This Earth Day, I want to take a moment to focus on an issue we don’t normally associate with environmental policy: healthcare.
Friend,
This Earth Day, I want to take a moment to focus on an issue we don’t normally associate with environmental policy: healthcare.
As the frequency and severity of natural disasters increase with climate change, hospitals are faced with the task of both improving their infrastructure and accommodating the influx of people suffering from the effects of these weather events. Floods, heat waves, tornadoes, wildfires, and more have the potential to strike at the very core of hospital care by destroying equipment and cutting off power.
These disaster-related outages have real consequences for the lives of patients. During Hurricane Katrina, for example, patients and staff at New Orleans’ Memorial Medical Center were unable to evacuate after the city’s levees failed, resulting in the deaths of 45 patients. Five people on ventilators died when St. John’s Regional Medical Center lost power and its back-up generator to a tornado. And during the 2021 ice storm in Texas, officials were forced to rapidly administer thousands of COVID-19 vaccines that were at risk of expiring because they could not remain frozen at the required temperature.
Meanwhile, hospitals themselves are greater contributors to climate change than most would acknowledge. The healthcare sector is responsible for 8.5 percent of carbon emissions and growing in the United States, more than a third of which come from hospitals. This has the added effect of creating a negative feedback loop by worsening environmental health issues.
These problems cannot continue to be ignored. That’s why I’ve joined Senator Ed Markey to introduce the Green New Deal on Health. This legislation would improve hospital infrastructure by making it more resilient to natural disasters, protect workers and shift infrastructure towards renewable energy, making hospitals less susceptible to power failures while reducing carbon emissions.
