Air conditioning has long been viewed as a luxury which makes people’s lives more comfortable in the hot summer months, but increasingly in the era of the climate crisis, analysts are pointing out that it has become a matter of life-and-death, and thus access to air conditioning should be regarded as a human right in the late 21st century.
Asserting that humanity “cannot wait for the pandemic to pass” before acting to rapidly reduce carbon emissions fueling the climate emergency, more than 220 health journals around the world published an unprecedented joint editorial calling for “urgent action to keep average global temperature increases below 1.5 degrees celsius, halt the destruction of nature, and protect health.”
A panel of policy experts and medical professionals convened to examine the healthcare legacy of Donald Trump have concluded in a detailed report that the former US president’s sweeping regulatory rollbacks and full-scale assault on the already decimated public health infrastructure severely undermined the nation’s fight against Covid-19 and caused tens of thousands of preventable deaths.
Dr. Douglas Bettcher of the Director of the World Health Organization explains the human costs of cigarette smoking in Japan.
