Harvard's Planetary Planetary Health Alliance - Dr Sam Myers

Claudia Cragg @claudiacragg speaks here with Samuel Myers of the Harvard Planetary Health Alliance. In a recent article he wrote for The Lancet with his colleague, Howard Frumkin, Myers states that, of course, elections impact health through changes in both health-care delivery and upstream social and environmental policies. The upcoming US election presents stark contrasts in environmental policies that will affect health in the USA and globally. His new book with Frumkin is Planetary Health: Protecting Nature to Protect Ourselves. Elections impact health through changes in both health-care delivery and upstream social and environmental policies. The upcoming US election presents stark contrasts in environmental policies that will affect health in the USA and globally. Here we examine these contrasts through the lens of planetary health. A hallmark of the current US administration, say Myers and Frumkin, has been its hostility to environmental stewardship and its embrace of an antiregulatory agenda. President Donald Trump has appointed administration officials from the ranks of polluting industries and their lobbying firms; eviscerated some key government agencies; and diluted or overturned environmental regulations. Notably, Trump has called climate change a hoax and has cast doubt on established science. The Democratic presidential candidate, Joe Biden, has stronger pro-environmental positions as evidenced by the actions of the Obama administration in which he served and by his published 2020 election platform on a clean energy revolution and environmental justice