Global Warming and Health Care: Why the Climate Crisis is Not Like Other Issues
by Jesse Jenkins, July 13th 2007

The War in Iraq, Health Care and Global Warming.

The three issues have emerged as the top issues of the Democratic Presidential Primary race and will almost certainly remain top issues in the General Election to follow.

As a blogger, I focus on the third of those issues, but I want to talk today about both Health Care and Global Warming for a moment in order to take a look at what I see as a fundamental difference in the nature of the two problems.



America's Health Care Crisis

To begin, it is clear that our nation is facing mounting and persistent problems with our health care system. Some may argue that we are now facing a full blown Health Care Crisis.

Roughly 50 million Americans are uninsured, over seven million of them are children, and the numbers are growing. That means nearly one in six Americans live every day hoping they don't get injured or sick, knowing that whatever the costs, it will come out of pocket, if they can afford it at all.

To add insult to injury, the uninsured are usually forced to forgo preventative care that can help keep them healthy and ultimately save them money because the up-front, out of pocket expense for this care is too much. When faced with paying the bills or going to see the dentist, for example, I can't imagine too many people would opt for a trip to the dentist's chair, and who could blame them. But the same is true for potentially life-saving preventative care like prostate exams and mammograms as well as regular doctor's check ups during which many health care problems are caught early. That means that when the uninsured due get ill, it's often diagnosed at a later stage when treating the illness is more costly and offers less hope.

Additionally, when, as is too often the case, someone without insurance does get sick or hurt and heads to the emergency room, the cost of their unpaid bill is born by those lucky enough to be insured through increased hospital costs and premiums. A 2003 study in the journal Health Affairs found that hospitals provide $35 billion in uncompensated care to the uninsured each year. So even if you're a stone cold, heartless individual and you think that the millions of uninsured men, women and children aren't your problem, think again.

And what about the lucky 250 million Americans who can actually afford health insurance or have it provided by their employers? Well, as any of you who recently watched Michael Moore's new film, Sicko, are now keenly aware, and as any of you who have been unfortunate enough to have an insurance claim denied know all to well, after dutifully paying premiums for years, when illness or injury strike and it is time to turn to your insurance company for help and file a claim, you may not end up much better off than those without insurance.

Think you're safe with your health insurance? Consider this: costly illnesses trigger about half of all personal bankruptcies, and most of those who go bankrupt because of medical problems have health insurance, according to a 2005 Harvard University study. “Unless you’re Bill Gates, you’re just one serious illness away from bankruptcy,” said Dr. David Himmelstein, the study’s lead author and a associate professor of medicine at Harvard. “Most of the medically bankrupt were average Americans who happened to get sick.” The study estimates medical-caused bankruptcies affect about 2 million Americans each year, including 700,000 children.

The central problem is that the for-profit American insurance industry's primary motive - maximize profits by minimizing claims paid - runs counter to their supposed purpose - covering health care costs for their members at times of need. This perverse incentive to deny coverage, deny claims and deny treatment in order to increase profits leads, as anyone with high school economics under their belt could predict, to a pretty poor health care system - large numbers of uninsured, frequently denied care, rising premiums and even after all those premiums paid, large out of pocket expenditures for health care expenses. Time to cross your fingers and hope your insurance company doesn't find a reason to deny your claim ... and the list of reasons warranting a denial is long indeed.

Here are the facts: According to the World Health Organization, "The U. S. health system spends a higher portion of its gross domestic product than any other country but ranks 37 out of 191 countries according to its performance." The World Health Organization ranks the United States just ahead of Slovenia (38th) and Cuba (39th) in their report, which uses five performance indicators to measure the overall performance and effectiveness of health systems in 191 member states.

Americans pay 28 times more for health care per capita than Cubans do (about $7,000 per person compared to roughly $250 per person in Cuba) and yet we receive only slightly better health care! And although Cuba ranks slightly lower overall than the United States in the WHO rankings, it still has a lower infant mortality rate and longer life span.

You read that right: A tiny impoverished nation crippled by a decades-old blockade by the most powerful nation in the world (a blockade which inhumanely includes medical supplies and drugs) ranks just about the same the United States for health care. What's wrong with this picture? And more importantly, why don't we do something about it?

Clearly the problems with health care in America demand remedies. Caring for the sick, poor and needy seems to be a moral imperative central to the values of people of just about every faith or moral persuasion. And I doubt I would find many - except perhaps the richest among us - who wouldn't prefer a health care system whose primary motive was to care for us when we are ill, rather than maximize the profits of shareholders.

And yet as pressing as this issue is, as important as it is to address and as much as I am happy that it is finally a central issue in the presidential election, the Health Care Crisis differs fundamentally from another crisis we face: the Climate Crisis.



The Climate Crisis

As most of us are hopefully aware by now, the occurrence of global warming is "unequivocal."

Those aren't the words of Al Gore or some liberal think tank. That's a direct quote from the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Fourth Assessment Report, released earlier this year. The IPCC report is a very conservative document. In fact, it's a true consensus document, representing the work of over 2,500 climate scientist. Furthermore, the report's content and wording must be unanimously approved by representatives of 130 participating governments from across the world (including the U.S. government).

The report goes on to state with greater than 90% certainty that human activities are to blame for warming temperatures.

In short, the debate is over (and in truth, has been for some time) and the fact that we are facing a global climate crisis is increasingly apparent.

The second in a series of IPCC working group reports that make up the Fourth Assessment Report details the effects of increasing temperatures, and they are not pretty:

Drought and heat waves, heavy rains and floods, hurricanes and other extreme weather events will be more frequent and in most cases more severe, causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage and costing countless lives.

Ecosystems across the planet will be devastated and 20-30% of all known plant and animal species will be at risk of extinction.

Millions more people living along the sea will be flooded every year due to rising sea levels.

Hundreds of millions of people will face water and food shortages as frequent drought, disappearing glaciers and shifting climate zones take their toll on farmland, rivers and lakes. By 2020, between 75 million and 250 million people in Africa alone are projected to be exposed to water shortages due to climate change, and yields from rain-fed agriculture in many African countries could fall by 50%. The disappearance of glaciers in the Himalayas is expected to threaten the freshwater availability of billions of people in populous Central, South, East and Southeast Asia by mid-century.

As the IPCC report makes clear, it will be the world's poor - those in developing countries who have contributed least to the greenhouse gas emissions that have driven rising temperatures - who will (in another cruel twist of fate) bear the brunt of these impacts.

However, lest we think that the Climate Crisis will only affect those in the Sudan, or Bangladesh or the Maldive Islands, let's consider the impacts of a couple of recent extreme weather events on the world's developed nations:

More than $81.2 billion in damage, 1,836 lives lost and untold millions affected. That's the cost of Hurricane Katrina's devastating impact on New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, just one extreme weather event of the kind predicted to be more frequent if we don't rein in the climate crisis.

52,000 lives lost. That's how many people died in a severe heat wave that struck Europe in 2003. Heat waves like this will be more common, and more deadly in a future where global warming is left to run amok.

Water for drinking or for agriculture. That's the tradeoff Australians may be forced to make this summer. Calling the situation "unprecedentedly dangerous," Australian Prime Minister John Howard warned in April that unless record drought conditions are broken by significant rainfall in the next six to eight weeks, irrigation will be banned in the nation's principal agricultural area in order to preserve water supplies to cities. "It is a grim situation," Mr. Howard said, "and there is no point in pretending to Australia otherwise. We must all hope and pray there is rain."

OK, so it's clear: global warming is occurring, humans are the cause, and it will have (and indeed is already having) some decidedly unpleasant effects felt here at home and across the planet.

On the surface then, the Health Care Crisis and the Global Warming Crisis are very similar: both are pressing, both present clear moral imperatives, and both hurt the unempowered most: the poor, and in the case of climate change, those yet unborn. True, the Health Care Crisis is a domestic issue while the Climate Crisis is of a more global nature that requires international as well as domestic solutions. One might also argue that the scope and scale of the Climate Crisis exceeds that of the Health Care Crisis. But both issues are clearly deserving of immediate action and I'm excited to see them emerge as central issues in the presidential election.

But there is one main difference between the two, one crucial difference that I would argue elevates the Climate Crisis to warrant being not just a high priority, but the top priority of the Next President of the United States.



Time is Running Out

To put it simply, time is running out!

When it comes to the Climate Crisis, we are rapidly approaching the point where, no matter how hard we try, we will no longer have the chance to do anything to halt rising temperatures.

Here's the deal: like all natural systems, the Earth's carbon system is naturally in balance. As carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, is emitted by natural sources, an equal amount is absorbed by plants, algae, the world's ocean and other 'carbon sinks.'

However, human activities have now thrown that balanced system out of whack. The global warming pollution we add to the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels, producing cement, clear cutting forests and other human activities has increased the amount of greenhouse gases entering the atmosphere far beyond the capacity of the Earth's natural systems to absorb and sequester the heat trapping gases.

The end result: levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are building up, driving global warming. And as long as human-caused emissions continue to exceed the capacity of the Earth to absorb them, these levels will continue to rise, driving every accelerating warming.

But the problem gets worse. As greenhouse gas levels build and the planet warms, it creates positive feedback loops - the warming causes changes that beget further warming in a feedback cycle that accelerates the rate of warming.

As the ice covering the Arctic Ocean and the North Pole melts, for example, it exposes more open ocean. The open ocean absorbs more sunlight and heat than the reflective white ice, meaning the oceans warm even faster, accelerating the melting of the ice which accelerates ocean warming which accelerates melting ... you get the picture.

There are any number of these feedback loops out there in the world. Here's two more particularly relevant ones scientists have described in recent peer reviewed journal articles:

melting permafrost in Siberia and Alaska threatens to release millions of tons of the potent greenhouse gas methane now currently frozen in the soil;

like the melting sea ice, as continental ice sheets in places like Greenland melt, they form meltwater lakes that pool on the surface, absorbing more heat than the reflective ice, and accelerating the ice melt.

Worst of all, at some point, the oceans, a very important carbon sink, will have had all they can take and begin emitting carbon dioxide instead of absorbing it. In fact, an international team of scientists recently reported that the ability of the Southern Ocean - the body of water surrounding Antarctica - to absorb and store carbon dioxide is already weakening, an ominous portent that the Earth may soon have enough of serving as our carbon dumping ground.

What all this means is that there's a point out there - Dr. James Hansen, America's top climate scientist calls it 'the Tipping Point' - where temperatures and greenhouse gas levels will have increased enough to set off a chain reaction of these feedback loops that will push global warming beyond our control. Once we pass the Tipping Point, warming will simply spin out of control and no matter what we do, we won't be able to halt or reverse the changing climate. We could stop using all fossil fuels entirely, but if we did it one day after crossing the Tipping Point - think of it as the Point of No Return - it wouldn't do a damn bit of good.

But don't take my word for it. Let's hear what Dr. Hansen has to say: "In my opinion," he testified in 2006, "there is no significant doubt (probability > 99%)" that projections for warming in a business-as-usual future "would push the Earth beyond the tipping point and cause dramatic climate impacts including eventual sea level rise of at least several meters, extermination of a substantial fraction of the animal and plant species on the planet, and major regional climate disruptions."

Translation: unless we act soon to change course and avoid this business as usual future, we will almost certainly pass the Point of No Return.

That's why I would argue we ought to view the Climate Crisis as a different kind of crisis than the Health Care Crisis we are facing today.

In the case of the Climate Crisis, it comes down to this: we have one shot to fix this mess. If we get it wrong, we condemn today's young people as well as untold generations to come to a darker and forever changed world and a quality of life so diminished that they will be the first generations in American history to be worse off than those who came before.

And therein lies the crucial difference between the Climate Crisis and the Health Care Crisis.

If we wait to fix the problems with our health care system, the fundamental nature of the problem changes little. Yes, we would prolong the suffering of tens of millions of Americans lacking health care and condemn those with coverage to the whims of a profit-greedy insurance industry, an outcome I hardly consider acceptable. But failing to solve the Health Care Crisis doesn't carry the risk that we won't be able to fix the problem at some point in the future. As sad as it would be, if the Next President of the United States fails to solve the Health Care Crisis, his or her successor can still take a crack at it. And if we make incremental progress - say finding a way to insure every child in America but failing to extend coverage to uninsured adults - we can enjoy that success, knowing we've made a step forward.

The same might not be true for the Climate Crisis: as we've seen, if we delay in tackling global warming, we risk passing the Tipping Point where the fundamental nature of the problem changes, and not for the better.

If, by the end of the next president's term in 2012, the United States is not well on its way to slashing our greenhouse gas emissions and leading the world in a transition to a sustainable energy future, we will be dangerously close to the Point of No Return, if we haven't already crossed it. We will simply be too late to get a handle on global warming and the problem will change from one of avoiding or mitigating global warming to learning to live with its consequences and adapting to live in a world of frequent droughts, floods and hurricanes, acute water shortages and famines, dramatically lower biodiversity and rising sea levels.

And unlike making incremental progress on the Health Care Crisis, until we get the climate system fully back in balance - that means emitting no more than the carbon system can absorb - we won't be finished. Greenhouse gas concentrations will continue to build, driving ever increasing temperatures and pushing us ever closer to the tipping point.



Building a Road or Fixing the Bridge

Here's another way to think about the difference between the Climate Crisis and the Health Care Crisis...

Solving the Health Care Crisis is like building a new road. As we build the road, we can make incremental progress towards our ultimate goal. Each mile of road built is a concrete step forward, and we can enjoy and make use of the portions of the road already finished regardless of how long it takes us to finish the entire road.

Solving the Climate Crisis is more like making repairs to a crumbling bridge. The bridge is decaying and at some point soon will collapse. We're not sure when, but we do know that an earthquake could do the job, or simply one too many trucks rattling over its expanse. We can make some investments in repairing the bridge now, strengthening it and making it safe and sound again, or we can delay those investments. But the longer we delay, the more we risk passing the point of no return when the bridge collapses and we're faced with an entirely different, and much more costly proposition: building an entirely new bridge.

Except here's the big problem: we can't build a new bridge. There's only one planet, one climate system, and once it goes spinning out of control, there's little humans can do to stop it.

So to carry the bridge analogy to its final conclusion, unless we act quickly to repair the bridge, we risk letting it collapse and will be faced with finding a new, more expensive, far less convenient way to cross the river. When's the last time you preferred taking a ferry to a bridge folks?



But How Much Time Do We Have, and What Do We Do About It?

So how long do we have? When will we cross the Tipping Point?

Well, there's really no way to know for sure. Dr. Hansen cautions that we have no more than a decade to get our house in order and start making serious progress on climate change, and I'm not one to argue with a man with his kind of credentials. Some argue that we've already passed the Tipping Point, but I'm not yet willing to accept that overwhelmingly depressing idea.

Either way, I think it's safe to say that whoever we elect as our next president will make or brake our chances of tackling the Climate Crisis.

In some ways it doesn't much matter when the Tipping Point will come. We know it's out there, and we know it can't be too far off.

To borrow an analogy from successful Silicon Valley entrepreneur, philanthropist and climate change activist, Steve Kirsch, we can think of it this way: you're sitting in a car with your family, friends and loved ones. You've got your foot on the gas and the car is going faster and faster every minute. But now you pass a warning sign that says 'Stop, Cliff Ahead!' It doesn't say how far away the cliff is (curse those ambiguous folks at the Department of Transportation!). It could be 100 yards away, could be a mile, could be ten. What do you do?

It's clear that any rational person wouldn't keep their foot slammed on the gas. You'd hit the brakes, slow down and travel at a cautious speed where you could come to a complete stop once you spotted the cliff. Heck, you might even turn around the head down another road entirely!

So if we're not willing to keep hurtling towards a cliff with our family on board, why are we still asking ourselves what to do about the Climate Crisis while we hurtle at an every faster pace towards the Tipping Point, even if we're not sure how far away it is?

The answer is clear: it's time to slam on the brakes, so to speak, time to cut our emissions of greenhouse gases as hard and as fast as we can, and that means launching an effort to transform the way we make and use energy.

It won't be easy, but it also won't be impossible. In fact, we have the technologies today - wind, solar, geothermal and other renewable energy technologies, energy efficiency and conservation, biofuels and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles - that are ready to be deployed to build a low-carbon, homegrown, sustainable energy future.

The American Solar Energy Society unveiled a report in January that shows how a combination of aggressive efforts to harness energy efficiency opportunities and deploy available renewable energy technologies - no fantasy future tech here, just technologies ready to go today - could provide most, if not all of the U.S. greenhouse gas emissions reductions needed to do our part to stabilize the climate. That means even without help from nuclear or 'clean coal' technologies, renewable energy and energy efficiency technologies available today can get the job done.

Furthermore, in a follow-up to the ASES report unveiled this week at the SOLAR 2007 Conference in Cleveland, Ohio, the report's editor, Dr. Charles Kutscher of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, showed cost estimates for the full build-out of renewables and efficiency described in the report. The price tag? A net savings of $82 billion a year! You read that right: rather than break the bank, tackling climate change with a potent one-two punch of renewable energy and energy efficiency will actually save American energy consumers money, billions of dollars a year in fact relative to business-as-usual energy spending and investments in energy infrastructure. Kutscher estimates that the renewable energy portion of the ASES plan will cost $26 billion/year more than business-as-usual energy costs while the energy efficiency part of the plan actually saves $108 billion every year through reduced energy bills and avoided investments in energy infrastructure.

Now the American Solar Energy Society is hardly an impartial party, but the report was compiled by more than a dozen experts in the field and even if Kutscher's cost estimates are off by a factor of two for both the efficiency and renewable energy portions - that is, even if the energy efficiency investments save only half the estimated $108 billion/year and the renewable energy investments wind up costing twice as much as estimated - the ASES plan still comes out a wash. Even in that case, we end up tackling climate change in the United States at little to no extra cost.

Kutscher's cost estimates are purely focused on the direct energy costs - the price we pay on our energy bills, at the pump and in the portion of our taxes that wind up in energy industry subsidies. So even if Kutscher is way off and building a sustainable energy future winds up costing a bit more than business-as-usual, we still get a whole host of other benefits out of the deal that shouldn't be ignored: millions of jobs created in a burgeoning, American-made clean energy industry; an end to our costly and dangerous addiction to foreign oil; cleaner and healthier air, water and land; and lets not forget, a stabilized climate! I'm sure most of us would be willing to pay a little bit more for our energy if it meant energy independence, a stronger American economy, healthier lives and an end to the climate crisis.

So what are we waiting for?

The obstacles standing between us and an end to the Climate Crisis are not technological. They are not even economic.

The obstacles are political, and that is why who we elect as our next president is so critical.

It's going to take someone with an acute understanding of the problem, it's scope and it's urgency, a clear vision of the path forward, and an unwavering commitment to get the job done.

Most of all, it's going to take a true leader, someone who can redefine what is politically possible, stand up to special interests, and most importantly, convince the American people that transforming the way we make and use energy is necessary, it's possible, and it's ultimately highly desirable. It's no small task for sure, but we shouldn't we expect big things from our president?

So when you think about which of the 2008 Presidential Candidates you want to support, keep a keen eye on their plans to tackle the Climate Crisis. Don't think about climate change as just one more in a list of important issues. While we should all be looking for a candidate with a solid plan to get us out of Iraq and a smart proposal to fix our ailing health care system, we've got to realize that solving the Climate Crisis should be the top priority of the Next President of the United States.

The simple fact is, no less than the fate of the world as we know hangs in the balance of the 2008 Presidential Election. I know it sounds like dramatic hyperbole, but as I hope I've shown above, when it comes to the Climate Crisis, it's unfortunately quite true.



Resources

Want to look a bit deeper into the 2008 candidates' plans to tackle the Climate Crisis? These resources below might be helpful:

MoveOn.org's Virtual Town Hall on Climate Change, featuring videos of questions and answers with all eight Democratic presidential candidates.

Grist.org's take on the candidates' 'green credentials'

The League of Conservation Voter's Climate Change Candidate Scorecard (pdf)

Straight to the horse's mouth - the candidates' Issues Pages: John Edwards, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Bill Richardson, Chris Dodd, Joe Biden, Dennis Kucinich, Mike Gravel