Climate Change

Mark Twain is generally credited with the quip, “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” The same can’t be said about climate change, which has become one of our most contentious and complicated public policy controversies. It’s also divisive. According to a recent Gallup Poll, sixty-two percent of those polled worry about climate change a great Read More ›

The public-health intelligentsia and bioethics movement are determined to become the primary policy decision makers internationally. For example, back in 2020—at the height of COVID—Anthony Fauci wrote that the UN and WHO should be empowered to “rebuild the infrastructure of human existence.” You don’t get much more expansive than that. In the years since, others among that ilk have pounded the same drum furthered by an international agreement known as “One Health” (without US involvement) establishing an international bureaucracy aiming “to sustainably balance and optimize the health of people, animals and ecosystems.” Toward that end, writing in The Lancet, a gaggle of international technocrats and academics reject the WHO’s current definition of human health as “a state of complete physical, Read More ›

The ambition of the bioethics movement continues to inflate. Now, we are told, humanity and endangered species need rescuing.

Writing in The Lancet, 22 (count ’em) bioethicists argue that there is a planet to save and they are just the experts to do it! From “Bioethics for the Planet“:

Severe threats to the health of humans and other species derive from degradation of Earth’s life-support systems, particularly the impacts of climate change. Researchers and practitioners in clinical medicine, public health, global health, and One Health are increasingly focusing on these risks to planetary health, which include (but are not limited to) rising temperatures, extreme weather disasters, intensified wildfires and flooding, biodiversity and species loss, expansion of vectors of infectious diseases, reduction or arable land alongside growth of intensive and factory farming, a proliferation of microplastics, antimicrobial resistance, and chemical contamination of the environment.

Consequently, the authors argue, the field should no longer be limited to health care, public health policy, clinical controversies, and medical ethics:

The “nature rights” movement continues to advance swiftly across the globe. Recently, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruled in an advisory opinion that to protect humans from climate change and other environmental disasters, nature should be granted “rights.” From the opinion (citations omitted): The Court takes note that the United Nations General Assembly has adopt fifteen resolutions and twelve reports that reflect the increasing recognition of the case law on the Earth and the rights of Nature at the global level. Additionally, the Pact for the Future, adopted by Member States of the United Nations in 2024, declares “the urgent need for a fundamental shift in our approach in order to achieve a world in which humanity lives in Read More ›

Science, medical, and bioethics journals are setting themselves up as the new political resistance to Trump policies, most particularly around global warming controversies. For example, The Lancet published a piece blaming the Los Angeles fires on climate change, which is hardly a medical issue properly understood. A bit later — as I wrote about here — a major bioethics journal published an advocacy article asserting that it is up to bioethicists to prevent global warming. Not to be undone, JAMA has just published a column decrying Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord and claiming that preventing climate change is now up to doctors. From, “Defying Environmental Deregulation:” These policy changes may appear catastrophic for effective climate action, but they Read More ›

The assistant secretary general of the U.S., Kanni Wignaraja, wants “nature” to go to court so that tribunals can set environmental policy for the world. From her “Nature Goes to Court,” published by the U.N. Development Programme (of which she is a regional director): Nature is taking the stand as courtrooms worldwide become battlegrounds for Earth’s rights. The rise in climate litigation shows how the environment can take centre stage as a plaintiff, demanding justice and accountability, benefiting us all. . . . Good grief. “Nature” would not be “going to court” or doing anything as viruses, geological features, flora and fauna would be utterly oblivious of the proceedings. What Wignaraja really means is that people who think like her Read More ›

About a month ago, some bioethicists claimed that bioethics should prevent climate change. My eyes had finally stopped rolling when lo and behold, I learn from three UN Women researchers — in Scientific American, no less — that feminism holds the real key to preventing the planet from cooking. As you would expect, the opinion piece is a godawful mess that attacks capitalism and the use of fossil fuels, in other words, its authors disdain prosperity. From “How Feminism Can Guide Climate Change Action:” The current economic system that underpins that status quo is rooted in the extraction of natural resources and exploitation of cheap or unpaid labor, often done by women and marginalized communities. This system therefore drives the climate crisis while perpetuating inequalities based Read More ›

We keep hearing that climate change is increasing heat deaths (and migration, wars, hunger, thirst, and every other bad thing under the sun). But Bjorn Lomborg frequently points out that many more people die from cold than heat. Now, a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association tells us climate change caused increasing cold-caused deaths in the USA. From “Cold-Related Deaths in the U.S.”: Although mean temperatures are increasing in the US, studies have found that climate change has been linked with more frequent episodes of severe winter weather in the US over the past few decades, which may in turn be associated with increased cold-related mortality. But winters are growing increasingly mild. At least, that was the story last year. From a CNN Read More ›

The bioethics movement has always had power ambitions beyond wrestling with health policy and medical ethics. Indeed, for years, the mainstreamers have been seeking to interpose themselves into the global-warming controversy.

The Hastings Center — the beating heart of the bioethics establishment — has been leading the charge to so expand the sector’s influence. The center just published a call to arms to fight global warming by a medical ethics professor emeritus, advocating that bioethicists be at the center of the climate-change fray.

After praising the inflation-causing spending of the mendaciously named Inflation Reduction Act as now set in stone — time will tell — the author rallies the bioethicists troops to the great cause. From “Now What? Bioethics and Mitigating Climate Disasters“:

We might well ask: Now what? Is there a way to make a difference over the next four years? And, especially, does bioethics have a role in this effort?

I argue that there is important work ahead and bioethics should be squarely in the middle of it. The work is less in federal policy and more in public persuasion. The role for bioethics is to bring global warming and its catastrophic health consequences into focus as an existential crisis neither party can ignore.

San Francisco was once a conservative city. Oh, sure, it had its bohemian side. The Beats of the ’50s were at home in North Beach, and Harry Bridges, the suspected communist who served for years as head of the longshoremen’s union, had a definite influence. But for the most part, San Francisco was well within the cultural mainstream. Indeed, the city was so staid that the Republican Party’s nominee for mayor won landslides in 1955 and 1959, and the GOP nominated the archconservative Barry Goldwater as its presidential candidate from the Cow Palace in 1964.

Then, San Francisco changed. Radically. In 1964, the University of California, Berkeley, a few miles across the bay, became the center of the “free speech” movement. Civil rights and then militant anti–Vietnam War advocacy found great sympathy. The Haight-Ashbury neighborhood became a hippy haven and the focus of a growing drug culture. The gay-rights movement sprang energetically out of the Castro District, and the once predominately Italian working-class neighborhood was transformed into a radical front of the sexual revolution. By the 1980s, the term “San Francisco values” — wielded by conservatives to describe the cultural and political radicalism of the Bay Area — had turned the city into something of a national joke.

Over the years, policies enacted by the city’s ever more extreme progressive leaders slowly destroyed San Francisco. I lived in and around the city for almost 25 years, starting in 1992, and saw the decline happen in real time. It broke my heart.