I've had the bad fortune to have had family members with cardiac conditions. Two of my uncles, both men I liked and looked up to, died suddenly of massive heart attacks. My wife, whom I love more than life itself, has a chronic cardio-pulmonary condition that requires regular testing and highly specialized medications to keep her, well, breathing.
So when it comes to cardiac health care, you might say I have a vested interest. Fortunately, the state of the art in cardiac medicine is pretty good, with some amazing breakthroughs in recent years, both in medicine and in surgical procedures.
You can imagine my reaction at seeing a study, published in the European Heart Journal, finger-wagging at cardiac practitioners over the environmental costs of these necessary procedures.
If anyone ever needed a perfect illustration of how climate obsession has infected even the most sacred realms of human life—medicine—look no further than this earnest study from the European Heart Journal proposing to weigh cardiac procedures not in terms of survival, outcomes, or cost-effectiveness, but by their “carbon footprint.” That’s right. Your surgeon’s scalpel is now competing with the internal combustion engine for the title of “climate criminal.” Who knew the Hippocratic Oath was to be amended: “First, do no harm—to the atmosphere.”
The paper is titled, in all seriousness, “Carbon emission analysis of aortic valve replacement: the environmental footprint of transcatheter vs. surgical procedures.” Let that marinate for a moment. The burning question keeping these academics up at night isn’t how to make cardiac procedures safer or more accessible, but which one expels less CO2—because, clearly, when Grandpa needs a new aortic valve, the number one concern should be his operation’s planetary impact, not, say, his chance of walking out of the hospital alive.
I won't document for you all my initial outburst of invective at reading about this; this is, after all, a family-friendly site. Suffice it to say, I think I turned the air blue.
Are these brainiacs seriously considering that the carbon footprint of a given procedure should be weighed in the balance of a patient's life? Because it sure seems like they are:
The study measured the “total carbon footprint” of open surgical aortic valve replacement (SAVR) and two flavors of transcatheter procedures (TAVR), tallying up the greenhouse gas output with a precision that, one hopes, they also apply to, say, stopping hemorrhages. The results? SAVR was found to spew a positively scandalous 620–750 kg CO2e (that’s “CO2 equivalent” for the uninitiated), compared to the positively parsimonious 280–360 kg CO2e for TAVR. The authors are quick to note: “The carbon footprint of SAVR is about twice as high as those from OR–TAVR or CATH–TAVR. These findings should potentially be considered when making population level decisions and guidelines moving into the future.”
Let’s put that “scandalous” emission in perspective. For reference, the average round-trip transatlantic flight emits about a ton of CO2 per passenger. In other words, your life-saving open-heart surgery—an event presumably rarer in a person’s life than, say, a weekend in Majorca—emits less than one seat’s share on a flight to Europe and back. Should we start shaming cardiac patients for not taking the train to their operations?
My wife, I should note, is required to fly to Seattle twice a year, for examinations, consultations, an echocardiogram, and a right heart catheter study. These are necessary to monitor her condition (she is, according to her doctors, doing amazingly well - but then she's always been tough) and no doubt these same climate scolds would be wagging fingers at the necessity of us, twice a year, driving to Anchorage, flying to Seattle, taking an Uber to a hotel, to the hospital, back to the hotel, and back to the airport to fly back to Anchorage and then to drive home. No doubt these same scolds would be claiming that we should move, that we should at least live closer to the medical specialists, to reduce the carbon footprint of our twice-annual trip and give up our rural Alaska home.
Yeah, that ain't gonna happen.Read More: Climate Scolds Are Losing the Discussion: They Think It's the Messaging, Not the Message
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This is a downright cultish outlook. It's one thing to wag fingers at people who drive big SUVs or live in big houses, like, say, a certain former vice president and current climate scold and his famous Tennessee estate, or another former "climate czar" with his multiple palatial homes and his private yacht. It's one thing to make noises about "renewable energy," which would saddle us all with more expensive, less reliable power.
But attaching a climate onus to lifesaving medical procedures? That's not political activism. That's not a concern for the environment, which most of these people have never seen. That's insane. It's anti-human. It flies in the face of medical ethics. The practice of medicine, the intent of medicine, is to heal, and carbon footprint be damned.
Just when you think you've seen the depths to which these lunatics will sink, something like this comes along and just blows everything away. And, as we've seen on this and other leftist issues, there's no idea, no agenda, so lunatic, so insane, so anti-human that some nut won't think it's worth trying.
