global warming

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 ›

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 ›

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.