Webs of Denial: Climate Change and the Challenge to Public Health.

Abstract

I n an interview with THE NEW YORK TIMES on September 8, 2016, President Barack Obama reflected on what “he believes . . . will be the most consequential legacy of his presidency.” It wasn’t progress in destroying ISIS or efforts to bring peace to the Middle East; nor was it marriage equality, the Affordable Care Act, or his steady hand in bringing the nation out of recession. Rather, it was his struggles to slow global warming—the inexorable, slow-moving process he considered “the greatest long-term threat facing the world.” The president eloquently spoke of the potential political and social unrest caused by the dislocation of a billion people living in countries threatened by rising sea levels, droughts, intense heat waves, global pollution, new patterns of epidemic disease, and other health risks. Together, these could destabilize the most modern industrial society.1 Obama echoed some of the same points illustrated in a sobering study by the US Global Research Program titled “The Impacts of Climate Change on Human Health in the United States.” “Climate change,” the report argues, “can . . . affect human health in 2 main ways . . . first, by changing the severity of . . . respiratory diseases and cardiovascular diseases due to air pollution; second, by creating unprecedented or unanticipated health problem . . . in places where they have not previously occurred.”2 This past summer, a group of 19 Democratic senators led by Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) focused on the political reasons why emergency action has stalled. On July 11 and 12, just days before the Senate adjourned on July 15, they spoke about the “dozens of shadowy organizations” that, according to Senator Harry Reid, “are waging a campaign to mislead the public and undermine American leadership on climate change.” The goal of these organizations, Reid argues, is to destroy the Paris climate agreement and erode support for “clean air initiatives across the country.”3(p1)