Australia needs policy to deal with health effects of climate change, Chris Bowen says

Australia needs to develop policies and structures to prepare for the health impacts of climate change because we have not moved quickly enough – domestically or internationally – to reduce emissions and mitigate the risk, Labor’s health spokesman, Chris Bowen, believes.

Labor’s health spokesman, Chris Bowen,
wants Australia to develop a policy to deal
 with the health effects of climate change.

Bowen will use a lecture at Sydney University on Wednesday night to argue a health response to climate change would not be necessary if there was a robust international policy response to emissions. “But the world, and Australia, has failed to act with appropriate seriousness and haste, and so we will need specific policies to deal with the health impacts of climate change,” he will say.

A copy of the lecture shows Bowen will point to estimates that by 2030, 250,000 people around the world will die each year as a direct result of a warming planet.

But what was often missing from the public debate in Australia “is an understanding that severe climate change, of the type the globe is currently on track to experience, isn’t just about the frequency and severity of weather events”.

Read the story from The Guardian by Katharine Murphy - “Australia needs policy to deal with health effects of climate change, Chris Bowen says.” 

Central America's first hydrogen fuel cell bus hits the road

GUANACASTE, COSTA RICA – Just off a quiet road amid sparsely wooded fields are four rows of solar panels and a single wind turbine. The power they generate is sent a few feet away to a small-scale hydrogen production and storage plant, a cluster of structures and tanks surrounded by a chain-link fence. Next to that is a sleek digital dispenser with a gas-station style hose to deliver the compressed hydrogen to a vehicle.

Hydrogen fuel cell bus ‘Nyuti’ at the hydrogen dispenser. 

Specifically, it’s a boxy 35-passenger bus called “Nyuti” (which means “star” in the local Chorotega indigenous language) that sits in the adjacent parking lot. This is Central America’s first hydrogen transportation “ecosystem” and, seven years after the effort to introduce hydrogen fuel cell vehicles in Costa Rica began, Nyuti is taking to the road.

Read Robin Kazmier’s Yale Climate Connections story - “Central America's first hydrogen fuel cell bus hits the road.”