The climate crisis is our greatest health crisis

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 07/12/2024 (363 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

As a physician observer attending the recent United Nations Conference of the Parties (or COP 29) in Azerbaijan, it was clear the deeply unhealthy COP process needs some massive therapy if we aim to curb the single greatest health crisis of our time: the climate crisis.

As our planet burns, powerful dedicated pro-climate officials, organizations and advocates from around the world tried to advance a critical climate agenda while tense global negotiations deadlocked, and 1,773 fossil fuel lobbyists showed up alongside pro-nuclear lobbyists to disrupt, delay and derail.

Fossil fuels are the greatest cause of both the climate crisis and also of toxic air pollution, which kills over eight million people worldwide every year, including over 15,000 Canadians. Unless we phase out fossil fuels all of us, ranging from the unborn to the most elderly, will face increasing risks of disease and death while our health-care systems and global economies tailspin out of control with the repeated unsustainable hits of climate change.

Proven large-scale solutions, including energy efficiencies, renewable energy, and new battery technologies, could immediately and safely replace both fossil fuels and grossly expensive nuclear energy at a fraction of the costs while eliminating the associated serious health risks.

Since COP 29 has been dubbed the “Finance COP”, let’s follow the money. It’s well known that the cost of not acting on climate (US$1,266 trillion) is massively greater than the cost of taking action (US$19 trillion by 2050). This only intensifies the pressing health reasons for getting off fossil fuels. Every dollar invested in cutting greenhouse gas pollution from fossil fuels returns $2 in health-care cost savings alone. Additional massive savings will rack up by avoiding damage to public infrastructure, homes, jobs, food systems and more from punishingly expensive storms, floods, fires and other climate impacts.

The global fossil fuel industry is responsible for over five million deaths every year. Inconceivably, while literally killing us the industry makes profits of US$3.5 trillion annually while also collecting US$7 trillion in annual subsidies — that’s US$13.3 million in subsidies every single minute, 365 days a year.

It’s unacceptable to then be told there’s not enough money to pay for health care, housing or essential public services at home. It’s unacceptable that wealthy nations at COP29 refused to pay anything beyond 25 per cent of true “loss and damages,” the United Nations term for money owed by rich countries most responsible for creating the climate crisis, to poorer countries disproportionately suffering deaths and damage, so they might survive climate impacts and reduce their own emissions. Those emissions reductions would also protect wealthy nations.

Pulling trillions in subsidies out of fossil fuels could pay for a lot of quality health care, could fund loss and damage, and could fund the clean renewable energy transition we all urgently need to get off fossil fuels permanently. Reducing fossil fuels will save millions of lives while generating more money through massive health-care and infrastructure savings to reinvest in a positive upward spiral of global prosperity. More money could come from taxing the obscene profits of large-scale polluters.

The only path forward to a healthy, livable future must get us off fossil fuels now.

COP29 was meant to be that path for humanity. However, it is increasingly obstructed by roadblocks thrown up by the fossil fuel industry, and conflict of interest among certain participants and host countries with lack of global consensus stalling critical climate decisions.

Fossil fuel influence is already proven in suppressing protest in higher education, and in actively silencing its own industry scientists for decades, and must be eliminated from COP. Deliberate climate disinformation has become such a powerful obstacle to global action at COP and beyond that a new joint UN initiative to counter climate disinformation, the Global Initiative for Integrity of Information on Climate Change, was announced at the G20 Summit during COP29. As the world watches, negotiators from wealthy nations at COP30 next year must be willing to allow progress with the urgency the global climate crisis demands.

Criticism doesn’t mean abandoning the COP process — in fact, exactly the opposite.

The more COPs fail to deliver, the more every voice from civil society matters to get us back on course. We must maintain ongoing pressure to clean up COPs.

We don’t have time to hand over COP to parties willing to sacrifice our collective future for short-lived power and profit. We don’t have time to start over in some new forum that could deliver global climate action with the scale and urgency we need.

In a rapidly overheating world suffering rising oceans, fires, lethal floods and storms, physicians and health-care workers must get louder on centring human health and well-being as the reason for climate action.

Beyond health workers, we all need to tune in, show up and push at this pivotal moment, to take back the COP process as our best hope for a survivable world for our children.

Time is no longer on our side.

Dr. Mili Roy is a former member of the faculty of medicine, University of Manitoba and current Ontario co-chair of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment.