Dr. Vanessa Kerry Discusses the Human Cost of Air Pollution and Climate Change
The conversation about climate change and air pollution often is focused on the big picture: global impact. The cost to countries and communities.
Those arguments often fail to persuade the man on the street. Information about the more than 300,000 in excess deaths annually in the U.S. due to fossil fuel-related air pollution is drowned out by a cacophony of fossil fuel industry misinformation and an epidemic of skepticism about scientific expertise.
Living On Earth guest Dr. Vanessa Kerry is on the frontlines of the public health campaign to combat this misinformation. A critical care trained physician, Kerry is the director of Global Health and Climate Policy at the Department of Environmental Health, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
During Part 1 of her interview with host Steve Curwood, Kerry argues that the power of persuasion rests on the facts. There’s an enormous physical and financial toll everyday people bear as a result of the air pollution linked to society’s reliance on fossil fuels. Beyond the death toll, Kerry points to the everyday burden – cost of medical care, lost sick days, chronic illnesses. She emphasizes that people need to be aware of what the pollution is doing to them individually, even if they are unconcerned by the societal impacts. That kind of storytelling can move the needle in this existential debate.
Kerry also acknowledges that the facts are fighting against a tidal wave of misinformation that sows confusion among the general public and erodes trust in once trusted institutions. She recalls the story of a formerly vaccine skeptical, gravely ill COVID patient begging for the vaccine. But it was too late.
“That confusion cost lives. And I saw that very, very directly as an ICU physician during COVID, when I would have patients coming in that we'd be having to put the breathing tube in, and they would be begging for the vaccine, saying, I didn't understand. I believed what everybody said, please, just give me the vaccine. And I would have to tell them it was too late. And seeing them suddenly have the dawning of what the impact of that confusion was, is what we're facing in climate change again now,” Kerry recalled.
Kerry says the confusion created by misinformation also makes people feel helpless to change the current trajectory of our warming planet.
But inaction is not an option, she asserts.
Dr. Kerry’s professional focus is not just domestic. As a World Health Organization (WHO) Special Envoy for Climate Change and Health, her vision and work are global. She is also co-founder and CEO of Seed Global Health (Seed), a non-profit organization which works to strengthen health systems in several African countries. The work of her NGO has become more vital in the face of the Trump administration’s gutting of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and its attempts to discredit and weaken the WHO. In Part 2 of her interview to be broadcast starting Jan 30, Kerry warned that those actions have cost millions of lives. In addition, the damage to WHO will erode global disease surveillance efforts when the next pandemic comes.
Kerry doesn’t mince words.
“What we know is that there are an estimated 14 million people that are going to die directly from these results,” Kerry said about the impact of the USAID cuts. “The way this has been done has been profoundly destructive in lives, in systems and very disheartening.”
Andrew J. Skerritt
Living On Earth producer and senior project director of the Center for Climate and Environmental Justice Media (CEJM)
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