If Global Warming Is Killing Us, Why Is Global Life Expectancy Increasing? | Ryan McMaken: According to a recent report from the Centers for Disease Control ('Mortality in the United States, 2017'), 'Life expectancy for the U.S. population declined to 78.6 years in 2017.'
Upon noting this, advocates for climate-change regulations might claim "well both things are true. We'd be living even longer if not for climate change!" Except here's the rub. The very things that make it possible to expand life expectancy: medical care, high-quality housing, heating, air conditioning, and clean water are all byproducts of our industrialized economies powered primarily by fossil fuels. Tearing down this system in the name of preventing climate change would be devastating to life and health worldwide. In other words, taking steps to greatly increase the cost of essential resources and amenities — as carbon taxes and other anti-climate change regulations do — would only pull the rug out from under current efforts to continually fight against countless causes of mortality such as water-borne diseases, cancer, and diabetes. It is not climate-change that poses the greatest threat to future generations. The real threat lies in losing the ground gained in the Global South in terms of sanitation, medical care, and housing. Thus, crippling the global economy through climate-change regulation — not climate change itself — is "the most systematic threat."
The bird-in-hand of industrial globalization has clearly delivered a higher standard of living than has ever been known before in the old "third world." The promised two-birds-in-the-bush of global climate control offers fewer plausible promises for a better life.
Realizing the need to up the ante, researchers continue trying to connect a myriad of health problems directly to climate change in order to justify more regulatory intervention. The New Republic continues:
It [a 2012 report on climate change] linked 400,000 deaths worldwide to climate change each year, projecting deaths to increase to over 600,000 per year by 2030.
But how do they arrive at these numbers? They're achieved by claiming a variety of diseases are indirectly caused by climate change. Given that most mortality is now caused by diseases such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease, liver failure, and other chronic conditions, it's chronic disease (and not factors directly connected to climate like heat stroke) that will be the most significant drivers in life expectancy.2 Thus, a solid connection must be made to diseases such as diabetes if climate-change can be held up as a leading cause of mortality.
No comments:
Post a Comment