By Wesley J. Smith
Tuesday, December 03, 2024
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 bioethicist 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.
See how this works? Supposedly looming “catastrophic
health consequences” becomes the catch-all justification for bioethics
expanding its jurisdiction into environmental and energy policy issues. (Never
mind, as Bjorn Lomborg has often pointed out, that
“temperature-driven deaths are overwhelmingly caused by cold” rather than heat,
with 4.5 million cold-caused deaths annually, which is nine times higher than
deaths caused by high temperatures.)
But don’t confuse us with facts. This is a power play,
don’t you know, and that requires panic-mongering:
The future health consequences of
these environmental changes are almost unimaginable. Massive numbers of deaths,
especially among the world’s poorest populations, will occur because of
unrelenting heat, uninhabitable land, food and water shortages, and the
breakdown of economies and national governments. Already a quarter of the
earth’s population lacks safe drinking water, with the result that nearly 2 billion
people currently struggle to meet their daily needs for clean water. By
2030, increased salination of irrigated farmland, evaporation caused by
increased heat, and frequent flooding of coastal areas will mean that an additional
1 billion people will be without a safe source of potable water.
Moreover, climate change affects
the spread, intensity, and seasonality of infectious
diseases like malaria and cholera. In general, climate
change will produce a substantial increase in transmission of disease
worldwide. Heat emergencies, mental health disorders, and broader health
problems like declining food safety and its consequences add to the growing damage of climate change.
Reading that, I was reminded of the great comedic scene
in Ghostbusters in which the ghost-busting crew warns the
mayor about a looming supernatural disaster of “biblical proportions,”
described thusly: “Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and
seas boiling! Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes. The dead rising
from the grave! Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together . . . MASS
HYSTERIA!”
And here, readers are told, is what bioethicists should
do about it:
Suggestions for bioethics and
bioethicists:
1. Bioethicists
who work in hospitals and academic medical institutions must urge their
leadership to be proactive in creating greener systems of care. A good place to
start is with Practice
Greenhealth.
2. Help
to educate the press about global warming. This effort could involve partnering
with climate scientists to offer workshops and continuing education.
3. Join
local health boards and focus attention on global warming as a central health
hazard for communities.
4. Include
global warming as a central topic in all bioethics courses at every educational
level.
5. When
invited to speak or write, choose global warming as the topic. Emphasize:
6. The
disastrous health effects of global warming. The health ethics of the larger “bios-ethics” must now complement the ethics of individual medical care.
7. Active
resistance to disinformation and greenwashing. Fossil fuel companies have deep
pockets to promote false claims that they are adopting green energy while
simultaneously shifting blame to individual lifestyle choices rather than
polluting corporations. It cannot be forgotten that ExxonMobil withheld and lied about its
own research accurately predicting the ill effects of fossil fuels for decades.
8. Better
understanding of how science works — how it continuously gathers new evidence
about climate change to improve the accuracy of its assessment of the
catastrophic health effects. Emphasize that there is no longer any significant
debate about what we are facing, only about how severe and how soon the
devastation will occur.
Bioethics was born as a response
to threats to the humanity of patients and research subjects. The integrity of
the field now depends on whether it can respond to the environmental threats to
humanity and the planet, rather than playing for small stakes at the margins of
the crisis we now face.
Oh, good grief. No one is going to listen to what bioethicists
— who, after all, are mostly philosophy majors, doctors, or lawyers — think
about climate change and what, if anything, should be done about it. Besides,
mainstream bioethicists have already done enough damage promoting
assisted-suicide legalization, abortion absolutism, and coercive pandemic
policies.
So why try to insinuate the field into environmental,
energy, and related policies? Simply stated, the bioethics movement yearns to
be important.
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