Docs say ‘fossil fuel addiction’ starves millions
Extreme weather from climate change triggered hunger in nearly 100 million people and increased heat deaths by 68% in vulnerable populations worldwide as the world’s “fossil fuel addiction” degrades public health each year, doctors reported in a new study.
Worldwide the burning of coal, oil, natural gas and biomass forms air pollution that kills 1.2 million people a year, including 11,800 in the United States, according to a report last week in the prestigious medical journal Lancet.
“Our health is at the mercy of fossil fuels,” said University College of London health and climate researcher Marina Romanello, executive director of the Lancet Countdown. “We’re seeing a persistent addiction to fossil fuels that is not only amplifying the health impacts of climate change, but which is also now at this point compounding with other concurrent crises that we’re globally facing, including the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the cost-of-living crisis, energy crisis and food crisis that were triggered after the war in Ukraine.”
In the annual Lancet Countdown, which looks at climate change and health, nearly 100 researchers across the globe highlighted 43 indicators where climate change is making people sicker or weaker.
“And the health impacts of climate change are rapidly increasing,” Romanello said.
In praising the report, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres put it even more bluntly: “The climate crisis is killing us.”
New analysis in the report blamed 98 million more cases of self-reported hunger around the world in 2020, compared with 19812010, on “days of extreme heat increasing in frequency and intensity due to climate change.”
Researchers looked at 103 countries and found that 26.4% of the population experienced what scientists call “food insecurity” and in a simulated world without climate change’s effects that would have only been 22.7%, Romanello said.
“Can I say that every bit of food insecurity is due to climate change? Of course not. But we think that in this complex web of causes, it is a very significant contributor and it’s only going to get worse,” said pediatrician Dr. Anthony Costello, Lancet Countdown co-chair and head of the University College of London’s Global Health Institute.
Computerized epidemiology models also show an increase in annual heat-related deaths from 187,000 a year from 2000 to 2004 to an annual average of 312,000 a year the last five years, Romanello said.
When there’s a heat wave, like the record-shattering 2020 one in the Pacific Northwest or this summer’s English heat wave, emergency room doctors know when they go to the hospital “we’re in for a challenging shift,” said study co-author Dr. Renee Salas, a Boston emergency room physician and professor at the Harvard School of Public Health.