Months after President Joe Biden signed off on his climate bill — his potentially $1 trillion-plus, misnamed Inflation Reduction Act — Americans are cooling on global warming.
So Democrats are looking to crank up climate alarmism by suggesting it’s not only a threat to the planet but to public health as well.
Some even want to add it to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s mission.
Big mistake.
In February, voters ranked climate change 17th in importance out of 21 issues.
A recent poll found just 37% say climate change should be Biden’s top priority.
Nearly half say they’ll never buy an electric vehicle.
New York is now intent on following California in banning gas stoves and gas furnaces in all new construction.
Consumer cooking preferences are of no interest to regulatory “experts” who increasingly control the smallest details of our lives.
Faced with waning public interest, Democrats are pivoting to make climate change a public-health issue.
Just last week, the Senate Budget Committee held a hearing dedicated to “Diagnosing the Health Costs of Climate Change.”
A not-so-hidden aim of the hearing: to have the CDC take up the issue.
Yet that could actually harm government’s ability to protect us from actual health threats we face today.
Public-health agencies are already spread too thin by their ever-expanding mandates.
As we learned during COVID, when these agencies spend their time trying to solve social problems, they’re incapable of combating real threats of communicable disease.
Indeed, trying to stop biological pathogens is difficult, if not impossible, when you’re also attempting to reverse the “epidemics” of gun violence, loneliness, traffic deaths, etc.
Historically, public health involved “the science and art of preventing disease, prolonging life and promoting health.”
This was the nation’s vision in 1946 when it created the CDC as the primary federal agency to fight communicable diseases.
And despite the success of antibiotics and breakthrough vaccines, the job of stopping diseases that can threaten widespread death is never over.
Yet only about 8% of the CDC personnel are tasked with detecting and controlling communicable threats.
Even after its failure to contain COVID, the CDC initiated two initiatives, promoting “social determinants of health” and “health equity,” that are unlikely to make Americans less prone to disease or healthier.
Forcing climate change under the CDC’s umbrella would only further burden the agency and make it harder to fight disease.
Fact is, the agency is already beset by “mission creep.”
Indeed, it’s precisely because the agency is so focused on so many divergent social issues that it failed to adequately prevent, combat or contain COVID-19, despite having a $12 billion budget before the pandemic.
Even if global warming posed a clear and present danger to the health of the American people, there’s little chance the CDC could effectively fight it.
The agency’s managerial focus is already so diffuse, there’s little chance it could absorb another issue, particularly when the correlation between global warming and population health is so ambiguous.
The good news: Climate change can be solved outside of our public-health apparatus.
Consider that the level of the six most dangerous airborne particulates has dropped remarkably since the passage of the Clean Air Act in 1970, a law that had little to with the CDC.
Americans no longer breathe deadly lead fumes as they once did.
This is good from both a climate and public-health perspective: The annual rate of new lung cancer cases fell from 70 per 100,000 people in 1999 to 53 per 100,000 in 2019.
What’s more, during the seven decades since the Clean Air Act became law, we nearly trebled GDP while reducing by half the amount we spend on total energy.
Our economy has become progressively less dependent on oil and coal as energy sources for economic expansion, significantly reducing the United States’ actual contribution to overall global warming.
We know how to grow our economy, improve the disposable incomes of nearly every American, with ever-decreasing levels of fossil fuels, even as the contributions of wind and solar energy to these gains have been negligible.
Congress would do well to remember all this before attempting to push global warming onto the shoulders of public-health agencies.
Keeping the CDC focused on its core mission will help agency personnel prepare to face the next public-health threat, and ensure that decades of climate progress continue unabated.
Carl Schramm is University Professor at Syracuse University and a member of the COVID Crisis Group. Adapted from Senate testimony on April 26.
