You’ve no doubt already heard that on February 12 the Trump administration officially revoked the EPA’s “endangerment finding,” the regulatory ruling that declared climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions to be a threat to public health and welfare. The decision has rightly been denounced by all the usual suspects, but it’s worth taking a minute to ponder how truly bonkers this latest Trump move is. If you want to maximize endangerment of people’s lives and health, he picked a pretty good way to do it.
Although the administration talked more about the (phony) economic benefits of the move, health was central to the original finding. So, let’s cut to the chase: Climate change has already killed people, both in California and around the world. And death is generally agreed to be bad for one’s health.
Bay Area readers don’t need to be reminded of California’s recent wave of record wildfire seasons, spreading death and destruction from Paradise to Malibu and Altadena, among other places. But fires don’t just kill directly. They dump massive amounts of fine particle pollution into the air, pollution recently estimated to cause over 24,000 deaths a year in the 48 contiguous states. Those deaths don’t come all at once, because lung damage caused by particulates is slow and insidious, but dead is dead. And, based on the experience of a close relative, I can tell you that lung disease is not the way you want to die.
But it goes beyond particle pollution. Wildfire smoke contains all sorts of toxic chemicals. Some of these come from the various types of pollutants that get absorbed by trees and brush that burn. Others come from the assorted plastics, electronics and other stuff that goes up in smoke when thousands of homes and businesses burn. None of this is good for you.
Newborns, pregnant individuals, older adults and people dealing with chronic disease are especially vulnerable to the effects of all these types of pollution. This allegedly “pro-life” administration doesn’t care.
No one who’s seriously studied these things doubts that climate change has contributed to the rise in wildfires. Increased droughts and wildly unpredictable levels of rainfall are precisely the sorts of impacts the scientific community has been warning for decades that we can expect as the earth warms.
California is hardly alone in this. In my adopted home state of Hawaii, much of the lovely, historic town of Lahaina was wiped out two and a half years ago by a fire that was manifestly worsened by climate change. With Maui already made vulnerable by mismanagement of both land and water by the now-departed sugar industry, the fire’s immediate amplifiers were directly related to climate: Drought left the area where the fire ignited bone dry, while a rapidly-intensifying hurricane passing to the south fueled the winds that swept those flames through the town too quickly for everyone to evacuate, much less for firefighters to save much.
For anyone unclear on how this works, it’s pretty simple. Climate change has been warming the oceans. Warmer ocean water is essentially hurricane food, leading to hurricanes getting more intense more quickly. That’s what turned what might have been an ordinary brushfire into a catastrophe.
But the issue of climate change and health goes well beyond droughts, hurricanes and fires. As a 2022 article in Infectious Diseases and Therapy noted, “Climate change is adversely affecting the burden of infectious disease throughout the world.” Among other things, the article notes, warming temperatures expand the range of disease-carrying insects, like the mosquitos that led to an unexpected outbreak of West Nile virus in Europe in 2018 and the ticks that are expected to lead to increasing spread of encephalitis and Lyme disease in the US and Europe.
Taking into account the above shifts and other climate-associated changes like mass migrations of humans and animals, shifts in land use and more, an article in Clinical Infectious Diseases concluded, “Climate change poses a grave and multifaceted threat to human health.”
Endangerment, anyone?
One could go on forever about other climate-related risks to health. Floods and rising sea levels put entire communities at risk. While the US food supply hasn’t yet been greatly impacted by climate change, other parts of the world haven’t been so lucky. One recent scientific review noted, “Climate change will make it more difficult to achieve food security because of the anticipated adverse effects on agriculture, especially in developing, tropical and subtropical nations where agricultural yields are expected to drop drastically.”
Those sorts of changes could surely come to bite Americans eventually, if droughts or floods start to impact grain production in the plains states or vegetable production in the Central Valley. And even if the worst effects of climate on food production occur in tropical regions, the societal disruptions and resulting mass migrations (something you’d think might be of concern to an administration hell-bent on keeping dark-skinned foreigners out of the US) are going to impact us. Wars, strife and global fights over access to food and water tend not to be conducive to good health.
As Dr. Lisa Patel wrote recently in MedPage Today, “Many of us entered medicine to protect health before disease takes hold. The question now is whether our regulatory systems will continue to do the same. The air our patients breathe should not make them sick and policy choices should not make our jobs harder by increasing preventable disease.”
