This commentary is by Dan Quinlan of Burlington, chair of the Vermont Climate and Health Alliance.
Let’s get the bad news out of the way. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has released a new report — the latest in a long line of frightening scientific documents released over many years.
The unprecedented heat waves, massive fires and intense storms we experienced last summer in North America yet again underscored the validity of the superb work done by the IPCC science teams. No surprise then that the World Health Organization has declared climate change to be “the greatest threat to global health in the 21st century.”
Experts in the public health world focus on the “social determinants of health.” The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention defines that idea as the “conditions in the places where people live, learn, work and play that affect a wide range of health and quality-of life-risks and outcomes.”
For example, your ability to get food and to have an income dramatically impacts your health. Imagine that our local farms are constantly flooded. You won’t be buying local food and those farmers won’t be able to make a living. You might not be able to get to a grocery store either.
Play those types of scenarios out and there’s only one conclusion: If we don’t get moving, climate change will become the single most powerful and overarching driver undermining all social determinants of health. That’s why medical and health professionals all over the world have been demanding for years that governments and businesses start listening to the climate scientists.
Fortunately, Vermont is blessed with an indefatigable and well-informed group of environmental organizations, and many lawmakers, who refuse to sit idly by. For 2022, advocacy groups jointly developed the “2022 Common Agenda”. It is a smart, high-impact, equitable plan. If you want to do something about climate change, read it. Then call (or write) Gov. Scott and your state legislators and tell them that you support that agenda. Or, just focus on the one or two ideas in it that you find most compelling and talk about those.
Our hard-working, unstaffed and highly committed Vermont lawmakers won’t know what you think unless you tell them. They appreciate hearing from us — because they care about us and about Vermont.
Let’s dive in on one big hitter in the Common Agenda. Like our neighboring states, Vermont’s transportation sector is by far the state’s leading source of carbon pollution (about 40%). Fossil fuel-powered automobiles, buses and trucks release pollutants that aggravate respiratory and cardiovascular disease, including asthma, multiple lung diseases, heart disease and many forms of cancer. The carbon pollution from our tailpipes also drives climate change — the cause of the much worse impacts described earlier.
For that reason, 300 medical and health professionals in Vermont have signed this letter calling for a comprehensive approach to reducing transportation pollution and protecting the health and well-being of all Vermont residents, especially our young children.
Our tailpipe emissions spread all over the Northeast, too. Transportation pollution is an enormous environmental, health and equity issue that disproportionately burdens the nation’s most vulnerable residents.
In its annual “State of the Air” report, the American Lung Association found that “despite some nationwide progress on cleaning up air pollution, more than 40% of Americans — more than 135 million people — are living in places with unhealthy levels of ozone or particle pollution. The burden of living with unhealthy air is not shared equally. People of color are more than three times more likely to be breathing the most polluted air than white people.”
In February 2021, a study from Harvard’s TH Chan School of Public Health backed these assertions in startling fashion. The team found that more than 8 million people worldwide died in 2018 from fossil fuel pollution (almost equivalent to the population of New York City).
Back to what we can do about it together. Common sense says that the Legislature and Gov. Phil Scott must adopt aggressive and equitable laws and programs that will accelerate:
- The adoption of electric vehicles of all types (including electric bikes), along with a commensurate increase in charging infrastructure.
- The adoption of electric buses for public transit and school transportation.
- The use of public transit.
- Town planning and construction that supports and promotes biking and walking.
- Use of federal funding allocated to Vermont for transportation in a manner that aggressively reduces transportation pollution.
- Engagement with neighboring states in developing and adopting a multistate solution that leverages Vermont’s economic power by creating and implementing a new regional approach to our shared transportation challenges, such as the Transportation Climate Initiative.
For everyone’s sake — especially those in overburdened and underserved communities — it’s time to wake up and get moving. We need far more immediate, dramatic and durable action to protect Vermont’s children and our communities from the devastating health impacts of a warming world.
Please join Vermont’s medical and health community in speaking up. Call Gov. Scott and your legislators about the transportation ideas or other parts of the Common Agenda. They need to hear from all of us today. If you do, you’re going to feel much better in the morning.
