Does Hippocratic Oath challenge doctors to stop spewing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere?

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Posted on February 19, 2007
Filed Under Justice, Global warming/Climate change, Deep ecology, Greenhouse gas emissions, Ecological hope, Consumer culture, Environmental disasters, Earth spirituality

Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:

Since this site focuses on ’spirituality,’ a term used broadly to include lifestyle choices, how we live, the values that support our ‘way of life,’ our framework of meaning, we are always looking for signs that people are beginning to get to the essence of our ecological problems — the values by which we live, the choices we make that either promote the life of our planet, or undermine it, even contribute to its destruction.

So I rather enjoyed this little tidbit that I found in the Washington Post this morning. When you click here, scroll down to the second brief article, “Doctors Faulted for Flying.”

The ‘fault’ noted by two British physicians is this: does flying unnecessarily to medical conferences with little or nothing to contribute to the medical field violate the Hippocratic Oath which says that doctors must ‘do no harm?’

Why would this violate the oath? Because in flying, doctors are contributing to the greenhouse gas emissions that are causing global warming which is threatening the well-being of millions of human beings.

They quantified that irony by citing a recent study, which calculated that the 17,000 delegates at a European Respiratory Society conference last year in Munich generated 4,000 tons of carbon dioxide from travel alone. Another study found that the 15,000 delegates who flew to the American Thoracic Society meeting in San Diego this month generated nearly 11,000 tons of carbon dioxide — about the amount produced in a year by 550 Americans — or 110,000 people in the African nation of Chad.

That’s a lot of CO2 — and this, of course, raises once again a point hard for us to come to terms with — flying is very bad for the atmosphere, and we are doing more and more of it. Everyone I know has a good reason for why in their case it is okay to do it. Very few people I know stop and think about how those airplanes are spewing enormous amounts of carbon emissions into the atmosphere — including many of those who are working to stop global warming.

So I just raise the issue one more time. I just highlight this fast-and-far-travel world of ours.

Here’s an excerpt from the article by Ian Roberts and Fiona Godlee, which you can find on the British Medical Journal website:

Callister and Griffiths reported the carbon footprint of the American Thoracic Society meeting in San Diego. The meeting was attended by about 15 000 delegates who generated an estimated 10 779 tonnes of carbon dioxide from air travel.4

Although probably serious underestimates, these are big numbers.5 How do we put them in context? The yearly per capita carbon dioxide emission in the United States is about 20 tonnes, so the 11 000 tonnes from the American Thoracic Society meeting is equivalent to that produced by around 550 US citizens in one year. But the US, the most energy hungry nation on earth, is not the best comparator—11 000 tonnes of carbon dioxide is equivalent to that produced in one year by 11 000 people in India and 110 000 people in Chad. The last is arguably the most appropriate comparison as climate change has probably contributed to the disappearance of Lake Chad, formerly the sixth largest lake in the world; sand dunes now encroach on its drying bed, imperilling the lives of thousands.6

This is tough stuff, but exactly the kind of tough stuff we have to face in order to appreciate the moral challenges that now confront us — to directly link our lifestyle choices to the ecological deterioration of the planet. From the article:

Air travel is not the biggest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, but it is one of the fastest growing. In 2001 the IPCC estimated that aviation caused 3.5% of human induced global warming, which could rise to 15% by 2050. Air travel is also one of the easier aspects of our high carbon lives to change. Scope exists for ingenuity and experimentation, as well as investment in new technologies to overcome distance. A more local focus may also have hidden benefits. Reducing travel is just part of how we must tackle global warming in the next 20 years. Other aspects of our lives must also change, and we must lobby governments to implement the laws and conventions needed to ensure that we ration our carbon use within sustainable limits.511 Climate change is a major threat to global public health and doctors must lead by example.

We could all stand to do more and more of this — lead by example. Nothing communicates a crisis better than folks seeing more and more people, especially community leaders of all sorts, actually changing their lives because of it.


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