Pirate's Cove

We’re all good with creating another federal agency chock full of activists with no accountability to the citizens and taxpayers, right, who can pass all sorts of rules and regulations on your life, right?

We Need a National Institute of Climate Change and Health

If there was any lingering doubt that climate change threatens human health and well-being, this year put it to rest. Wildfire smoke aggravated heart disease and lung disease up and down the West Coast and across the country. A record-breaking hurricane season killed and injured people from North Carolina to Texas, and left tens of thousands homeless and at risk of PTSD and other mental health problems. Oppressive heat across the Southwest imperiled outdoor workers and athletes, the elderly and the poor, and people with underlying health problems, with risks ranging from heatstroke to heart attacks and even death.

Not one of those things prove that the causation was due to Mankind’s output of greenhouse gases (though many of those wildfires were the fault of negligence of humans in mostly Democratic Party run areas)

2020 reinforced another lesson: If we don’t prepare for health disasters and manage them skillfully, informed by the best evidence, then people suffer and die needlessly. In confronting a novel virus, the United States failed in its response, and we continue to have one of the world’s highest COVID-19 death rates.

What is true for COVID is true for climate change. We’re not prepared. Part of the gap is a knowledge gap: We haven’t done the needed research, and we lack critical information.

They do know that all these climate cult groups could have spent lots of their own money to do research and done things, right? Like them or not, there are tons of preppers and prepper groups (some more extreme than others) who have prepared for Bad Things To Happen. But, as we all know, Leftists like to spend Other People’s money, not their own. And aren’t particularly thrilled at actually having to do something themselves

As former directors of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Environmental Health, we are alarmed by this neglect of a major climate and public health emergency. And so we recommend a solution: the urgent creation of a new National Institutes of Health division—the National Institute of Climate Change and Health.

With a budget of over $40 billion, the NIH is the largest, best funded health research institution in the world. Yet currently a measly $9 million is spent annually on research directly related to climate change and health, according to the NIH’s own tally. If the NIH budget were scaled to $100, climate change and health funding would amount to two hundredths of one penny—what’s called “budget dust.”

Howard Frumkin and Richard J. Jackson have both been, among other things, former directors of the CDC’s National Center for Environmental Health.

A climate change institute within NIH would support research to answer critical questions related to climate and health. This would help Americans be better prepared for mental and physical health risks and identify effective prevention and treatment strategies. Research could quantify the health benefits, and cost savings, from cutting carbon emissions across the economy, to help chart the healthiest path forward. It could provide a blueprint for reconfiguring hospitals and clinics to be climate-ready and to reach net zero carbon emissions as soon as possible, while delivering top quality care to all. The United Kingdom’s National Health Service, for example, has already launched an ambitious plan to eliminate nearly all of its carbon emissions.

Personally, a tiny 1.5F increase in global temperatures over the last 170 years is minor, and barely noticed. What they really want is for the NIH climate cult division to put out pronouncements of Doom, the better to scare people Officially.

Existential threats call for groundbreaking innovations. It’s time for a National Institute of Climate Change and Health.

Nope. No thanks. Spend your own money on your cult.