Should We Be More Optimistic about Fighting Climate Change?

Diagnosis: Climate Change

When we think about the major health challenges facing the world, we tend to think about mental illness, violence, malnutrition, and chronic illnesses like heart and lung diseases. It surprises many to learn that climate change is the greatest public health challenge facing communities around the world. But where there is risk, there is also opportunity; Nielsen estimates that by 2021, one quarter of total store sales in the U.S. ($150 billion) will be sustainable products. What’s more, those products are expected to outperform traditional products. We are heartened by this, but not altogether surprised. As physicians, we know that patients we have cared for throughout the years stand to be increasingly affected by climate change. We also know that these people are not just our patients, but they are also your employees, colleagues, and customers, maybe even yourself and your family. The choices you make today—big ones about carbon neutrality and small ones like the kind of light bulb in your desk lamp—are going to influence their lives tomorrow.

The impact of climate change hits close to home for us. Our families still live in California and Miami where we each grew up—in neighborhoods at risk from increasing wildfires, drought, hurricanes, and sea level rise. Our young son and daughter are too young to understand, but they will live with the consequences of what we do today to protect their world. This became exceedingly evident to us in November 2018, when Northern California was bathed in a deep and noxious smoke.

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Two hundred miles north of San Francisco the largest wildfire in California’s history—named the Camp Fire—was burning. In the Bay Area, home to over 7 million people, the smoke hovered overhead. Children couldn’t go outside during recess, and many schools closed entirely. People wore masks whenever they stepped outside. Emergency rooms and doctors offices filled as people struggled to breathe. Many people with particularly sensitive family members—babies, the elderly, asthmatics, and others with chronic illnesses—temporarily fled from the area. By the time it was contained, it had consumed more land than the city of Chicago and destroyed 500 businesses. In nearby Chico, 10% of their workforce lost their homes. Many were unable to find new housing they could afford, so they moved away, straining an already tight labor market.

A report by the global insurance group Munich RE found that the Camp Fire was the costliest natural disaster in the world in 2018 at $16.5 billion. PG&E, California’s largest electric utility, cited wildfire liabilities of $30 billion from 2017 and 2018 fires when they filed for bankruptcy in early 2019. It was the sixth largest corporate bankruptcy filing ever. Their 16 million customers will see rate increases to pay for costly court-ordered wildfire prevention work, including clearing power lines from the branches of an estimated 120 million trees. Increasingly homes and businesses at the interface between city and natural spaces—some of the most sought after communities—are becoming uninsurable.

It’s not just wildfires, and it’s not just California. According to a survey released December 2018, nearly half of Americans (46%) said they have personally felt the effects of climate change. The number who actually have is almost certainly higher. Warmer oceans mean more frequent and severe hurricanes that are flooding cities, causing extended power outages, shuttering businesses including hospitals and clinics, and creating short- and long-term stress for all those in the potential path of the storm. When Florida residents went online to buy supplies ahead of Hurricane Irma, they found 2-day shipping that had extended to 13 days—after the storm would have passed. E-commerce increased to 14.3% of total retail sales in the U.S. in 2018, making extreme weather a threat to a growing segment of businesses and the economy.

Beyond the immediate economic impact, extreme weather increases the risks and costs of employees who work outdoors, in construction, delivering mail and packages, utility maintenance, farming, or policing, for example. These workers have the greatest exposure to not only catastrophic extremes, but also extended pollen seasons that are worsening people’s allergies and asthma and, as the territories for tick- and mosquito-borne illnesses expand, are also increasingly at risk of getting sick from Lyme disease, dengue, and Zika.

A Dose of Optimism

It is easy to feel overwhelmed by the magnitude of the climate change crisis. But not only can this be dangerous, it ignores the progress we have made in the five decades since scientists first sounded the alarm on climate change. Now, for the first time, new renewable energy has become cheaper than existing coal in the U.S. Consumers are choosing sustainable products at a higher rate each year. Even Royal Dutch Shell, the largest oil company in the world, is responding to shareholder pressure by looking to renewables and energy efficiency in transportation. Sweden is committed to eliminating fossil fuels from electricity generation by 2040 and is challenging every other country to race them to 100%. Germany’s renewables have outstripped coal, and on one windy, sunny day this past Easter Monday, they generated 77% of the nation’s electricity needs with renewables. This is climate change’s second story. And it is one that should both give us hope and spur us to further action.

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In 2017, Walmart launched Project Gigaton, an initiative to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the global value chain. More than 200 suppliers of products that are a part of our everyday lives have joined that effort, bringing sustainability—whether we know it or not—to our laundry piles, refrigerators, and showers. For example, because up to 90% of a washing machine’s energy use goes toward heating water, Tide had reformulated their laundry detergent to clean well in cold water and launched a new campaign to challenge consumers to make the switch to cold. Similarly, Anheuser-Busch built a massive wind farm in Oklahoma that supplies enough electricity to cover all of the Budweiser beer brewed in the U.S. Kellogg has established a goal of training half a million U.S. farmers in techniques that lower greenhouse gas emissions, and Unilever has reached nearly 50% post-consumer recycled materials for plastic packaging.

For more evidence of progress, we look to Boston-based Indigo Ag and their Terraton Initiative, a private carbon market that will pay farmers to capture carbon in the soil by switching to regenerative farming practices—including no tilling, crop rotations, cover crops, and livestock grazing. Indigo Ag estimates that transitioning all of the world’s agricultural lands to these more sustainable practices has the potential to take 1 terraton (1 trillion tons) of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, nearly as much as we have put into the atmosphere since the start of the Industrial Revolution.

Commitments in the private sector go hand in hand with what is happening in the public sector. In the U.S., more than 100 cities and 8 states plus the District of Columbia have committed to 100% renewable energy. China is outstripping the rest of the world in installation of solar power. Scotland harnessed so much wind energy in the first half of 2019 that it could power all Scottish homes twice for the year. Kenya gets half its power from geothermal sources, capturing heat coming from deep within the East African Rift. Morocco is building the world’s largest concentrated solar plant.

In California, business and political leaders are not waiting for the wildfires and droughts of climate change to take apart the fifth largest economy in the world. In 2018, the state made a commitment to 100% zero-carbon energy sources by 2045. In that same year, the all-electric Tesla Model 3 became the top-selling passenger vehicle in the state. And this past July, four of the world’s largest automakers—Ford, BMW, Honda, and Volkswagen—sided with California in a surprise deal to produce more fuel-efficient cars, rejecting Trump administration efforts to roll back Obama-era standards.

Each of these examples takes us one step closer to ensuring climate stability. Closer to managing the stress and destruction and loss that comes to increasingly frequent natural disasters. Closer to protecting ourselves and our most vulnerable—the elderly, children, and those with chronic disease like congestive heart failure—from increasingly common extreme heat.

Where We Need to Go Together

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The Paris Agreement in 2015 has been adopted by every nation on earth, even war-torn Syria, which was the last to join the global climate effort. And while the Trump administration has announced an intention to withdraw the United States from the Agreement, it cannot legally do so until November 2020. We should demand that governments play the bold leadership role that is needed in this moment. In the meantime, a groundswell of people in the private sector and state and local governments are rising to the challenge with the “We Are Still In” campaign. They recognize that every one of us must build on the successes to date and rapidly transform how we live and do business because the window of opportunity is small, and there is a job for all of us to do.

Consider how even changing a light bulb can make a difference. Thomas Edison changed the world when he invented the incandescent bulb in 1895 by dramatically expanding the hours during which it was possible to work, read, and socialize. But that the incandescent bulb has one major drawback: it only turns 10% of the energy it uses into light. The rest is lost as heat. Following the 1973 oil crisis, General Electric tried to popularize fluorescent lights, which were more energy efficient. But the blueish, flickering light felt jarring and most families opted to stick with Edison. Finally, in 2011, the first LED light bulbs to replace standard bulbs were introduced. They had the warmth and constant light of incandescents but used up to 90% less energy and lasted up to 25 times longer.

At first many of us were shocked that a light bulb could cost $50. But enough of us chose to try them—millions of us in fact—that the prices dropped rapidly. By 2017, the cost dropped to less than $2 per bulb, and for the first time, LED bulbs topped sales of household replacement light bulbs in the U.S. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency now estimates that if every household in America switched to EnergyStar^® LEDs in their top 5 most used light fixtures, we would save enough energy to light 33 million homes for a year, and save nearly $5 billion a year in energy costs, and prevent greenhouse gases equivalent to the emissions from nearly 6 million cars. This is a boon for businesses and cities, which are increasingly installing LEDs into offices, factories, street lights, and traffic lights. The wins here pile up; they are saving on the cost of energy, and also on productivity, as they spend less time switching out broken light bulbs and worn out fluorescent tubes.

This sounds like a good story on its own, but there’s still another frontier when it comes to lighting. Solar powered LED lanterns are promising an even more dramatic reduction in traditional energy needs while expanding access to light for the more than 1 billion people who are not on the electricity grid. Here, again, we see the intersection of public health, climate change, and innovation. Before LEDs, kerosene lamps were a major contributor in many parts of the world to indoor air pollution that caused respiratory and eye problems, not to mention the risk of burns and fire. Solar powered LED lanterns—and other solar and local renewable energy sources—mean that people around the world can extend their lives by living in healthier conditions, but they are also a shining example of the possibilities ahead as we innovate and open new markets as solar panels, batteries, and LEDs converge.

Next week, the UN Climate Change Summit in New York is bringing together nations to share progress and commitments and to challenge one another to be bolder and faster in a global race to outpace climate change. One year ago, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a special report that showed that we have to cut our carbon emissions in half in 11 years—by 2030—on our way to net zero emissions by 2050 and negative emissions after that in order to avoid the most catastrophic and irreparable changes. This is about the bottom line and productivity, yes. It is also about our health. None of us can wait for the biggest, most powerful players to take action.

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Our research and experience tell us that now is the moment to turn the tide. Ultimately, success in combating climate change will mean all of us working together with as much speed and thoughtfulness as we can. Each of us must find ways to have impact, whether that’s launching bold initiatives to reduce carbon emissions in your company, connecting with your trade association to build strength in numbers, or even just changing the light bulb in your desk lamp. It is time to rapidly adopt solutions that are working and improve upon them. We do not have time to dwell too long on why we cannot win and must focus on why we can, and must, win.

Joining the Conversation

1. Alice Chen and Vivek Murthy use a classic “they say / I say” format in this article. Restate it in your own words, and summarize how the authors support their argument.
2. The authors are physicians and experienced leaders of major medical organizations. They published this article in the Harvard Business Review, a general management magazine read by managers in business, industry, government, and the nonprofit world. In what ways can you tell that the article is intended for an audience of executives as opposed to activists or general readers?
3. The article describes a number of climate-related disasters that would seem to offer strong reasons for pessimism. Why do you think the authors are so adamant about the importance of staying optimistic that the problems they discuss can be solved?
4. The authors bring in examples from their own and other people’s experiences as well as statistical findings from research. What, in your view, is the power of this personal way of arguing? What, if any, are its limitations?
5. Write an essay responding to Chen and Murthy with your own view of optimism versus pessimism in fighting climate change. In developing your essay, feel free to draw on and enter into conversation with other readings from this chapter.