Perth Voice Interactive

THIS week’s Speaker’s Corner comes from Mount Lawley neurologist CAROLYN ORR, who explains why so many medical doctors are concerned about the looming “human health emergency” posed by policies favouring fossil fuels.

ON Friday December 1, more than 50 medical doctors rallied outside Parliament House against WA’s support for oil and gas expansion. 

Why is the medical profession, usually so conservative, taking on both the state government and the fossil fuel industry?

Medical doctors recognise that the climate crisis is a human health emergency.

Climate change causes illness and death by driving extreme weather events, increasing risk of infectious diseases, causing air pollution, rising sea levels and biodiversity loss.

A warming climate threatens the very foundations of our health – reliable food supply, clean air and water, and safe shelter.

Our emergency departments and general practices are already seeing the health impact of climate change play out in real time, with hospitalisations increasing 10 per cent in a heatwave, and emergency department visits and deaths spiking during bushfires.

This climate crisis is driven primarily by the burning of fossil fuels: coal, oil and gas. 

This year is now confirmed as the hottest in human history (by a scarily large margin), with oil and gas-driven heatwaves, bushfires, droughts and flooding occurring around the country and across the globe. 

The same fossil fuels that cause climate change are also the largest preventable cause of air pollution, responsible for about 1 in 5 human deaths.

The science is clear that to halt the climate crisis, and secure a safe and liveable future for everyone, we need to phase out fossil fuels and replace them with renewable energies. 

But the WA state government is supporting oil and gas expansion despite the escalating evidence of the health impacts of climate change, most notably in their support for Woodside’s Burrup Hub project.

This will be Australia’s most polluting fossil project ever and is projected to release over 6 billion tonnes of dirty carbon emissions.

Medical doctors successfully took on the powerful tobacco industry half a century ago to protect human health.

Our focus is now oil and gas, which need to be phased out to protect us from the dire health impacts of global warming. We need an end to new oil and gas projects, an end to subsidies to the fossil fuel industry, and to fast track a just energy transition towards a renewably powered economy.

We urge the state government to prioritise the health and wellbeing of Western Australians over the short term profits of the fossil fuel industry.