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Renewable Energy—An Important
Component of Health Care Reform
by Steve Sargent, CRES President
 It
never ceases to amaze me how serious debate and discussion about
essential national issues can so easily be sidetracked onto ridiculous
and irrelevant distractions. The current “debate” (I use the term
advisedly) over health care reform is a perfect example. Instead of
talking about the substantive contents of the proposed changes to our
health care system (admittedly a difficult task since there are five
separate bills floating around Congress, each of them many hundreds of
pages long), some people at public meetings have taken to shouting
down calmer voices with bogus arguments about “death panels” and
“socialized medicine”. Some people have even shown up at rallies with
posters of President Obama with painted-on mustaches, to try to make
him look like Hitler.
One health issue about which I have not heard much discussion
(although it may be buried in one or more of the Congressional bills)
is preventive care—that is, keeping people in good health so that they
don’t GET sick, rather than treating them once they do. We are all
aware that an essential element for keeping a population healthy is a
clean environment, of course along with periodic physical exams, good
diet, exercise, and all those other sensible (but sometimes boring)
things that the Department of HHS, and your mother, is always telling
you to do.
Clean air is essential to maintaining a healthy populace. There
have been appalling pictures on TV of people in China who live in
areas where the air is so polluted with coal dust and stack emissions
from factories and electric generating plants that they have to wear
face masks to breathe, and many people have developed cancer just from
breathing the local air. We don’t have many areas in this country that
are that bad, but several of our cities have ambient air quality that
is below EPA standards for good health.
Renewable energy, and energy efficiency, can play a significant
part in helping to clean up our air. Large-scale solar generating
plants can partially replace electricity generated by coal-burning
plants, as can distributed photovoltaic systems on rooftops, thereby
reducing emissions of harmful pollutants such as sulfur oxides,
nitrous oxides, ozone, and mercury. This would also reduce CO2
emissions, which are not a short-term health hazard but may well prove
to be a serious long-term health problem. Studies show that global
warming has allowed the northward migration of disease-bearing
insects, such as malaria-carrying mosquitoes, so that diseases
formerly confined to the tropics are becoming more common in temperate
zones.
Auto exhausts are another air pollution source, which can be
reduced through energy efficiency (e.g., hybrid cars), and
renewably-generated electricity can power plug-in hybrids, further
reducing harmful tailpipe emissions.
There are many arguments in favor of increased use of renewable
energy. It is to be hoped that whatever health care reform law is
eventually passed will provide for renewable energy incentives as an
integral part of maintaining a healthy population.
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