Energy transition, the Royal Society of Medicine, and DEEPA

I attended a conference yesterday called "Prosperity challenged: Energy transition & public health (there is a blog of it here, posted by Medsin-UK), hosted by the Royal Society of Medicine, founded in the 18th century, in London. I attended it electronically, using software called Jabber.

I was the first invited speaker, and had intended to travel in person. Circumstances stopped that; it's a shame I couldn't interact more with the people at the meeting, including Prof Kevin Anderson, but at least I didn't have to spend days on a plane, and my carbon generation is a bit less. Instead, I recorded my slides a few day ago. My slides (with recorded voice) are now posted on slideshare; maybe also on You-Tube if I can figure it out. Note, that to hear the voice you need to download the file, which is almost 80 megabytes.
 

We need a transition to clean energy urgently, in order to (a) prevent dangerous climate change; (b) improve air pollution, especially in Asia, and (c) because, pretty soon, fossil fuel is going to be generally unaffordable. If we factored in the negative "externalities" of fossil fuel we'd already find them too expensive, as Christine Legarde, of the IMF has pointed out. 

Optimists think ingenuity will solve scarcity. It may (largely) – including by recognizing limits. Triumphalists don’t seem to admit that reduced energy use, solar, education for girls, wider human rights, indeed environmental rights etc etc are forms of applied ingenuity. But market forces, even though rigged by an increasingly desperate fossil fuel industry (as pointed out by Prof Sharon Beder), are now working in favour of renewables.

Later I had an interesting "conversation" with Dr David McCoy, current president of MedAct, UK, who also attended the conference. In that correspondence, I was reminded of my proposal, made in 1988, for a global coalition of doctors and their friends, which I suggested, perhaps romantically, be called "DEEPA", an acronym for “Doctors for Earth, Environment, Peace and Action”. DEEPA in English, is of course a pun on "deeper" .. but it also means “light” (or "lamp") in Sanskrit. Deepawali, usually shortened to Diwali, is the Hindu Festival of Light. It's probably an ancient harvest festival, held in October or November.

DEEPA remains an idea, but soon after Susan and I did found the NGO BODHI (Benevolent Organisation for Development, Health and Insight). BODHI is also a Sanskrit word, meaning "enlightenment", or "awakening." "Bodhicitta" can be translated as the mind of enlightenment, and also of compassion. BODHI, whose patron is His Holiness the Dalai Lama, marks its 25th anniversary in July 2014.

Susan and I first met during Diwali in Delhi, in 1985. On the next night I left Delhi to travel by train for three days to West Bengal. I still vividly recall my emotion as I passed through what seemed miles lit by thousands of candles, with no electric light anywhere.

In November, 1990, the International Society of Doctors for the Environment (ISDE) was founded, a sister organisation to the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985. One of ISDE's affiliates is Doctors for the Environment Australia (of which I am a founding board member). Since 2011 I have been DEA's representative to ISDE.

Perhaps doctors can develop even more coalitions trying to protect planetary health in order to protect human health. There is a chapter on the general topic of health and medical activism, co-authored with Dr Sue Wareham, in my forthcoming edited book Climate Change and Global Health (CABI). Both the Lancet and BMJ have recently had relevant articles (in the Lancet's case a manifesto that anyone can sign) on the need for health workers to also think about planetary well-being. In fact, the author of the BMJ piece is Dr Eric Chivian, who co-founded IPPNW in 1980. Dr Chivian also founded the Center for Health and the Global Environment, later associated with Dr Paul Epstein, to whom my book is dedicated.

 

 

 

The Future of Global Health. Reasons for Alarm and a Call for Action

Just published (open access) in the World Medical Journal (Vol 59, issue 3)

Co-written with Prof Phil Weinstein. 

The abstract is below. Mainly this paper warns that "business as usual" will lead to a deterioration in global population size and life expectancy. "Peak health" may already be in the past. We might be able to change course but it's getting very late.

This paper was requested after the editor read our editorial in EcoHealth, in 2011. It is to be translated to Latvian.

Here is the abstract:

"The future of global health depends far more on fundamental ecological and social determinants than on progress for health technologies, whether surgical, pharmacological or immunological. There is a growing gap between the optimism in official forecasts of development and global health and the trend of the most important health determinants. Without fundamental change to these, in turn requiring a global shift in culture and measurements of progress, the prospects for global health look bleak. “Peak health” in the past has generally referred to humans in their prime of fitness; in the future it may be seen to refer to the time when global life expectancy reached its maximum. That time may be within a decade – but, if we can change sufficient practices, then we might still improve global health through this century."

“The prospect for the human race is sombre beyond all precedent. Mankind is faced with a clear-cut alternative: either we shall all perish, or we shall have to acquire some slight degree of common sense. A great deal of new political thinking will be necessary if utter disaster is to be averted.” Bertrand Russell, 1945.

The cornucopian enchantment

The cornucopian enchantment: "the conceit that ingenuity will always trump scarcity".


I just heard an interview with Prof Robert Shiller on ABC Radio National. Schiller mentioned Montesquieu foreshadowed Adam Smith by suggesting commerce would help civilise society. However Smith warned against capitalist criminals - monopolists, market riggers and so on (the Goldman Sachs traders of his time).

Schiller refers in passing to everyone being "fed well" as a component of that civilising effect; to me this implies also a reasonably fair distribution, today shared abundance has to be more than food, especially in rich nations with abundant calories, in order to produce civil happiness. The manifest unfairness of Wall St legitimately fuels the backlash of the Occupy movement, just as the unfairness of the French court legitimately fuelled the French revolution. Montesquieu and Smith are right - capitalism is potentially a better driver for happiness and abundance than complete market control - but as Keynes (as Smith) understood it needs regulation to reduce the unfairness, and a lot of that regulation must be self-organised by social norms and moral framework. But those governors have been substantially, deliberately undermined since the late 70s – as Paul Krugman describes in various essays about the 'return of the gilded age".

Philanthropy is useful, but of course rarely is of sufficient scale to repair the damage to public goods that enables the philanthropists to acquire their wealth in the first place (and then to rig the market to further lock in the inequality.) Shiller talks (without calling it that) of the groupthink dominant in the US early in his career (but still after the return of market deregulation) and also in the rise of irrational exuberance (by the way attributed to Greenspan in 1996 not Shiller in 2002).

There is an even stronger form of irrational groupthink operant today – I coined the term “cornucopian enchantment” for this sometime around 1999 (the term appears in my PhD, Inequality and Sustainability). This is the conceit that ingenuity will always trump scarcity. Unless society can rapidly produce a suite of energy, technological and social rabbits then global scarcity will deepen, and indeed hunger will return, not just to Niger and Somalia, but more generally. Then followed by conflict, despite Montesquieu's hopes (and those of Steven Pinker, for that matter). In that context reducing unfairness is essential.

This period of enchantment can be traced roughly to the late 1970s when Limits to Growth started to be ridiculed. We should be awakening from it by now, but in privileged parts of the word we keep dozing on. Europe bleeds $1 billion a day importing energy. This is a greatly under-recognised causal factor in the global financial crisis, and looks as if it will get worse. Not only my opinion, also that of Sir David King (former UK chief scientist.)