If it feels a little apocalyptic out there, there’s good reason.
We’re still in what is going down as the hottest summer in Vegas history, with the Clark County coroner’s new heat-related death-count up to 224 people.
And we’re looking into skies this week so hazy from wildfire smoke, you can barely see the mountains. Reno, several hundred miles north of Las Vegas, has become famous as the fastest warming city in the country, and now it’s beset with ash and smoke from wildfires in California and its own backyard. Homes near Reno this week were being evacuated for safety.
This is climate change you can see, feel, and smell.
It’s becoming so prevalent, Nevada doctors, psychologists and others in the medical field have formed Nevada Clinicians for Climate Action. They want to help reduce the impact of climate change.
Part of that starts with managing emissions close to home: The healthcare industry itself is responsible for around 4-5% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions — which is comparable to the aviation industry — and about 9% of emissions in the U.S.
The group’s chair and one of its founders, retired physician Dr. Joanne Leovy, said that it’s incumbent upon the medical field to reduce its carbon footprint, since doing so is in line with the age-old Hippocratic motto of “do no harm.”
“One of the things we've done is we've looked at anesthetic gasses in a few hospitals,” Leovy said, “[which] really warm the planet. They're very potent, and they often leak and are vented into the air. There are very simple ways to take that one issue and stop the leakage and really reduce pollution. So that's just one example of what we're trying to promote with health systems.”
Another aspect of the nonprofit is education, for patients and providers alike, about the dangers a changing climate is posing to people’s health: heat-related illnesses, dehydration, mental health disorders, and the myriad problems associated with smoke inhalation and poor air quality.
Dr. Debra Hendrickson is a pediatrician with Northern Nevada Pediatrics, as well as a founding member of Nevada Clinicians for Climate Action. She’s also the author of a new book, The Air They Breathe, which presents a collection of vignettes about the impact climate change has on childhood health, from Zika virus to wildfire smoke inhalation, the latter being something she’s seen more of in recent years.
“Kids who live near [the Davis] fire have been coming in with a lot of irritated eyes and throats and some coughing and wheezing,” she recounted. “We've been fortunate with that fire that, even though it's so close to Reno, the wind’s taking most of the smoke East. But in prior fires like the Dixie fire or the Caldor fire, we were engulfed in thick, terrible smoke for more than two and a half months, and we saw lots and lots of wheezing, coughing kids ending up in the hospital on oxygen because of the air quality being so bad.”
Despite the issue being one that’s increasingly politicized, Leovy said healthcare workers are in a unique position to educate the public on climate change, due to the high levels of trust patients have with their physicians, nurses, and pharmacists.
“I know that I can say things to patients that they might be able to hear,” she said. “And so talking about the health impacts [of climate change] — because it affects all of us — it doesn't necessarily have as much political resistance as framing climate change in some other ways.”
Even so, progress in the right direction is incremental.
“We can't really reverse what's happened already,” said Hendrickson, “and the goal now is to prevent it from getting worse. So, I hate to think of it as the new normal, but we do have to do what we can to protect kids and recognize that they're going to be the inheritors of whatever we do now, and that a greater health burden falls on the young. There's a huge moral imperative to try to prevent this from getting any worse.”
Guests: Dr. Joanne Leovy, chair and founding member, Nevada Clinicians for Climate Action; Dr. Debra Hendrickson, pediatrician, Northern Nevada Pediatrics; founding member, Nevada Clinicians for Climate Action; author
