.
At the COP28 climate talks in Dubai, health featured as a theme for the first time, helping to bring the climate-health nexus to the mainstream. The issue was front and center during a series o
pavilion, which examined the need to focus on the health impacts of continued dependence on fossil fuels to engage the public on climate action.
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The managing chair of the America is All In coalition is Gina McCarthy, a veteran clean air advocate who was head of the Environmental Protection Agency under President Barack Obama. She explained that 36% of the United States population (nearly 120 million people) live in areas with unhealthy levels of air pollution. “Every action that we take to reduce climate change is action that is going to reduce the other pollutants that are harming people,” she said. “We can solve our health crisis, if we fix our climate crisis.”
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In a recent report, the group, which has 5,000 member organizations, including 10 state governments, showed how actions such as transitioning away from fossil fuels, adopting electric vehicles and enhancing energy efficiency, could significantly decrease air pollutants, and help save 35,800 people from premature death between 2024 and 2035.
According to Gaurab Basu, director of education and policy at the Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health: “Having a clean energy system, having a clean transportation system, getting fossil fuels out of our buildings are like a prescription”.
Part of Basu’s role is showing new health professionals that they have a vital role to play explaining the link between health and climate change to their patients. “There is a kind of waking up among health professionals,” he says. “(They’re) recognizing the way that climate change and air pollution is impacting their patients; that's why education has been so important.
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“The science can feel confusing; it's our job to understand that science and translate it to health,” he continues. “We need to be actively counselling our patients.
Many of these patients will live in disadvantaged neighborhoods, he explains, alongside some of the most polluting facilities, including fossil fuel plants in states like Texas and Louisiana. “Lower income communities are most impacted by climate change and air pollution (but) they're not the ones causing (it),” he says.
Basu is also a practicing GP and while talking about emissions can leave people cold, he says: “when you talk about health, there's something that makes it very real to people”.
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For example, he says, doctors can explain how fossil fuels and living by a freeway can make their asthma worse, or how excessive heat can affect how children perform in school. His hope then is that people will start to spread the word and talk to other members of their community about how the climate could be affecting their health.
It’s not just outside air quality that has become an issue, the air people breathe in their homes is also becoming a health threat, explains Peggy Shepard, co-founder of WE ACT for Environmental Justice.
Working mainly across New York City, Shepard says that indoor air quality readings from public housing are often worse than those taken outside. “That's pretty scary,” she says.
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Forty million homes in the U.S. are still having natural gas pumped into their kitchens, she continues, yet many lack the ventilation necessary to make the atmosphere safe. As a result, ditching the gas stove for cleaner sources of energy has become a major health campaign.
WE ACT spent 10 months monitoring the air quality in 10 flats in the South Bronx fitted with electric induction stoves, and in 10 that retained their old gas cookers. Those flats that had been switched to electric showed a 35% reduction in nitrogen dioxide concentration, and a near 60% drop in carbon monoxide levels. Both gases can have severe health impacts.
Commenting on the results of the Out of Gas Project, WE ACT’s climate justice campaigns coordinator Annie Carforo said: “Residents living in low-income communities and communities of color, like the Bronx, are already exposed to disproportionate levels of air pollution. Reducing the pollution in their homes – given that we all spend around 90% of our time indoors – is a significant benefit to their health.”
As a result of the study, the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA), the largest public housing authority in North America, has committed to electrify and decarbonize all of the 2,400 buildings it manages across the city.
Reflecting the fact that 70% of New York’s greenhouse gas emissions come from buildings, WE ACT has also had an impact on new builds too, successfully campaigning for the introduction of the All Electric Buildings Act. The law came into effect in January and requires all new buildings under seven stories to be all-electric, with those higher than this subject to the law in July 2007.
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Shepard is skeptical that technologies such as carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS), which are being subsidized through tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act, are the answer to decarbonizing the U.S. energy system.
While CCS technologies address CO2, they don’t curb other environmental pollutants, she points out “(They) do not make that crucial link between climate policy and health,” she says. “They are false solutions.”
“We’re creating a whole new economy and market with billions of dollars going to these technologies that are unproven, and that will continue to keep polluting fossil fuel facilities in business.”
Instead, Shepard says the money should be invested directly into communities and used to boost electrification and decarbonization by providing landlords with low-interest loans to replace gas boilers and install heat pumps, as well as paying for more tree-planting and green spaces to combat the ever-worsening urban heat island effect.
Basu agrees. “We have clean energy sources now that are cheap and accessible,” he says. “I think we have to aggressively ramp those up. ... That's the affordable approach, that's what we have available, and I think getting distracted by anything else is just going to slow us down and not protect peoples' health.”
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There is a sense that legislators are listening. Shepard has represented WE ACT on numerous White House committees, helping to secure a federal commitment that 40% of all investments in clean energy will go to under-served communities. The EPA is now making multi-million-dollar awards directly to communities, she says, while the IRA, which has set out to reduce U.S. emissions by 40% by 2030, is to set to start bringing “historic levels of investment” to these communities.
Health Care Without Harm (HCWH) is coming at the problem from a different angle. The global non-profit is championing climate-smart health care, explains Emily Mediate, director of HCWH’s U.S. Health and Climate program, by helping the health sector decarbonize and addressing the fact that it contributes 8.5% of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.
“The irony (is) that the healthcare sector is meant to be a sector that is treating patients and making people healthier… (yet it is) contributing in no small way to the very challenge of climate change through their own emissions,” she says.
“We want to see hospitals delivering climate-smart healthcare: reducing emissions, building resilience and advancing equity all in one and taking responsibility for their own role in the crisis.”
Through its membership of the US Health Care Climate Council, HCWH shares best practice with the broader healthcare sector, as well as advocating for policy changes.
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One recent success, explains Mediate, was updating an archaic code that’s said that all hospitals must maintain a diesel generator as its back-up source of power, exposing patients to pollution. Now, she says, the rules have been changed so that hospitals can use greener renewable energy options.
The council is now looking to tackle emissions from commonly used anesthetic gases such as nitrous oxide, too, as well pushing for alternative, lower emission inhalers.
There has been innovative, out-of-the-box thinking, too, continues Mediate, with the Boston Medical Centre’s unique Clean Power Prescription Program, which shows how hospitals can advance clean-energy solutions in a way that also improves patient health.
The center is now prescribing clean energy to patients who need to operate medical equipment at home, or for whom turning on the air conditioning is vital during hot weather. The energy comes from solar panels on the center’s own roof and appears as a $60 credit on utility bills.
HCWH is also working through its Anchors in Resilient Communities program to develop a relationship between hospitals and other partners that support the health, wealth and climate resilience of low-income communities.
In California, they have established partnerships between hospitals and local farmers to supply food that is healthier, plant-based and which creates fewer transport-based emissions. Any unused food is donated to homeless centers or other community groups. It’s a “new model for what healthcare delivery could look like”, she adds.
It's developments like this that have buoyed McCarthy. Speaking to The Ethical Corporation in Dubai, she explained: “If we take action on climate, we can actually improve public health and we can save lives. I think it is hugely important that we personalize the issues of climate so that people know that they have solutions; they can demand things; we can deliver them.”