Climate Change

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.

The nature-rights movement continues to advance, and that’s bad for human thriving. Now, a “tribunal” will be held in New York — coinciding with Climate Week NYC 2024 — to promote the rights of nature and undermine public support for fossil fuels. The tribunal’s website is typical of the anti-humanism that permeates the nature-rights movement. For example, the fundamental philosophy of nature rights — as elucidated at the website, is “that the interests of nonhuman beings are of equal importance to human interests.” So, pond scum, mosquitoes, trees, squirrels, grass, and scallops are equal to us. That’s self-loathing any way you look at it. Worse, adopting such a misanthropic approach to environmentalism would have serious consequences to human thriving. For example, forget about heating Read More ›