Climate change: motive, means, and opportunity

Thank you, Dr Ladouceur, for your excellent editorial on climate change, published in the November issue of Canadian Family Physician.¹ It is an important issue to raise with members of the College of Family Physicians of Canada. We want to respond to your question about what we can do.

In many ways, what family physicians need to do to address climate change is the same as for every other person: critically examine their every action, ask whether there is a more sustainable approach, and then choose it.

But Canadian family physicians can and should do more, not only because the responsibility “to advocate public policy that promotes their patients’ health” is embedded within the principles of family medicine,² but also because we, more than most others, are among those with the greatest opportunity to do so.

We cannot plead ignorance. We have the intellectual capacity to understand the science and its implications for the health of our children. We have the critical analytic skills to recognize that the climate crisis is being driven by the authors of these “fairy tales of eternal economic growth”³ who profit from the status quo, enticing us to buy ever more, peddling single-use medical devices in the name of patient safety, and threatening us with economic collapse if we don’t “do our part” in sustaining the existing carbon-based economy (despite examples from countries like Germany that prove this to be false).

With our 6-figure incomes, working within the health care system of one of the wealthiest countries in the world, we have the means, both privately and on a systems level, to make more sustainable choices. If we cannot buy less, at least we can “buy better.” And as is so often the case, those of us who can afford to make sustainable decisions like purchasing electric vehicles, doing facility energy or waste audits, and investing in green technology will actually benefit financially in the long term.

As physicians we can use our powerful voices to influence change at every level. If we lobby our associations, they will be empowered to lobby governments. But change on the scale required will not be easy, and we need to care enough to do it. Replacing a few light bulbs and recycling a bit of trash is not enough. Ocean cruises, Black Friday consumer orgies, and our ever accumulating mountains of unnecessary medical waste are incompatible with a happy ending to this story. To fix the problem we need to make some sacrifices. If we don’t, future generations will indict us for our selfishness—for having had the motive, means, and opportunity to help avert this crime against humanity and for doing nothing.

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