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An interview of Dan Bednarz by Didi Pershouse of The Center for Sustainable Medicine.
“There is no doubt that the amount of resources– not just oil, but other resources too– flowing into health care is going to start shrinking. But here is mainstream health care with this vociferous appetite to grow and grow and do more and more research for arcane and esoteric technological improvements. A lot of that stuff is going to go away…”
Link: http://sustainablemedicine.org/2009/07/peakoilandsustainablemedicinepart1/.
Bethany Schroeder
Through an ongoing application of fiscal resources, professional collaboration, and continuous assessment, the legislative, medical, and social work communities of Tompkins County have created a network of health services that largely complement one another. The degree to which the network remains integrated as peak oil and climate change influence the region will be a matter of planning, depending on the approach the community and its formal and informal leaders take.
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Editors Note: The following two articles appeared in Public Health Reports / January-February 2009 / Volume 124. They appear here through the kind permission of the Journal. Mainstreaming articles discussing these issues are an important step for education and acceptance.
Energy and the Public’s Health: Making the Connection (PDF) – Michael T. Osterholm and Nicholas S. Kelley
Rarely does a scientific article come along that begs to be read by a much broader audience than the subscribers of a niche journal. Frumkin and colleagues have achieved such a feat in this issue of Public Health Reports. Their article, “Energy and Public Health: The Challenge of Peak Petroleum,” should be required reading for every public policy leader, business executive, health-care provider, and general public health professional. It makes a connection between an old world where the use of carbon-based energy was largely related to wood burning and simple crop production, and a current world that is growing closer to exhausting the fossil fuel stores created by many millions of years of geologic processes. Frankly, it’s quite hard to imagine that we have largely cannibalized the “easily obtained carbon-hydrogen bound energy” that is as much a part of our planet earth’s history as is evolution. But the depletion is happening, just as Frumkin and colleagues have detailed…
Energy and Public Health: The Challenge of Peak Petroleum (PDF) – Howard Frumkin, Jeremy Hess, Stephen Vindigni
Petroleum is a unique and essential energy source, used as the principal fuel for transportation, in producing many chemicals, and for numerous other purposes. Global petroleum production is expected to reach a maximum in the near future and to decline thereafter, a phenomenon known as “peak petroleum.” This article reviews petroleum geology and uses, describes the phenomenon of peak petroleum, and reviews the scientific literature on the timing ofthis transition. It then discusses how peak petroleum may affect public health and health care, by reference to four areas: medical supplies and equipment, transportation, energy generation, and food production. Finally, it suggestsstrategies for anticipating and preparing for peak petroleum, both general public health preparedness strategies and actions specific to the four expected health system impacts…
Nov 20, 2008 (CIDRAP News) – A new report from the University of Minnesota warns that an influenza pandemic could disrupt the coal industry, thereby endangering the nation’s significantly coal-dependent electric power system and everything that depends on it.
“Despite regional differences in coal usage, a pandemic is likely to break links in the coal supply chain, thus disrupting electrical generation. This has the potential to severely endanger the bulk electrical power system in most of the United States,” says the report from the university’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP), publisher of CIDRAP News.
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