302: Health Warning: The Human Cost of Climate Inaction with Julia Gillard

Full Transcript

Tom: [00:00:00] Hi, friends. I'm so sorry I'm not with you this week. I'm here at London Climate Action Week. I'm at the opening event and I have to say, coming here. I did wonder what the mood was going to be. I'm sure my friends Paul and Christiana have talked about this 1.5 report that came out recently, saying, we're going to blow through the targets in just a couple of years. And coming here, I thought maybe there'll be a kind of down, depressed mood about what's happening. And, you know, we're only a few hours in, but I've been stunned to discover it is completely the opposite. Everybody is looking at solutions, opportunity, momentum, the fact that costs are coming down and the the breakthroughs are now feel closer than they ever have before. And right at the heart of that is the narrative around health that really seems to be landing here in London. So many people I've spoken to have said they've started talking about health, and that has changed the nature of the conversation and opened up the possibility to talk more about solutions. Yes, because of the economics. Yes, because of climate change, but also because it impacts human health. Right now, this is only the first day, but it's been really interesting and encouraging and optimistic already.

Paul: [00:01:03] Hello and welcome to Outrage and Optimism. I'm Paul Dickinson.

Christiana: [00:01:06] I'm Christiana Figueres. And where in the world is Tom?

Paul: [00:01:10] He's gone missing in London climate action week. As I understand it, there are like tens of thousands of people running around London doing climate change related things. And I think he's just got sort of lost in the crowd as far as I can gather. But let's get on to the episode this week. As scientists warn, the world is on track to breach one and a half degrees of warming within just a few years. We look at how the climate crisis is already a health crisis. Plus, Christiana speaks to former Australian Prime Minister and chair of the Wellcome Trust, Julia Gillard. Thanks for being here. So Christiana, that is one of the most depressing things I've ever had to say in my life and career.

News Reporter: [00:01:48] The world will definitely break the international target to keep global warming to within 1.5 degrees within just three years, if it keeps burning carbon At current rate, scientists have warned.

News Reporter: [00:02:00] A coalition of 60 international scientists has warned. Greenhouse gas accumulation is accelerating rapidly and more extreme weather will come.

News Reporter: [00:02:09] Things aren't just getting worse, they're getting worse faster. We're actively moving in the wrong direction.

News Reporter: [00:02:13] Humans are releasing so much greenhouse gas that within three years, planet Earth will likely be unable to avoid 1.5°C of long term warming since pre-industrial times.

Paul: [00:02:27] How are you feeling about this news? I mean.

Christiana: [00:02:29] Well, first of all, it's not news, right? That's the first thing. Scientists have been screaming this from the rooftops for many years. So the news is there is a new report that confirms it. And I just wanted to say two things. One is sort of technical, and the other is can we actually understand what the heck the technicality means? So the new report, what it says is that the budget, the carbon budget that we have in order to give us a 66% chance of staying under 1.5 degrees. As a permanent temperature change, not year to year, because we already breached that last year, but as a permanent is now, if we stay at the same level of emissions, we basically only have two or may be three years max before we hit that budget. So that's what the report is saying. Now just to understand what that actually means. And I've used this analogy before on the podcast, but I think it's worth understanding, especially now because of this new report. Let's pretend that the atmosphere is a bathtub and it's been filling up. And what scientists are saying is if we continue to fill the bathtub at the same speed that we have been filling it up recently, then we're going to reach the top level of the bathtub within two, three years.

Christiana: [00:03:58] And then the water spills and we have huge consequences. In this case, it's not the water, but it is. The CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere are going to have a spillover effect that is very consequential. So what do we do? There's two things. Just think of the bathtub. Two things. If you have a bathtub that is about to run over and pull, you love bathtub. So I do if you if you start filling the bathtub and then you see it's about to run over, there's two things you have to do. Number one, turn off the damn faucet. Okay? That means stop burning fossil fuels, because that's what adds CO2. And the other thing is, pull the plug underneath, let some of the water out, i.e. let some of the CO2 that is concentrated, let some of that out. And that is the whole chapter of carbon removal that we will be talking about in depth. But let's just remember there are two things that we have to do. Stop burning fossil fuels and extract some of the CO2.

Paul: [00:05:02] I'm going to put a slightly nightmarish third thing in there as well. I mean, just one quote on the report. You know that over the past decade or so, the rate of heating is more than doubled, that of the 70s and 80s, and it's estimated to be 25% higher than the late 2000 and the 20 tens. And to quote Matthew Palmer of the Met Office and a professor at University of Bristol, that's a really large number, a very worrying number. So I know some people who are risk experts and insurance companies, and they are desperate to say we have to introduce solar radiation management, but dust in the atmosphere doesn't exactly stop the faucet, but it sort of deals with it and we don't really know what the consequences are. I also know a very brilliant scientist, and she said in response, I think this discussion is premature and detrimental to action on climate change. Solar radiation management is dangerous both scientifically and politically at present, but it's the kind of nightmare that we're in. We're stuck. Actually, a scientist who I truly trust saying we mustn't do this because it's dangerous. If we stop doing it, we'd bounce ourselves into terrible climate warming and professional risk experts and insurance companies saying we have to do it. I just think it's it's really what happens when you get this close to a crisis. All kinds of strange and difficult stuff happens. But, I mean, we're coming to the end of that budget and we can all see we're passing through it and we very likely will quite soon. We're going to go deeper into this issue in a near future episode. But I mean, just as you reflect on this news, Christiana, I suppose, what would you leave our listeners with as a way to comprehend this news, which is not news.

Christiana: [00:06:37] Which is not news exactly. I think the way to comprehend is it is now pretty well certain that we are going to overshoot. Overshoot means we will go over 1.5. The question still remains is that overshoot going to be a temporary overshoot, or will we be able to bring it back down? And that's the question. That's the question. And as I say, it depends on instead of opening the faucet further, which is what we have been doing in the past decade or so, can we close the faucet of the burning of fossil fuels, and how much carbon removal can we do both through land based solutions as well as technical? But I don't really don't want to go into this poll because we're going to have an in-depth conversation. So we shouldn't detract from the conversation we want to have today, which is the 1.5 is a very technical, very scientific conversation. And we better have it when we have scientists at our side to help us out on this. What is very helpful in the meantime is because this is not news and because we we have known this. And because we continue to burn fossil fuels. Is there another way to talk about this that makes more sense? And one of the things that we have spoken about at some length is human health. This is not just planetary health. This is also human health, because it is so happens that the emissions that we're putting out there, the CO2 and the other emissions, the pollution of the air and of the atmosphere is also having a huge consequence on human health, not just planetary health. So for those and I totally understand that, that find it is very, very difficult to speak about or understand planetary health. Can we just bring it down to human health and understand it at that level? Because fortunately it's not. Unfortunately, fortunately these two things are intricately linked.

Paul: [00:08:47] Mhm. Well, I mean, I think the interview coming up with Julia Gillard, the chair of the Wellcome Trust, is is an excellent one. And I really want to kind of applaud the long standing role of the Wellcome Trust, which is a very large grant maker. You know, somebody called Wellcome, started a drugs company a long time ago and made an enormous amount of money and put that into a trust to advance health research in future. And they have a few tens of billions and they've been doing amazing work, but they realise that health is a theme that you can't separate from climate change. And in fact, they want to combine those two and just, you know, with this where it gets really real. At the Wellcome Trust's event this week in Climate Week, we learned that the recent mini heatwave in the UK, which many listeners would have experienced, is anticipated to have cost 600 lives. And in the UK, you know, excess deaths can begin at 16°C. And that is because indoor temperatures can greatly exceed outdoor temperatures I actually woke up the other day and it was about 21 outside, and it was 24 degrees inside my air conditioned home. So it's going to be different in different countries, but it's that potential for indoor temperatures, particularly for people in low income households, to to to get very high. And this this problem is also compounded by humidity in the built environment and other factors. But it's you know, it's really something when you start measuring heat in degrees centigrade and you start measuring it in lives lost.

Christiana: [00:10:14] Well, this is true, Paul, and you live in the UK, so I totally understand that you refer this to the UK. I live in the developing country, so I would like to present that developing countries don't have air conditioning. Usually they don't have even heating. And this heat is something that a lot of people in developing countries have to work under. They're not even under a roof. There are many people who work outside in very heavy manual labour under this heat. Some studies say that we're already causing somewhere between 300,000 and 700 deaths a year because of heat outside. So whether it's outside heat or inside heat. Yeah, this is about deaths.

Paul: [00:11:04] And is shocking but true and brings it all home. And then, you know, if you just leap to the to the really huge number. Air pollution from fossil fuels is causing 7 million premature deaths globally. Some of those actually are correlated to wood or charcoal, which not exactly a fossil fuel, but most of them are fossil fuel related. So this is a huge part of it. And there are so many different dimensions to health as well. One of which I want to draw attention to is mental health, where I mean alongside air pollution and food systems, the Wellcome Trust are also looking at mental health, and I can understand how that's a kind of critical issue that has come up against many, many times in our discussions over the last few years, but it's really good to see it being sort of grouped. And I suppose this is my question for you, Christiana. How does health show up for you? Is is it is it the unifying theme that we've we've wanted, or is it silly to look for a unifying theme?

Christiana: [00:11:57] I think it's definitely the humanizing theme of climate change, because it really brings something that some people feel is far away, both in time and geography. And it brings it down to, okay, this is about me. This is about my children. And I think that that is very, very helpful to be able to think about it in a way that is closer to our human daily life context. And you talk about human health, Paul. And as you know, we host many retreats around the world because of climate anxiety. To me, it's very scary, especially among young people. A 2021 global survey found that 59% of young people between the ages of 16 to 25 are very or extremely worried about climate change. That is not the kind of context that you want your children to grow up in, or your young adults to be figuring out what are they going to do with their life. Or young adults figuring out will they want to bring children to this, to this world, under these conditions? And in addition to the fact, of course, we have migration, forced migration of so many thousands of people who just cannot survive the heat or the drought caused by climate change. And that, of course, leads directly to trauma and loss of livelihoods. So the ramifications are absolutely huge with food systems, Terms. Crop failure is affecting so many lives and deleting, as I say, to forced displacement. And then of course, infectious diseases. If you want to look at the health because of the increase in temperature, we have a much broader range of vector borne diseases like malaria, dengue, Zika, etc. so we are really making it very difficult for ourselves with this increased heat that is not just affecting, if you could separate it the planet from humans, I don't separate it, but some people feel that those are two different things. It's not just the planet that is heating up. We are making it very difficult for ourselves.

Paul: [00:14:29] Yeah. And also, I mean, I have to really, um, I guess why not? Thank you for convening so many of those meetings where so many people have told me that the ability to be with other people who are working on this problem and and being able to, you know, share the burden, if you will, to some extent, and to exchange experiences of the challenges of working on climate change. I think that's that's really been inspiring to a lot of people. I mean, just digging a little bit more into to welcome, you know, they talk about areas that they cover like discovery, research, climate and health, infectious diseases and also mental health. But they have a section on their website on climate, which I think is is fundamental to me. And it says why we influence policy. And it says to achieve our mission, we need governments and policymakers to take action. And actually, there have been some extraordinary initiatives that they've run. And I did listen to Julia Gillard talk a little bit with some of her top team and some of the people they grant talking about, actually, how we need to sort of weave together a theme.

Paul: [00:15:29] We've come up very much before about different ministers and different governments in society, but they were talking about getting the health minister together with the finance minister. Actually, Julia Gillard explained that those two are often not friends, because the health minister is always asking for a lot of money from the finance minister. But this notion of of sort of linking up more enlightened policy frameworks, I guess you would call them, you know, science based policy as being a kind of dream. And just back to this point about heat. It does cause a premature death. It takes people's lives, heat it also, believe it or not, has a very negative impact on productivity. There are people in cities in India who are losing 25% of their salaries because they can't work in the heat for a lot of the time. Even in Miami Dade County. There was a report that said that there had been a $10 billion loss in the efficiency of of the workforce because of the heat stress they're experiencing.

Christiana: [00:16:24] I mean, if you if you want to read the most harrowing story, and this is currently still a story, the most harrowing story about the effect of heat on people's life and livelihood. Read the first chapter of the Ministry of the future. That is the most harrowing. If you can survive that. I had a very hard time reading that chapter to the end. But if you can survive that, you have understood what we're heading for.

Paul: [00:16:52] You're right. That is an incredible read and indeed ferociously realistic. All I was going to say to close Christiano is that I think that I come from a medical family, and I believe that we, you know, we do have a lot of trust for the medical system and for good reasons. And alongside health, there's preventative medicine, which is a critical and perhaps neglected and increasingly important part of medicine and one that we need to focus on here. And although governments seem stretched at the moment, you know, and there's lots of talk about how governments have run out of money, the private sector, in its various different forms and individuals have massive, massive wealth. And so we are in a position to deal with these problems. The question is, can we organize ourselves in such a way to do it? And that's why I actually really salute the Wellcome Trust. On getting a former head of government of a huge and significant nation in Australia. So let's get on to the interview with her. And, um, is there anything you wanted to say, Christina, to introduce it?

Christiana: [00:17:48] Well, I don't think that Julia Gillard needs much introduction, but for those who have not heard of her, she was the first female Prime Minister of Australia from 2010 to 2013. She led many, many really important key reforms in education and health and emissions trading and climate policy. She was really a force to be reckoned with. And since 2021, she's been the chair of the Wellcome Trust, a welcome chair of the Wellcome Trust, who recruited her because of her leadership on both health and climate. That was really interesting that that was the profile that they were looking for. And as you have said, Paul. It is one of the world's largest charitable science funders with ten year strategies to tackle global health. And really doing an excellent job both inside the UK, which is where they're headquartered, but also internationally. So let's hear this interview with Julia.

Paul: [00:18:55] We'll be back after the break.