How to Make Climate Change Doubters Pay a Political Price

More than any past report, the U.S. government’s National Climate Assessment in November made clear the devastating effects of climate change on global public health. As it and other analyses have described, these aftershocks will be generational and wide-reaching but particularly crushing for vulnerable health systems in developing countries. In response, multinational organizations and elected officials must reprioritize how they delegate scarce health resources to ensure that recent progress in combating both communicable and noncommunicable diseases is not reversed. And even the status quo is too little; current efforts are insufficient and poorly funded.

A woman wears an air-filtration mask while crossing
a street in San Francisco, California, October 13, 2017. 

In purely economic terms, health consequences dwarf the other effects of climate change in sheer cost to the United States, estimated at $141 billion due to heat-related deaths alone by 2100, vastly outpacing infrastructure damage to coastal cities from sea-level rise (estimated at $118 billion).

Read the Medium story by Vin Gupta and Juliette Kayyem - “How to Make Climate Change Doubters Pay a Political Price.”