While deniers are busy trying to sell the lie that carbon pollution is good for the planet and the people on it, actual health experts have a decidedly different view.
Yesterday, England’s National Health Service announced several new initiatives to address climate change by eliminating its fossil fuel emissions by 2050. In explaining the new campaign, NHS head Sir Simon Stevens said that “with almost 700 people dying potentially avoidable deaths due to air pollution every week, we are facing a health emergency as well as a climate emergency.”
Last week, the British Medical Journal took its own approach with an editorial announcing that the prestigious 180 year old institution is launching a divestment campaign aimed at getting the healthcare industry to divest itself from the fossil fuel industry (here’s a link to sign up!).
On top of that, the BMJ is also committing itself not to take any advertising from the fossil fuel industry, and perhaps most importantly, won’t publish any research funded by it. The editorial references its similar stance on tobacco. Considering the BMJ published the first studies conclusively linking smoking to cancer back in 1950, it’s an institution that is plenty aware of “the industry’s history of manipulating science.”
It’s great to see that the BMJ won’t let itself be used by industrial propagandists seeking to use the journal’s reputation to launder their dirty pro-pollution science. That said, these days deniers struggle to get published in even the lowliest and most predatory journals, so odds are this wasn’t exactly a tough call to make.
But still, while organizational proclamations like this tend to be bland and tepid, the BMJ’s editors didn’t pull any punches. With an introduction that asks how we can “restore hope for humanity” despite the “despair at a disintegrating political consensus to save our planet from fire, flood, disease and conflict,” and describes the feeling of being “trapped in our high carbon lives and disempowered by commercial influence of companies whose products damage the planet and people’s wellbeing,” the editorial hits the ground running.
With the evidence of disaster in front of us, and our current trajectory being far from where we need to be to meet internationally-agreed-upon-targets, the BMJ is clear about the culprits: “Populist politicians rubbish science confirming the harmful effects of climate change. Big business obfuscates, distorts, and denies evidence for the adverse effects of its products.”
Committing to not publish ads from the fossil fuel industry is exactly the sort of thing other media would be brave to adopt, though the editorial does admit that the BMJ doesn’t get much revenue from this sector anyway. (Our guess is that the industry is smart enough not to spend money targeting eyeballs that can see pollution’s health toll firsthand.)
But across cable news and the climate journalism space, fossil fuel industry ads are so common that the Instagram account Emily Atkin created less than two months ago to call them out already has over 40 entries, with ads spotted everywhere from airports to McDonalds trucks to political newsletters to social media.
Though it would obviously be a much bigger ask to make of major media, when framed as an institution’s complicity in climate catastrophe, it’s hard to justify having a fossil fuel ad next to a story about how the pollution from said industry is wreaking havoc on the planet.
And, as the BMJ, highlights, it’s hurting all of us people living on the planet, too.
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