In the recent weeks we’ve seen frequent headlines alerting people around the country to dangerous heat waves. Physicians and nurses see these headlines and the human results of the heatwaves in the form of heat illness, people burdened with lung ailments and suffering from deteriorating air quality, and a range of individual harms brought on by wildfires and torrential downpours. Current trends in extreme temperatures are alarming and clearly linked to climate change.
Amid the headlines and the spreading realization that something is different, one bold step that was taken by doctors to reverse the trend lines of climate change went largely unnoticed. At the recent annual meeting of the American Medical Association (AMA), doctors voted to divest their financial investments from fossil fuel companies. The vote sets in motion the move to withdraw the AMA financial investments from an industry that is clearly endangering Americans and people around the world. Drilling for fossil fuels takes carbon sources out of the ground that were left there over millions of years and releases them into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide and methane — two gases that drive global warming.
The effectiveness of past large-scale divestment campaigns demonstrates their power. I am old enough to remember the divestment movement against South Africa, which started slowly at first, led by those who understood that financial pressure could be a force for change. That movement picked up speed as apartheid South Africa was denied the right to host significant athletic events and then saw its economy squeezed to the breaking point because of its racist policies.
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