Global experts’ cure for a warming planet: Cut out coal

Some top international doctors and public health experts have issued an urgent warning: Get off coal as soon as possible. Substituting cleaner energy worldwide for coal will reduce air pollution and give Earth a better chance at avoiding dangerous climate change, recommended a global health commission organized by the prestigious British medical journal Lancet. The panel called it a “medical emergency” that could eventually dwarf the deadly toll of HIV in the 1980s, and that hundreds of thousands of lives each year are at stake and global warming “threatens to undermine the last half century of gains in development and global health.”

The prescription for patient Earth is that we’ve got a limited amount of time to fix things. We’ve got a real challenge particularly with carbon pollution.

Dr. Anthony Costello, director of the Global Health Institute at the University College of London

The Lancet commission report came out days after an impassioned plea to fight global warming by Pope Francis and hours after the President Barack Obama’s administration issued a report emphasizing the costs of inaction on climate change and the benefits of doing something now. The Obama administration said if nothing is done, at the turn of the next century about 57,000 Americans will die each year from polluted air and at least another 12,000 yearly from extreme temperatures.

Science Global warming