An Australian Hero: coal vs public health

Near the end of last year, a famous Australian put his religious and scientific convictions into action and was arrrested at the #LeardBlockade while non-violently protesting the construction of the Maules Creek open cut coal mine. This mine is being built in the middle of a critically endangered woodland ecosystem and is reducing the water supply to some of Australia's best farmland. The coal extracted over the planned lifetime of this mine will result in as much carbon pollution as would be emitted by hundreds of millions of people living with sustainable carbon footprints for a year. Air pollution from extracting, transporting and especially burning this coal will very likely result in thousands of early deaths and hundreds of thousands of people finding it more difficult to breathe.

So, who was this Australian icon putting his body on the line to protect our farmers, our koalas and bats, our neighbours, our habitable planet? I'm not referring to David Pocock​, though the rugby star and committed Christian was also arrested days later doing much the same thing, and undoubtedly received more coverage than of the other 350-odd arrests at Maules Creeks over the last year or so. I'm talking about the man who (in my book) is the most credible and authoritative of all those who have joined the #LeardBlockade: Professor Colin Butler​, an international expert on climate and public health, an IPCC author, and sole editor of the most up to date and weighty volume in that field, Climate Change and Global Health, a collaboration of 56 authors from 18 countries that came out weeks before his arrest. Prof Butler is also co-founder of the Buddhist NGO BODHI (Benevolent Organisation for Development, Health and Insight).

Prof Butler was arrested back in November and faced court yesterday, where the original charges against him were dropped and he was found guilty of a lesser charge. No conviction was recorded under Section 10, and Prof Butler was given a two year good behaviour bond (which is still heavier than many people who have been arrested under similar circumstances, including David Pocock).

Almost every time people read about people being arrested for peacefully protesting, there will be comments from confused people who have perhaps conflated "peaceful/non-violent" with "lawful", and who think it is outrageous that someone could be arrested for a peaceful protest. It was indeed a peaceful protest, but once which broke the law of NSW.

So what did Prof Butler do wrong?

Essentially, a parking violation. Prof Butler parked his backside in the middle of the road for a few hours (and presumably refused to move when directed to do so by a police officer), a road which just happened to one that mining equipment required for the construction of the mega-mine in question.

It is good to have laws against parking/traffic violations. In general, people ought not to be allowed to block public roads. But sometimes, there are bigger fish to fry: people really, really ought not be to be allowed to dig up sequestered hydrocarbons on a massive scale without regard for the damage caused by the extraction, and ought not be allowed to burn those hydrocarbons while dumping their waste into the global commons of the atmosphere and oceans in such a way as to endanger the habitability of the entire planet. In that context, one crime is far, far, far more serious than the other.

And so thank you Professor Butler. Thank you for your vital research, public voice and actions in seeking to protect the habitability of our home. There is no planet B.
First image (Leard State Forest being cleared for the mine) from Greenpeace Australia Pacific. Second image (Prof Butler's arrest) from Front Line Action on Coal.

Don't breathe too deeply, and other stories

Air pollution: 97% of EU citizens are exposed to levels of tropospheric ozone above WHO recommended limits. "On average, air pollution is cutting human lives [in Europe] by roughly eight months and by about two years in the worst affected regions". The situation is considerably worse in many parts of the world. The true cost of the public health burden on respiratory function of burning coal in China, for instance, is perhaps as high as 7% of annual GDP, even before climate costs are considered. A 2011 study of the external costs of coal in the US (excluding climate costs) found an annual price tag between 1/3 and 1/2 a trillion dollars.

Climate change is here: Climate change is already contributing to the deaths of nearly 400,000 people a year and costing the world more than $1.2 trillion, wiping 1.6% annually from global GDP, according to a new study. The impacts are being felt most keenly in developing countries, according to the research, where damage to agricultural production from extreme weather linked to climate change is contributing to deaths from malnutrition, poverty and their associated diseases. Air pollution caused by the use of fossil fuels is also separately contributing to the deaths of at least 4.5m people a year, the report found. That means failing to tackle a fossil fuel based economy will contribute to something like 100 million deaths by the end of next decade.

Warming oceans: warming and acidification will cut the productivity of fisheries in many countries. "About 1 billion people depend on seafood as their main source of protein. But some of those countries most dependent on fishing are expected to lose up to 40% of their fish catch by the middle of the century." Hardest hit will be the Persian Gulf, Libya, and Pakistan. Of course, this is just from carbon-related changes and does not take into account patterns of overfishing, invasive species, pollution, eutrophification, stratification, shifting currents or habitat loss from coral reef degradation. And even the size of fish will shrink in warmer oceans.

Dying trees: Who will speak for the trees? Trees are dying by the millions all around the world due to a wide range of factors. Not just deforestation - which, though it has slowed down a little in Brazil, still continues with increasing rapidity elsewhere - but also due to ground level ozone pollution, infectious diseases (a third of all UK trees face wipeout from a new fungal threat that is expected to wipe out over 90% of Danish Ash trees) and a variety of threats associated with climate change, such as heat stress, invasive species (pine bark beetle) and droughts. For instance, last year's drought in Texas killed over three hundred million trees (or about 6% of all its trees). Heat stress has been linked to widespread tree mortality in scores of studies over the last few years.

Ocean acidification: A basic primer with FAQs, including excellent brief answer to common misconceptions.

Killer cats: How much do cats actually kill? The Oatmeal summarises some recent research. There are hundreds of millions of domestic cats around the world, and tens or hundreds of millions of feral cats. They are taking a big toll on small wildlife.

Australian coal: Australia's carbon price, far from signalling the "death of the coal industry" as claimed repeatedly by the Opposition, has apparently done little to dent the explosive growth of coal exploration in the country. Australia is the world's largest exporter of coal, fifth largest extractor of fossil hydrocarbons globally and has the highest per capita domestic carbon emissions in the OECD. Despite setting very modest carbon reduction targets in recent legislation, both government and industry are planning on a doubling of coal exports in the coming decade, representing emissions many times greater than Australia's tiny domestic reductions, which will largely come from international offsets in any case.

Fossil energy costing Australia billions in health problems

"Coal-fired power triggered lung, heart and nervous system diseases estimated to cost Australia $2.6 billion a year, while the annual health costs of pollution from oil-fuelled vehicles were put at $3.3 billion a year. Switching from vehicle transport to cycling or walking to work would reduce obesity, which would significantly reduce risk of heart disease, breast cancer and mental illness. Reductions in consumption of meat from cattle and sheep, which were big contributors of greenhouse gas in Australia, would not only reduce pollution but also reduce the incidence of colorectal cancer. The report says: "In Australia, air pollution is estimated to kill more people every year than the road toll.""

- Mark Metherell, "Health impact of rising carbon levels said to be costing $6b a year", SMH, August 2012.
H/T Peter.

So, actually, the immediate costs of our high emissions just in Australia greatly exceed $6b a year, since the first two items alone account for that. There are plenty of other fascinating figures in the report that the SMH article skips over (and it entirely ignores one whole section of the report on the benefits for natural ecosystems):

• Motor vehicle-related air pollution is believed to be responsible for between 900 and 4,500 cases of cardiovascular and respiratory diseases and bronchitis each year in Australia, and between 900 and 2,000 early deaths.
• Reductions in red meat consumption in Australia from the (current) average of 100g to 50g per person per day have been predicted to reduce annual emissions from livestock by 13.3 MtCO2-e (about 22 per cent) as well as cutting the incidence of colorectal cancer by 11 per cent.
• Globally, 3.2 million deaths each year can be attributed to physical inactivity. [...] Longtitudinal studies reveal cycling for transport is associated with 30-40% lower mortality rates, and cycling and walking projects provide high value for money, with the health gains returning a benefit:cost ratio of 5:1. The likelihood of becoming obese increases by 6 per cent for each hour spent in a car each day.

Indeed, I think the SMH article missed the most politically sensitive number from the report, which is that if we simply take the public health costs of greenhouse emissions (and ignore climate costs), then the price of carbon ought to be at least $45/t CO2e, rather than the current price of $23/t CO2e. Let me repeat that: if the climate dissenters turn out to be right, and anthropogenic climate change is non-existent or not particularly injurious, it would still make sense to put a price on carbon emissions at almost double the present rate purely for the public health benefits.

And such benefits are by no means confined to Australia:

"Globally, air pollution [from coal and oil] kills 1.34 million people each year. [...] The 2012 OECD Environmental Outlook report suggests that without policy action, air pollution will become the biggest cause of environmentally-related deaths worldwide by 2050.

The report also notes that the black carbon (i.e. soot) pollution from burning biomass in poor countries kills more than two million each year "from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, lung cancer and pneumonia."

A somewhat similar study in the US by Harvard Medical School estimated that US public health costs of burning coal (it didn't even look at petroleum) run into the hundreds of billions annually. Total externalities for coal were estimated at between 300 and 500 billion dollars annually. If the price of coal-fired electricity included these costs (as it ought, in a well-designed economic system), coal no longer looks "cheap". It is cheap only to the moment you burn it, then it is nothing but costs.

Another report from the EU found that reducing carbon emissions 30% from 1990 levels by 2020 could save €80b annually in public health costs alone. For comparison, Australia's carbon scheme will actually see our emissions still rise between 1990 and 2020, though we use 2000 as our benchmark in order to hide this fact. And remember, all these studies are looking at countries with semi-decent pollution controls already. China and India's costs - burning much dirtier coal with little pollution control - are measured in millions of lives lost, shortened and worsened.

Two gripes with the SMH article:

1. It is criminal that online newspapers do not provide direct links to reports on which they are reporting. Here is the report in question.
2. The headline is misleading, not only in lowballing the true figure, but also in saying these are the costs of "rising carbon levels". The article makes clear they are the immediate health costs of burning dirty fossil hydrocarbons. The climate costs are likely to be much, much greater, but they are harder to get a handle on (either statistically or emotionally) because they are deferred and operate through highly complex causal chains.

However we slice it, the practice of burning fossil hydrocarbons has huge implications. There are all kinds of ways we can easily and quickly reduce our reliance on them, and taking such first steps is a no brainer even in the absence of climate concerns. When we acknowledge the shared understanding of 19 national science academies of OECD nations (which is contradicted by no scientific body of national or international standing in the world) that our greenhouse emissions are dangerously altering the climate then the demands of justice and prudence call us further than just the easy and obvious reductions. We should have started many decades ago, but today is better than tomorrow.

Peak when? We've already passed it

ArsTechnica: When is peak oil? We've passed it. Welcome to the downslope.

CP: How much of recent global warming has been caused by human activities? Most likely more than 100%. How can we have caused more than 100% of something? Without human activity, it is likely that we would have experienced a slight cooling trend and so our activities are primarily responsible for both overcoming this natural trend and the observed warming.

NYT: A case study in overfishing - the collapse of jack mackerel in under a decade. A single super-trawler theoretically has the capacity to catch more jack mackerel annually than the most optimistic estimate of the global sustainable catch. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimated (based on 1998 data, now hopelessly out of date) that global fishing fleets "are 2.5 times larger than needed." The latest estimate of total global subsidies for fishing fleets (back in 2003) was US$25 billion to $29 billion per annum (mainly in fuels). Let us therefore choose between fish and the fishing industry; we cannot save them both.

Physorg: Wheat can't stand the heat. A new study published in Nature Climate Change found that "a 2.0 Celsius increase above long-term averages shortened the growing season by a critical nine days, reducing total yield by up to 20 percent."

NASA: Greenland, the world's northern mirror, is rapidly growing dimmer, with some areas seeing a drop in reflectivity of almost 20% in a few years.

Stephen Leahy: Toxic pollution is a public health problem on a similar scale to malaria. A new study claims that more than 100 million people have their productive life span shortened by an average of 12.7 years. Some of the causes may be encircling your finger, resting in your pocket or illuminating your eyeballs right now, though the victims may well live on the other side of the world.

Onion: Scientists reveal how to achieve sustainability overnight, though wisely leave open the policy questions.

"When the Pentagon and Greenpeace are on the same page, you know things are getting serious."

"Picture a map of the world. Picture the areas we’re most concerned about; where poverty, instability, and conflict meet. Parts of the Middle East and North Africa. Pockets of sub-Saharan Africa. Delicate borders on the Asian subcontinent. Now picture the areas where climate change will strike hardest. The overlap is uncanny – and unnerving."

Chris Huhne, UK Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, gave an speech today in which he pointed out the systemic nature of the threats posed by climate change. Rather than directly causing problems, climate change exacerbates existing threats, making food more difficult to grow, water more difficult to distribute, public health more difficult to manage, infrastructure and lives more vulnerable to extreme weather events and, crucially, where tensions already exist in the geopolitical system, generally taking us closer to violence. It was not a ground-breaking address, but summarises why climate change is not "just" an environmental problem.

Huhne concludes with these words:

"Desperate people take desperate measures. Instability is now a national problem; soon it will be a regional one. Migrants surge outwards, searching for survival.

"This is the nightmare scenario. Yet it is already tragically familiar. We have already seen civil wars compounded by water stress, in Darfur. Regional conflicts fuelled by resources in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Food prices prompting riots in Bangladesh.

"Climate change is the force that threatens to unify and magnify these pressures. It will focus and concentrate existing tensions, fracturing states and destroying societies. So far, we have not done enough to stop it. We still have time to mobilise: but that time is rapidly running out. Doing nothing is not an option."

Full speech available here.

And then there were 306...

NOAA: “August 2010 was the 306th consecutive month with a global temperature above the 20th century average. The last month with below average temperatures was February 1985.” Any day the temperatures for September will be in. It's a safe bet to expect they will make it 307.

The most commonly cited target in international climate negotiations is that we ought to limit warming to an average of 2°C. However, that may already be too high.

How to shrink a city: this will become an increasing issue in many parts of the world due to likely demographic and economic changes of the next few decades.

Peak oil and healthcare, a UK perspective.

Terminological clarification: irreversible vs unstoppable.

Hot Topic: On giving up non-essential flying.

The health benefit of more ambitious emissions targets. If Europe raised its sights from 20% to 30% emissions cuts by 2020, then it could be saving an extra €30 billion per year in health costs. This saving alone would account for a significant portion of the estimated €46 billion p.a. the higher target would require.

Twenty-two percent of the world's plant species are threatened with extinction and another thirty-three percent have an unknown status. The main culprit? Land use changes associated with agriculture.

Rivers in peril worldwide: study in Nature claims that eighty percent of the world's population (nearly 5.5 billion people) lives in an area where rivers are seriously threatened. "[S]ome of the highest threat levels in the world are in the United States and Europe." See also here a graphic of the threat distribution.

Oceans acidifying much faster than ever before in Earth's history.

Soil degradation, erosion and desertification continues in many places around the world, reducing the amount of arable land.

On average, every single man, woman and child on the planet is US$28,000 in debt.

Speaking of money, a new study has estimated that the cost of vanishing rainforest each year is approximately US$5 trillion (with a "t". i.e. US$5,000,000,000,000).

However, the real issue is that each of these crises are not isolated, but are all converging on similar time scales.

Link love

Peter Singer: Why we must ration health care. H/T Milan.

Bryan offers some lessons from NZ's ETS.

Die-hard contrarian hedge fund manager Jeremy Grantham on everything you need to know about global warming in five minutes.

Cartographic conflict: a potted history of WWII.

Ben rants about men's groups.

Paul Krugman asks "who cooked the planet?"

If only gay sex caused global warming, or, why do we pay more attention to some threats than to others?

Gillard's climate inaction and the Citizen's Assembly

As we "move forward" to an Australian federal election on 21st August, Prime Minister Julia Gillard has just announced the ALP's climate change policies.

I'm a little underwhelmed.

Still aiming for endless economic growth, no price on carbon until after 2012, same tiny target (5% down from 2000 levels by 2020. Most of the rest of the world uses 1990 as a benchmark, as agreed at Kyoto. Australia doesn't, or our "reduction" would be revealed as an increase), slight increases on fairly lacklustre funding for alternative energies, more coal power stations (as long as they are "capture ready", which is a little like building a car with a third pedal but no braking system and calling it "breaking ready"), and in what is perhaps the most telling proposal, a Citizen's Assembly held over twelve months to build a bipartisan consensus on the issue that will last longer than an election cycle.

This last idea could be dismissed as a populist move aimed to give sceptics a chance to bury the hatchet or at least air their grievances and vent some steam, but there is more at stake. The perceived need for something like this is based on the observation that in Australia, some kind of legislation involving a price on carbon enjoyed bipartisan support for the last few years until this collapsed suddenly around the end of 2009 with the election of Tony Abbott to lead the Coalition, who has described climate change as "absolute crap" and whose policies even manage to make the ALP look green (which is all the ALP need, basically). Gillard's speech compares the need for such a consensus (which needn't include everyone) to support for Medicare (Australia's public health system), which began life as a partisan issue, but which gradually won widespread public support until it is now politically unthinkable for either side to abandon it.

The Citizen's Assembly will be accompanied by the creation of a Climate Change Commission "to explain the science of climate change and to report on progress in international action". If people think that the CSIRO, the Australian Institute of Physics, the Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Socities, the Geological Society of Australia, the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society, Australian Coral Reef Society, the Australian Medical Association and the Institution of Engineers Australia are all too political, part of a hoax, taken in by a fraud, in it for the money or whatever other argument people use to ignore the body of scientific opinion on climate change, then I am unsure what contribution another group set up by the government are going to make to building a community consensus.

Building a widespread understanding of the issue is important, and indeed, this was perhaps my largest disappointment with Kevin Rudd, that he abdicated his chance to lead the public debate on the issue, preferring to hang back and let the opposition shoot themselves in the foot over their internal squabbling on the issue.

It is also crucial to distinguish between the climate science (where expert opinion overwhelmingly acknowledges dangerous anthropogenic climate change) and climate policy (where expert opinion is more divided and where more deliberation on the goods of society is required) and to note that though we might agree (at least broadly) on the problem, proposed responses can vary widely for all kinds of legitimate reasons.

Exactly how the proposed Citizen's Assembly will work hasn't been spelled out in detail (or at least, I haven't seen where this has been done) and I can imagine a number of possible pitfalls to this approach. Nonetheless, I applaud Gillard and the ALP for trying something to raise the level of public debate on the ethics and policies of a good national response.

Healthcare and the market

I've mentioned the US debates about health insurance before. But it is graphs like this that are worth studying closely to get a quick handle on why universal healthcare is such a no-brainer to the rest of the developed world (a.k.a. "the den of socialism").
Notice that the much maligned NHS in the UK spends about 40% of what the US does per person and yet the UK has a higher average life-expectancy by more than a year. Portugal spends less than 30% of the US level and also has a higher life-expectancy. The country with the greatest longevity, Japan, spends about 35% per person of what the US spends. And this massive US spending is not just absolute, but also relative to GDP. The other salient feature of this graph is noting that the only industrialised nation without universal health care is the US.

Of course, there is not a simple correlation between health system and life expectancy. Also important are genetic and environmental factors (including diet). But it is at least worth pausing for thought and wondering whether the US system is really generating the quality of health care that is often claimed for it. Might not the introduction of market forces actually distort the system by giving doctors falsely inflated motives for unnecessary treatment? And by giving insurers incentive to deny treatment, or to deny cover to those already sick (who often need it most)?

This is not simply another cheap shot at US politics, but a way of raising a larger and more important issue. Namely, that there are parts of life where market forces distort healthy relationships. Introducing the logic of the market to situations requiring trust and gift doesn't improve efficiency; instead, it can often critically undermine the trust and generosity on which the relationship is built. To pick a somewhat facetious example, should we charge our daughter for each nappy that we change? Should breast milk operate on a user-pays system?

Nonetheless, the dominant expression of contemporary capitalism has an imperialist tendency based on the assumption that market logic ought to be extended to more and more spheres of life. Private ownership for profit is treated as though it is the most desirable kind of human sociality. This is not a recipe for good healthcare, and it is not a recipe for a healthy society.

UPDATE: Here are two very good contributions to the healthcare debate.
• The simplest explanation of health care reform you will read, giving a very readable summary of the logic behind the proposed reforms.
• Catch 22 for opponents of health care reform, or why a government option is neither a takeover nor a sneaky takeover (and why even if it were this wouldn't be a terrible thing). Note: the government option has been taken off the table, but this post is still worth reading to know why that was a bad move.

Thesis question articulation IV: Predicament

Predicament: part two
Series begins back here.
John Michel Greer in The Long Descent: A User's Guide to the End of the Industrial Age usefully distinguishes between two kinds of threats, which he calls problems and predicaments. Problems have solutions, whereas predicaments do not. A problem has a path may be discovered and chosen that will effectively avoid, nullify, or significantly diminish the problematic aspect of the situation. A predicament lacks such options. It is a situation in which there are no strategies that will substantially avoid all the significant negative aspects of a threat.

Greer suggests that the archetypal human predicament is death. Facing death, humans have come up with a wide range of responses, some healthier than others: from denial or suppression to great works of art and a variety of ethical and spiritual impulses. Yet it is a mistake to treat our mortality as though it were a problem we are to solve.

I may correctly treat this or that threat to my life as a problem and seek a solution to stay alive. I am standing in the middle of a busy road; I will get out of the way (or perhaps I will campaign for more pedestrian areas and higher taxes on private automobiles). But while specific problems can be seen and solved, the fact that I am mortal is a basic condition of my life. No amount of wishing, campaigning, meditating, medicating or moralising will decisively remove the constant threat and ultimate inevitability of my own demise.

Staying alive is a good thing. And so medical research and (probably more significantly), public health initiatives such as sewers and effective garbage disposal that reduce mortality rates and increase life expectancies are generally instrumental goods worth pursuing. But it is possible to pursue one good thing in a way that undermines other good things and distort the proper ordering of goods. There is an often unspoken assumption behind much of the angst over healthcare funding (whether private or nationalised): that, given sufficient resources, we can endlessly defer the inevitable. But throwing more and more resources towards medical interventions that merely prolong the continuation of a pulse may well be mistakenly treating a predicament as a problem, and ironically, diverting attention from other problems that do have solutions.

Death is a personal predicament. Greer argues that the present ecological and resource crises are a social predicament, indicating the unavoidable end of the industrial age as we have known it. Although at one stage (he identifies the 1970s oil crises for instance) the unsustainability of contemporary industrial society was a problem that could have been confronted and solved through an ordered transition to more sustainable ways of living, it is now too late. The moment for solutions has passed and we are now in a predicament, where no amount of activism, technological advance or personal reform is remotely likely to succeed in maintaining the astonishing trajectory of growth that industrial nations have enjoyed for the last few generations. Indeed, nothing can avert widespread social decline and political instability. He claims that treating this as a problem distracts us from a healthy response in which the inevitability of this decline is accepted and we seek ways of cushioning the most likely quite rugged downslope that lies ahead.*

Of course, it is crucial to identify correctly which threats are problems and which are predicaments. Treating a predicament like a problem is pointless waste of energy. Treating a problem like a predicament is an irresponsible defeatism. But how can we tell the difference? How do we know if an issue is insoluble unless we resolutely attempt to solve it?

These are important questions, and in the case of whether our society has reached or is reaching various limits to growth, very important questions. However, I would like to plead some measure of ignorance on the precise global situation and instead pursue some subsequent questions: if Greer is correct and unsustainability is not simply a problem, but a predicament, what does a healthy response look like?
*Greer also claims that we face long-term decline, not sudden collapse (hence The Long Descent). But that is a post for another day.
UPDATE: I've also just discovered that the relevant section of The Long Descent was first posted here on JMG's blog some time ago.

This post is part of a series in which I am outlining my current research question. My present working title, which this series seeks to explain, is "Anxious about tomorrow": The possibility of Christian moral attentiveness in the predicament of societal unsustainability.
A. Societal unsustainability: part one; part two
B. Predicament: part one; part two
C. Moral attentiveness: part one; part two
D. Christian: part one
E. Possibility: part one
F. Summary: part one

US Healthcare debate: lies, damned lies and the NHS

When massive health insurers have millions of dollars of profit at stake, it is no surprise that there is a huge amount of misinformation being deliberately spread about nationalised health care in the US at the moment. In particular, the UK's National Health Service (NHS) has been grossly misrepresented. It has its problems, of course, but overall, we have found it to be an excellent service and it has been of great help during my ongoing checkups after cancer and so far through the first half of Jessica's pregnancy. We have never had to wait long, we have received quality care on top equipment and we have not paid a penny despite not even being UK citizens. Indeed, the NHS was no small part in our decision to study in the UK rather than the US. I have also written in the past about my experiences of Australia's Medicare system, which were also positive. I am no health care expert, but it doesn't take much expertise to see through some of the deliberate lies and ensuing confusion that seem to be increasingly mudding the waters of public debate in the US.

As I understand them, the proposed health care reforms in the States are not even aiming at a system as nationalised as the NHS here in the UK. Here is a campaign allowing those who have benefited from the UK's NHS to tell it like it is in an open letter to US Congress and people that simply says this:

We urge you to ignore the myths about health systems in our country and others that are being pushed by US healthcare companies. Our national system of public healthcare works very well and enjoys extremely high levels of public support. We wish you a healthy and honest debate about healthcare in the US.

Now of course there is much debate about the use of public money, and rightly so, but debate isn't helped by smear campaigns spreading lies about what nationalised health care systems are like. If you have benefited from the NHS and would like to say so, then you can do so here.

That said, I do still wonder whether our societies (Australia, UK and US) all spend too much on acute health care, especially in comparison to the relatively little spent on preventative health care. We expect to be able to live however we like and then have the most expensive medical aid help us get out of the holes we have gleefully and collectively jumped into.

UPDATE: I don't think I'm alone on this.

In the news

Bad news: fisheries failing. I expect we will continue to hear more and more about this as it will not go away quickly.

Good news: a public health success story. I expect to rarely or never hear much about this again.

UPDATE: Even worse news: the cost of ecological destruction dwarfs the credit crunch. I am not sure which is more depressing, that we are losing between US$2-5 trillion annually in ecological destruction, or that most of us won't start paying attention until the destruction is quantified economically.