The Future Gas Strategy adds further fuel to global heating and damages our health. By locking in gas exports until 2050 our government condemns us to a hot, inhospitable and unhealthy environment.
We all know that our planet is getting hotter and that our climate is becoming increasingly changeable and erratic. As health professionals, we know global heating is causing increased heat related illness and death, bigger more dangerous fires, more severe droughts, increased extreme weather events, floods and sea level rise, all of which harm the health of Australians and undermine the capacity of our health systems to provide healthcare.
Yet this strategy adds further fuel to our heating earth and makes the problem worse.
The government seems to have forgotten that so-called “natural gas” increases carbon dioxide and methane emissions, directly increasing the greenhouse effect and global heating. Gas extraction itself harms health and is associated with air pollution, cancer, lung and heart disease.
It is an oxymoron to use gas to decarbonise. Using gas to decarbonise is like using vapes to quit smoking, it just increases the damage to our health and in this case makes net zero further away.
Multiple health bodies, including Doctors for the Environment Australia, the AMA and many medical colleges have declared a climate health emergency, recognising that fossil fuels are a health hazard and that we must rapidly phase out gas, coal and oil to protect health.
The government's National Health and Climate Strategy recognises that climate change is the greatest threat to public health in the 21st Century, yet they put forward a strategy that will worsen climate change. On the one hand they acknowledge the health harms of fossil fuels and on the other hand they put out a strategy that makes the problem worse.
Gas until 2050 is so much hot air, and this government strategy is creating a health problem for all of us.
Media Contact:
Executive Director, Dr Kate Wylie
[email protected] / 0432 871389