Source: In An Unusual Step, a Top Medical Journal Weighs in on Climate Change – Inside Climate News
In September 2021, the New England Journal of Medicine and more than 200 other health journals worldwide published a joint editorial calling for urgent action to limit greenhouse gas emissions to protect human health,1 adding to growing demands from around the globe. Yet 9 months later, global greenhouse gas emissions — predominantly driven by fossil-fuel combustion — continue to rise as the responses required are debated or ignored. In the United States, the country that has the greatest cumulative emissions historically and is the largest producer of oil and gas, greenhouse gas emissions are rapidly returning to prepandemic levels and are growing faster than the U.S. economy.2 Meanwhile, recent U.S. pledges to promptly decarbonize are incompatible with current policies and practices, including issuing new lease permits for fossil-fuel drilling and allowing continued construction of new pipelines, which lock in future emissions and their associated health harms.
The average global temperature is now 1.1°C above preindustrial levels. The report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published earlier this year warned that greenhouse gas emissions must start to decline by 2025 and fall by 43% from current levels by 2030 if we are to limit warming to 1.5°C, the preferred climate goal of the Paris Agreement.3 Humanity has the tools it needs to begin substantially reducing emissions over these next 3 years; technological advances have made solar and wind energy widely available and often cheaper than fossil fuels — especially if governments stop subsidizing fossil fuels.3 The primary barrier to an equitable transition away from coal, oil, and natural gas is a lack of political will, underpinned by the influence of the fossil-fuel industry.3
Why are fossil fuels an issue for medicine and, specifically, for medical journals? Their extraction and use are the root cause of air pollution and climate change. Each year, an estimated 8.7 million people die worldwide because of fossil-fuel–generated particulate air pollution,4 and the total number of deaths attributable to climate change is not even known.
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