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extreme weather
Big Oil is the New Big Tobacco; It’s Time They Paid for the Damage
Massachusetts must pass a Climate Superfund Act to hold big polluters accountable and keep our communities safe from climate harm.
May 29, 2026
Early in my career as a primary care physician, I found myself steering my car through driving rain around downed power lines and fallen tree branches for a shift in urgent care. I was already nervous about my new role. Having a hurricane didn’t help. I remember feeling overwhelmed and inadequate when I had to refer a patient to the already overburdened ER. The deep wound a roof shingle had carved in their scalp was too much for me. Hurricane Bob was a Category 3 hurricane and it took 18 people’s lives and caused today’s equivalent of ~$3.5 billion in damages. The fear, the injuries, and the losses all fell on the local community.
That was decades ago. Nowadays—from Texas floods, to Western wildfires, to deadly heatwaves across the Midwest and Northeast—communities across the country are paying the price. Severe storms are more frequent because of climate change caused by burning fossil fuels. Extreme weather events are causing traumatic injuries, post-traumatic stress disorders, medication shortages, and death. Heatwaves are more frequent and more dangerous, causing heart attacks, asthma attacks, kidney failure, and death. Floods are ravaging our towns, roads, bridges, and farms, overwhelming local businesses and thinly stretched municipal budgets. Public health and infrastructure costs from these crises are mounting. And fossil fuel air pollution—accounting for ~95% of total air pollution in the state—currently kills over 2,700 residents each year in Massachusetts through heart disease, lung cancer, stroke, and chronic lung illness.
Meanwhile, the petrochemical corporations—who’ve knowingly fueled the climate crisis and spent tens of millions of dollars to sow disinformation—got off scot-free.
As a doctor, I can treat people for asthma from air pollution and dehydration from heatwaves, but if the root cause is not addressed, countless more will suffer. The enormity of this threat to public health led me to retire from primary care and join with those fighting for clean energy. We urgently need to stop burning fossil fuels, but we must also invest in resilience and adaptation projects, to safeguard Massachusetts communities against the climate harms they are already experiencing—from the flooding and erosion threatening residents and businesses in Boston and along the coast, to the droughts facing farmers in Western Mass, to the record-shattering heatwaves hitting the entire state this month.
In my medical practice, if I discovered a treatment I prescribed was harming my patients, I’d be ethically bound to speak out. It’s abundantly clear that the fossil fuel industry follows a different ethic.
Passing the state Climate Superfund Act is one step we must take, following in the footsteps of our Vermont and New York neighbors and coalition partners in the nationwide movement to hold big polluters accountable and keep our communities safe from climate harm. Passing a superfund in Massachusetts would allow us to build resiliency in our communities using funds from Big Oil’s checkbook. This act would require the biggest polluters to pay, based on their historical emissions, for projects across the Commonwealth—upgrading stormwater drains, protecting our coasts, installing energy-efficient cooling for seniors who swelter without AC, and offering preventive healthcare programs to treat those sickened by climate change. We desperately need these measures, and this gives us a fair way to pay for them. If you made a mess, you need to clean it up.
In my medical practice, if I discovered a treatment I prescribed was harming my patients, I’d be ethically bound to speak out. It’s abundantly clear that the fossil fuel industry follows a different ethic. Big Oil has known for more than 60 years about the harms their products were causing, but instead of putting people over profits, they have spent tens of millions to cover it up and lie to the public about the damage they were creating.
We can no longer afford to be complacent. It’s time for the Massachusetts legislature to stop “studying” this problem and start protecting its people with this legislation that the majority of its residents support. It’s financially and morally imperative that we pass the Climate Superfund Act. It’s time to make polluters pay for the health of our Commonwealth.
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Greed and Shortsightedness Are Shrinking the Space Where Humans Can Live
Climate change and war are making life in Somalia almost impossible, and now that the US has shut down the US Agency for International Development, the “almost” is disappearing.
May 21, 2026
One way to think about the climate crisis is that we are systematically reducing the margin on which we live on this planet. There were always places where humans couldn’t live: the Antarctic, the centers of the great deserts, the high mountains. But now we’re systematically adding to that list, as places become dangerously combustible, or overrun by rising seas, or just plain too hot. We’re shrinking the board on which we play the sublime game of being human.
I was thinking of this on Monday because I read a truly remarkable piece in The New York Times, the kind of reporting that justifies a subscription despite all the endless disappointments. It was written by Peter Goodman, with powerful photographs from Finbarr O’Reilly.
The two of them traveled widely in recent weeks across Somalia, and what they found—well, you need to read the whole thing. But climate change and war are making life there almost impossible, and now that the US has shut down the US Agency for International Development, the “almost” is disappearing:
For nine days, they trudged across the parched soil of southern Somalia, taking turns carrying their 3-year-old daughter on their shoulders. Abdullahi Abdi Abdirahman, his wife, and their seven children sought escape from a landscape drained of life.
Another drought had killed their goats and sheep, turning their life savings to dust. So they pressed on for 140 miles toward Dollow, a dusty outpost on the Ethiopian border. They were drawn by the same things that had already attracted more than 100,000 other people: International relief organizations were clustered there, offering food, water, and healthcare.
Yet when they arrived in late January at a camp on the fringes of town, they were horrified to learn that aid groups had abandoned the area. President Trump had dismantled the US Agency for International Development, or USAID, eliminating Somalia’s primary source of assistance. From London to Berlin, governments had reduced funding for humanitarian aid. Relief organizations had been forced to choose where to focus their remaining money.
Let me get my anger out of the way first. Elon Musk, in particular, shut down USAID—boasted about “feeding it to the woodchipper” in the first weekend of his DOGE assault on the federal government. That is to say, the richest man in the world did this, under the auspices of our government. His cruelty and his self-regard—and his abject racism—know no bounds.
And then the most piggish and self-involved man in the world, Donald Trump, started a war in Iran, and now the price of fertilizer is through the roof, making life much harder for the people who grow food in Africa (and those who eat it). And an El Niño is now bearing down on the planet, riding on the highest temperatures in human history, which were caused mostly by us in the Western world. All of it taken together is too much
Drought ravaged the most recent harvest. Some 6.5 million people—roughly one-third of the population—were suffering hunger at levels deemed an emergency, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization warned in February. That included more than 1.8 million children under 5 facing acute malnutrition.
Those numbers have almost certainly increased given the war. Yet the World Food Program, the largest source of aid in Somalia, has only enough funding to support 300,000 people a month through July, a fraction of the nearly 2 million people a month it was reaching in early 2025.
Humanitarian relief organizations now contemplate a surreal hierarchy of suffering.
“There are different categories of starvation,” said Hameed Nuru, the World Food Program’s Somalia director. “We are only able to reach those who are really on the verge of, if you don’t give them something now, they will not be there tomorrow.”
In some areas, children are still getting food, but not pregnant mothers. “Literally, it’s who dies first,” he said, “and who dies next.”
Somalia is, of course, a particularly apt place to do this reporting. Trump has referred to its citizens as “garbage people,” and he and Stephen Miller dispatched Immigration and Customs Enforcement to Minneapolis to hunt Somalis. As it happens, it’s on the fairly short list of places I’ve never been, but one of my closest colleagues is Somali, and she is as fine a human being as I know, so I thought of her as I read and reread this piece. But as Goodman points out in his reporting, Somalia is by no means unique.
Indeed, the news this week of a new Ebola outbreak elsewhere in Africa reminds us of another way we keep shrinking the world: There are places it’s too dangerous to go because we’ve unleashed diabolical illnesses. As Kat Lay reports:
The Global Preparedness Monitoring Board (GPMB) said in a report published on Monday that “as infectious disease outbreaks become more frequent they are also becoming more damaging”, warning that pandemic risk is outpacing investments in preparedness and “the world is not yet meaningfully safer”.
Disease outbreaks are becoming more likely due to the climate crisis and armed conflict, while collective action is being undermined by geopolitical fragmentation and commercial self-interest, the report said.
In fact, it’s more or less Musk again—he made a joke at a presidential cabinet meeting about “accidentally” cutting Ebola funding, but insisted it had been restored, something that—and this will shock you—seems not to be entirely true:
In Geneva, Prof Matthew Kavanagh, director of the Georgetown University Center for Global Health Policy & Politics, said aid cuts may have played a role in leaving the world “playing catch-up against a very dangerous pathogen”.
He said: “Because early tests looked for the wrong strain of Ebola, we got false negatives and lost weeks of response time. By the time the alarm was raised, the virus had already moved along major transport routes and crossed borders.
“This crisis didn’t happen in a vacuum. When you pull billions out of the WHO and dismantle frontline USAID programmes, you gut the exact surveillance system meant to catch these viruses early. We are seeing the direct, deadly consequences of treating global health security as an optional expense.”
That margin is thinner all the time. Consider this report from Laura Paddison about the heatwave that shook India last week: There was a day when all the 50 hottest cities on our planet were in that country:
On April 27, average peak temperatures across all 50 Indian cities on the list hit 112.5°F.
Top of AQI’s list was the city of Banda in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, which has a harsh, sub-tropical climate which often delivers brutal summers.
Even before what are typically hottest summer months, the heat has ratcheted up. On April 27, temperatures in Banda reached 115.16°F, according to AQI, the highest temperature recorded anywhere on the planet that day. The coolest Banda got, in the early hours of that morning, was 94.5°F…
Experts have warned heat in India is becoming so extreme, it may “cross the survivability limit” for healthy humans by 2050.
Across the border in Pakistan, as Asad Mumtaz Rid reports, it’s at least as bad:
In southern Pakistan throughout April and May, temperatures have risen far above seasonal norms. In Sindh, daytime temperatures have frequently crossed 44°C to 46°C, forcing residents indoors during peak afternoon hours and severely affecting outdoor labourers, transport workers, and farming communities.
The impact has been particularly severe in Karachi’s coastal settlements, where prolonged electricity outages and water shortages have compounded the effects of extreme heat. In Ibrahim Hyderi, one of the city’s largest fishing communities, residents say survival is becoming increasingly difficult.
Abdul Sattar, a fisherman with more than three decades of experience, recalled how one of his colleagues collapsed from heat exhaustion during the recent heatwave. “We gave him lemon water and rushed him to a doctor,” he said. “He regained consciousness after receiving intravenous fluids.”
There are things we can and must do to make a short-term difference. One is to provide cooling—air-conditioning—to much of the planet. As a study last week from the Rocky Mountain Institute described:
Between now and 2030, the increase in electricity demand for air conditioning systems alone will exceed that for data centers, one of the fastest-growing energy uses globally. By 2050, cooling electricity demand is expected to match the combined annual electricity consumption of the United States, China, India, Germany, and Japan today.
That’s not optional—at this point, it’s medicine. In those kinds of heatwaves cool air is as important to the human body as water, or food. But, obviously it will drive up demand for energy, which is why, as the RMI experts point out, we need to
Reduce energy use and emissions through super-efficient technologies, improved system design, and better refrigerant management, while scaling next-gen, innovative solutions that lower life-cycle costs and emissions.
All of this is possible—new heat pumps are far far more efficient at cooling air than old AC units, and we can paint roofs, plant trees, and do lots more.
But at the most basic level we have no more important task than converting absolutely everything we can, right away, to sun and wind and batteries, so that we stop pouring carbon into the air and making the problem ever worse. And the horrible part is that we can do this, which makes the fact that we’re not doing it as fast as we can deeply and profoundly immoral. Hell, no one is even asking Americans to do with less, because that is clearly impossible. We’re just asking them to do with slightly different, and save money in the process. Here, for instance, is the latest update from former President Joe Biden’s key energy deployment expert, Jigar Shah, talking about a new method for coaxing more juice through existing transmission lines, which experts call
reconductoring with advanced conductors. Reconductoring replaces the wire on an existing line with advanced conductor technology that carries 50 -110% more current through the same towers, on the same right-of-way, in 18 to 36 months. No new permitting. No land acquisition. Montana-Dakota Utilities reconductored a 15-mile 230 kV line, increased ampacity by 77%, finished a full year ahead of schedule, and came in 40% under cost estimate. The Berkeley and GridLab 2035 study found a national reconductoring program could quadruple the rate of transmission capacity expansion at only 20% higher total system cost—saving $85 billion by 2035 and $180 billion by 2050.
But we have to do it. We have to force our leaders, state by state at the moment since DC is such a disaster area, to actually make these relatively small changes.
A way to look at the work we’re doing together is that we’re trying to build some margin back in. Every gas car that becomes an EV buys us back an inch or two, every furnace that becomes a heat pump, every solar panel and wind turbine that sprouts takes the tiniest bit of pressure off the system.
We were born onto a world with lots of margin, especially those of us who are older. The size of the game board was expanding back then, as we learned new ways to grow and store food and the like. But through shortsightedness and greed we began to shrink that buffer, and now greed and short-sightedness have become the cornerstones of government policy, along with pure and undiluted racism. It’s not like anyone is fooled. Goodman again:
As he sat beneath the shade of a mango tree, its branches sloping toward the river dividing Somalia from Ethiopia, Adan Bare Ali, deputy mayor of Dollow, said his community was suffering from troubles that had been concocted far away. The drought was worsened by climate change—primarily the result of industrial polluters in larger, more powerful nations. The war was the handiwork of foreign actors.
“The situation has become unbearable,” he said. “The American regime is led by a person who really doesn’t care about anything happening outside his gates. The Americans are not honoring their commitment to the world.”
He is right, and we are very very wrong.
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Climate Action in Healthcare—No Capes Required
It's time for physicians to step up and join the climate fight. This is not just an environmental issue; it’s a public health issue.
Apr 28, 2026
April 28 is National Superhero Day. It’s a shame that Superman is fictional, because our planet needs saving from its most deadly threat: climate change. Our real heroes will come from science, not planet Krypton.
The threat of climate change is not theoretical, and neither are the health impacts. The Earth was 2.3°F warmer in 2024 than during the 20th-century average, and the 10 warmest recorded years have all taken place between 2015 and 2024. According to the World Health Organization, 3.6 billion people already live in areas highly vulnerable to climate change. Climate-driven deaths are rising, from heat illness and malnutrition to vector-borne disease and disasters such as flooding. Thirty-seven percent of heat-related deaths are linked to human-induced warming, a number expected to climb.
Yet at the very moment when the world needs bold climate action, the Trump administration has taken major steps backward. The United States, historically the world's largest emitter, pulled out of the Paris Agreement and failed to show at last year's United Nations Climate Change Conference, sending clear messages to international partners. Federal disinvestment has been staggering: The latest proposed federal budget will cut the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget by 52% and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's by 32%. Funding for climate change research has been gutted across major universities. We are not on track to reach net-zero emissions by 2050, a deadline scientists view as essential for planetary stability. This backslide disproportionately harms low-income communities, contributing to rising climate-related mortality.
Even as the US retreats from its international and domestic commitments to reduce emissions, America still has a league of planet defenders made up of scientists, engineers, and activists. They may not have capes, but their work saves lives.
No one is coming to save us, and while the impacts of climate change may feel distant to some healthcare providers, the rest of us cannot afford to sit this one out.
It's time for physicians to step up and join the fight. This is not just an environmental issue; it’s a public health issue. All the statistics about heatwaves, floods, and disasters aren’t just abstract; they’re at the bedside. We’re seeing the direct impacts of climate change in emergency medicine as it affects both the types of diseases we’re treating and how we deliver care.
As a physician myself, I know asking overworked healthcare providers to do more is, well, a big ask. But research shows that physicians are viewed as credible messengers on climate-related issues. Our voices and expertise matter, not just in clinics and operating rooms, but in our communities. We know that change does not just come in the form of lobbying and big communication campaigns. Often, it can come from everyday conversations. It can look like asking patients how they keep their medications cool during a heatwave or reviewing their asthma action plan in preparation for wildfire season. By leading with curiosity, we can help patients make the connection between their environment and its effect on their health.
It can take the form of a discussion with your colleagues about eco-friendly prescribing, like opting for tablets over liquid formulations or dry powders instead of propellant inhalers. Within our hospitals and clinics, we can make simple changes like adding recycling bins and minimizing the use of single-use disposables. Plastic waste is a huge problem in the medical field, but it’s a scalable problem within our control.
No one is coming to save us, and while the impacts of climate change may feel distant to some healthcare providers, the rest of us cannot afford to sit this one out. Joining the Justice League of climate change advocacy does not mean taking on everything; it means starting with doing something. The planet doesn’t need a superhero; it needs all of us to take a step toward changing our practice.
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