Dr. Mona Sarfaty is the Executive Director and Founder of the Medical Society Consortium on Climate and Health, comprised of societies representing 70% of all U.S. physicians. She founded the Consortium in 2016 in conjunction with the George Mason University Center for Climate Change. Under her leadership, the Consortium has grown into a nationwide coalition of societies, organizations, and advocates mobilizing support for equitable policies that address the health impacts of climate change. She was a Senior Health Policy Advisor for the U.S. Senate Health and Human Resources Committee (now H.E.L.P.) for 7 years where she developed and negotiated policy, wrote legislation that established notable new programs. Dr. Sarfaty is a recipient of many honors and has been an invited lecturer in many academic, medical, governmental, and scientific venues.

Edward Maibach is Director of the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication, a distinguished University Professor and communication scientist who is expert in the uses of strategic communication and social marketing to address climate change and related public health challenges. His research – funded by NSF, NASA, and private foundations – focuses on public understanding of climate change and clean energy; and the psychology underlying public engagement; and cultivating TV weathercasters, health professionals, and climate scientists as effective climate educators. In 2021, Ed was identified by Thompson Reuters as one of the world’s 10 most influential scientists working on climate change.

MONA SARFATY

The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 is really a bill which is using the financial structure of the country to stimulate business. This is a very different kind of solution than one might have conjured up some years ago. Back in 2010, Congress tried to do something on climate change and the main solution under consideration was a carbon tax. So that was also an effort to use the financial system, but this is a very different approach.

This is putting out stimulus so that the business community can do what's necessary to build a clean energy economy. And so consumers can help support the growth of that clean energy economy by purchasing all those products that will allow individual people, families, and communities to be part of the solution by owning electric cars, by putting solar panels on their homes, by buying heat pumps to put in their homes, by improving the insulation in their private homes or buildings and thereby cutting their heating and cooling costs.

EDWARD MAIBACH

Humanity needs to do three things if it wants to continue to flourish, and it will. The three things that humanity needs to do are decarbonize the global economy, drawdown, capture, harvest much of that heat-trapping pollution that we've already pumped into the atmosphere over the past hundred years because as long as it's up in our atmosphere, we're going to have continued warming. And the third thing that humanity needs to do is become more resilient to the impacts of climate change, which unfortunately will continue for the next several generations at least, even as we succeed in decarbonizing the global economy and harvesting that heat-trapping pollution from the atmosphere.

So these are the three things that have to happen. These three things will happen. The open question is how rapidly will they happen? Any business that can play a vital role in making any one or two or all three of those things happen, those are businesses that are going to flourish going forward. And any business that's sitting on the side and not contributing to one of those three areas, I really think they will become increasingly irrelevant, if not completely antiquated and increasingly understood to be harmful.

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Take a step back and sort of look at the big picture of why is this a tough issue to deal with. Why is it that people worldwide were struggling with making the kinds of decisions and enacting the decisions that will get to the root causes of the problem and stop the warming and start to protect our communities so that people and other things we care about aren't needlessly hurt. And the answer to that question is most people worldwide accept the realities of climate change, but they see it as a distant problem, distant on three different dimensions: Distant in terms of time, so they see it not necessarily as today's problem but a future problem. Distant in terms of location - you know, maybe somewhere somebody's dealing with this, but not us, not here in my community. And, perhaps most importantly, distant in terms of species.

So people tend to see this as a plants, penguins, and polar bears problem and not a people problem. And that's a challenge that creates a challenge for us to engage the public in thinking about what this means for them today because, on all three of those dimensions, they feel like they've got some time, some distance in order to think these problems through.

There's a second challenge, which makes this work really hard, and that is that it's sort of fundamental to the human condition that we don't like to pay today for things that we don't get to enjoy the benefits until the distant future. And so when people think about climate solutions, they tend to think about being required to pay more today for the things that they're already getting, for benefits that will accrue from a more stable climate, maybe for their children, maybe for their grandchildren or maybe for their great-grandchildren. So that's a tough sell, if you will. It's the fundamental insight of the field of behavioral economics that people don't like to pay today for benefits that accrue in the distant future. The reason why the work that Mona Sarfaty and her colleagues at the Medical Society Consortium on Climate and Health is so important is because the doctors and other health professionals have extraordinary opportunities to address both of those challenges successfully.

This interview was conducted by Bruce Piasecki & Mia Funk. Associate Interviews Producer on this podcast was Andrew Green. Digital Media Coordinator was Julia Rhodes.

Business & Society is a 10-episode limited series co-hosted by Bruce Piasecki & Mia Funk.