In Marion County, Ind., public health worker Mary McKee is getting ready for a future that — to some — might seem lifted from the pages of science fiction.
Along with her more traditional duties as director of public health practice at the Marion County Health Department, McKee, MSW, LCSW, is slowly gathering the data and creating the teaching materials to help her community thrive in a future in which oil supplies are diminishing, energy prices are soaring and sustainability becomes a necessity of life, not just an oft-used buzzword. Fortunately, McKee is hardly alone in her concern over the nation’s energy future. Just this June, President Barack Obama spoke on legislation moving through Congress that he said “will transform the way we produce and use energy in America,” noting that the “nation that leads in the creation of a clean energy economy will be the nation that leads the 21st century global economy.” Still, the road toward a more sustainable, cleaner and healthier energy future is likely to be a bumpy one — but one that McKee and a growing handful of fellow public health workers are not shying away from.
Diminishing oil supplies may resonate beyond the pump to issues such as higher food and health costs, researchers predict.
Photo by Vasiliki Varvaki, courtesy iStockphoto
“We think we have a responsibility to begin to do some teaching to prepare our constituents for what’s coming,” McKee told The Nation’s Health. “We have to rethink the way we look at growth. Growth isn’t necessarily going to mean we expand and get bigger and broader. Growth is going to be more about growing and perfecting systems that are closer to your home. Growth is going to take on new meaning in the future because of our dwindling oil supply.”
When many people think of oil, they often associate it with automobiles, but petroleum availability as a source of energy and an ingredient in a wealth of products underpins a number of top public health priorities, from food affordability to health care access to the mental well-being of families who may face a choice between filling up the gas tank or filling a needed prescription. To help her community prepare for a future where oil may be scarce, McKee is leading a group of public health students in surveying residents on their “adaptation” skills, such as whether they grow and eat their own food, and gathering data on how residents’ lives were affected by last summer’s soaring gas prices, which in some states reached upwards of $5 per gallon. McKee said she hopes to use the survey data to craft educational sessions for residents and to use the “baseline information to prepare and incorporate oil depletion in our preparedness planning…because this really is a slow-moving disaster.”
“Right now, I hope that all local health departments are planning education strategies for their communities on mitigation and adaptation to oil depletion and climate change,” Virginia Caine, MD, director of the Marion County Health Department, told The Nation’s Health. “Public health educators are in the community all the time teaching our citizens how to mitigate the effects of their genes and the effects of unhealthy behaviors. We just need to insert some complementary messages into this education — grow a vegetable garden in your backyard, recycle, bicycle to work, develop strategies to reduce your reliance on oil.”
Predictions about petroleum scarcity center around a theory known as “peak oil,” a concept developed in the 1950s by geologist M. King Hubbert. Peak oil is defined as the time when the maximum rate of oil extraction is reached, after which oil supplies will continually shift downward. According to a 2005 report authored at the request of the U.S. Department of Energy, peak oil could be reached within the next 20 years, noting that the problems tied to peak oil will “not be temporary, and past ‘energy crisis’ experience will provide relatively little guidance.”
In a 2007 commentary, “Peak Petroleum and Public Health,” published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, public health researchers wrote that the prospect of an oil-scarce, oil-expensive future “should now be recognized as part of public health preparedness” and that “health professionals need to anticipate, prepare for, reduce and adapt to petroleum scarcity to protect public health in coming decades.” The researchers stated that petroleum scarcity could affect health and public health in a number of ways. For example, the price of medical supplies and equipment may rise, as petroleum is often an ingredient; food will become more expensive, as its production and distribution is energy intensive; and “higher petroleum prices could trigger a persistent economic downturn, which could increase the ranks of the uninsured.”
“Our society is fundamentally dependent on petroleum, so to the extent that we start seeing scarcity in prices and supplies, you can point to almost any sector of society and there will be an impact,” said Jeremy Hess, MD, MPH, who serves as a consultant to the office of the director at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Environmental Health and who co-authored the peak oil and public health commentary.
Hess told The Nation’s Health that public health work addressing peak oil already dovetails with the field’s work to prepare for, adapt to and help mitigate climate change, noting that the behavior changes tied to conserving energy can also reap positive health outcomes, such as more walking and bicycling, less pollution and eating locally grown, fresher foods. Ultimately, he said, the effects of peak oil will “unfold at a local and regional level, and the responses are going to be significantly driven by local activities.”
“(Public health) is familiar with education focused on promoting particular behavior change and we also realize what a difficult process that is,” Hess said.
With oil scarcity hovering at the horizon also comes the urgent search for new sources of energy. While much attention is being paid to sources such as wind, solar, nuclear and biofuels — some of which pose negative public health effects, such as a reported spike in food costs due to increased demands for corn-based ethanol — “no matter what we pick, we can’t replace the amount of energy that comes with oil,” said Brian Schwartz, MD, MS, co-director of the Program on Global Sustainability and Health at Johns Hopkins University.
Among the alternative energy sources being explored is solar power, such as these panels being installed in Gainesville, Fla.
Photo by Joe Raedle, courtesy Getty Images
The solution to peak oil will require changing how people use and think about energy, said Schwartz, who in March organized the first conference devoted entirely to peak oil and health, which was hosted by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Individual behavior change can be difficult, he said, “but when I talk to my economist friends, they say ‘behavior is easy to change....just change the price.’”
“We have built our country and our lifestyles in an era of cheap and plentiful oil and we are about to enter a time of scarcity,” Schwartz told The Nation’s Health. “For public health, we must make sure we don’t just transfer the coming energy inequities to the poor. Public health has to be engaged in the transition.”
Wind turbines are attracting interest both in the United States and around the world as an alternative energy source to oil.
Photo courtesy iStockphoto
In Multnomah County, Ore., public health workers are beginning to do just that. A few years ago, when a local task force dedicated to the issue of peak oil released a report on the topic, Multnomah County Health Department Director Lillian Shirley, MPH, RN, said she realized that “no one had looked at the issue through a public health lens.” In response, Shirley directed research colleagues to review the report, the result of which was the creation of a public health-focused addendum, covering issues such as how high energy prices will affect the health of vulnerable populations to the pressure it will put on an already-strained public health system. Shirley noted that while peak oil isn’t a “day-to-day” issue within the department, “it’s something that public health needs to understand.”
“It took us a while to figure out that social justice was a public health issue, and peak oil has enormous ramifications for social justice,” Shirley said. “It will be our responsibility to respond in our communities to (peak oil’s) consequences.”
For more information on public health and energy, visit www.jhsph.edu/dept/ehs/research_centers/sustainability/projects.html.
- Copyright The Nation’s Health, American Public Health Association
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