The Intersections of Health and Climate | Al Gore and Bill Frist on Climate Change and Public Health

Hi everyone. I hope you're having some fruitful conversations. Time to wrap up. I hope you continue these conversations over the course of the training. But for now, I'm excited to introduce our final session today, which is quite a special one. So, we just saw how trace data can help us in tracking plumes, and now we're going to hear how those plumes, pollution, and emissions are impacting us every day on a personal level. To discuss the intersection of health indicators and the climate crisis, please welcome former Vice President Al Gore alongside former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist from Tennessee.

I have to say that the transplant center, which is fantastic here, we were just talking about it earlier. If it weren't for a visionary who we're talking about today, obviously the biggest challenge that we have, existential. But the transplant center here would not be the biggest in the world in terms of hearts, if it weren't for a vision in terms of how organs and tissues are distributed back before anybody had thought of it, Al Gore. It's important for you to know that. So, round of applause for transplant.

So, the The Nature Conservancy is 6,000 people, 80 countries, chapters in all of your districts. And for years and years, it's been conservation and preserving the lands and the waters for which all life depends. For which all life depends. And we have pillars of streams and oceans and land and people. And then about 7 or 8 years ago, added climate. For all the reasons that everybody here knows we've been talking about today and some of us last last...

So, that's unusual for a guest speaker.

Every day, just about every night, walking into an operating room, making an incision and opening the chest, just what you did. It can be made dramatic, which is what you do. And many times, taking the lung out, putting it elsewhere, and putting new one in in our heart. But, looking at that lung, diseased, shriveled, toxins, modeled with tar, modeled with cigarette smoke, sort of what the damage is called, knowing that I was going to transplant it or cut it open, remove a tumor, and then it wasn't an epiphany because you kind of overstated it if you say it's an epiphany, but asking myself, what does happen upstream? Yes, genetics is probably 30% of it, but what's the other 70%? And what we've been talking about today is the sort of force multiplier effect of climate. Whether it's the heart disease or the lung disease or when I open the coronary artery and you see all the cholesterol there and coming back to diet and food and processed food and regenerative agriculture and the health of the soil. So, that kind of thinking takes you back root cause and the root cause of coronary artery disease and damage to the endothelium and the blockage and the clotting and the heart attack and the stroke. All of a sudden you see that what is the number one force multiplier and it is the climate. All the things you talked about. So, that's sort of the equivalent of the epiphany that started me on the track and then nature was more. There's a little tiny fungus in the soil discovered in Norway about 30 years ago that allowed for the first time for me and a handful of others to do lung transplants to make it possible. So, then you had nature, cyclosporine, 50% of all the cancer drugs come from nature being united with the fact that the climate, the hotter days, the anxiety, the stress, the cortisol, the immunology, the hormones, all of that coming together. So, it's a long-winded answer, but it's important because it's based on science, based on fact, it's based on truth. Everybody in here is going to have a disease that's climate related and you may or may not know it. Pretty powerful message for why now, not 10 years from now, why it matters to you now. So, that's the thinking behind it.

Yeah. And usually I do start with pollution and much of today's been about pollution and I love, you know, the whole day's been unbelievable in terms of making it real to everybody, even all of us who already feel strongly about it coming in. Stressors of the environment broadly. Now, I'll come to pollution quickly because it's the easiest to understand. Hit the body and what the body does, it takes the outside world, then that's the air we breathe, the food we eat, and the soil that we walk on, and how hot it is, and the anxiety around heat and hotter days. All of that gets written into the body. Written, coded into the body. In ways that enter and the lung is constantly taking all this pollution into the body and it gets written, it gets embedded. It has an impact three ways. Number one, this is a little bit too much, but you did a little bit this morning. A little bit complicated, but it's important to know that the science is so clear. And it's behind physiology, it's biology. So, I don't see the environment so much as an environmental metric, I really do see it as a biological or physiological behavior. But, what happens number one, it comes in and you get cortisol, any kind of environmental stressor, the adrenal hypothalamic axis, it doesn't matter, but your cortisol goes up. That's the stress hormone. It's good if you're running from a tiger, but if it happens all the time, chronic stress, chronic cortisol, heart rate goes up, blood pressure goes up, puts pressure on your vessels, have a heart attack, have stroke. That's one axis. Second axis, that all stressors, pollution included, head is what's called the sympathetic, autonomic, sympathetic, parasympathetic. Sympathetic is sort of fight or flight. Parasympathetic, the balancing act is repair, restore, heal. When you go into nature, you have that sort of feeling. And the third category is the hormonal response, and that's inflammation and the hormonal immunology response. So, I think of it inflammation and immunology. And with that, that is the sort of response that if you have a stress coming in, there's chronic activation of your immune system, which gets depressed, which makes you susceptible to all sorts of disease, which all of us know. We get a viral illness, we get sick, and we tend to get back to others. So, those are the three things. So, pollution out floating around the fumes that you have, unbelievable presentation. Unbelievable. Just waving there, you see it visually. I take that direct, I see it, I take it directly to coming into my mouth or my nose into the back, maybe a little bit of irritation down to the windpipe, down to the bronchus, where it actually splits, on out to the alveoli at the end, damaging along the way. This little particulate matter PM 2.5, particulate matter 2.5 is the size. It goes all the way down, damaging along the way, laying tar in there. Remember that lung that I'm looking at on the outside, and it's tar covered on the outside, it begins to shrivel. And then it hits the alveoli themselves, little sacs that is the size of probably in each person about half of this room if you laid the surface area of these little sacs. And they're pretty neat, like a tennis court or two tennis courts in each person. But there it goes into the bloodstream. And so all of a sudden all the pollution out there is going all the way through, damaging along the way, activating those three systems, gets into the blood, and where does it go? The brain, the heart, the kidneys, the adrenal glands, the liver, the pancreas, having an impact with stress hormone cortisol, sympathetic stress system, heart rate going up, blood pressure going up, chronic inflammation and immunology throughout. And the impact on that is disease. The two fields I do, heart and lung, heart transplant and lung transplants, backing them out upstream, that little particulate matter is what causes the disease. It's causal. It's causal in terms of being an amplifier of all the other stresses out there. And so that's it. And then I will stop with that because all of a sudden this stuff's real. Everything you've talked about today, when you see all of it through the lens of health and healing, and then do no harm, the Hippocratic oath, but if you look at everything there, and I mentioned it a second ago, it's why it matters to you and to you and to you and to you and to you and your loved one and your kids today. It matters today because that's what's happening, the cumulative effect. And so I add that in, and then all of a sudden a lot of this on the political world, where it does get as we talked about in two panels ago or two discussions ago, where it no longer is ideological, can be, no longer is it political, but it really is biological, physiological. Instead of driving people out when you're talking politics, the world that we were in, it pulls people in because you're talking health. And health matters to every single person today.

I'm happy to. I mean I'm...

It's a great question and the audiences I travel in now because we're in 80 countries is a lot globally as you do. And then a lot in this country because we have so many chapters here and we have a million members here just in this country coming on. I guess it's most dramatic for me when I go testify in the United States Senate. And I will testify, I won't sure raise my hand and say, 'Sure, I'll go testify. I'll jump into the lion's den of a really politicized place now totally so partisan. Nobody's talking it like they did in your days or even my days. I was there from 1995 to 2007. And we would still travel together, you know, Democrats and Republicans and talk together and when you're doing when you're talking and having a conversation, I don't care how illogical people are, you end up sort of coming to common ground. So, and you talked about that a little bit yesterday in terms of that loss, but that can get better, but that's sort of another topic. So, I generally will start with a health. If I know the audience, if I'm testifying and I've got 10 Republicans over here and 10 Democrats there. You've been on that side, too. Did you ever testify after you left? You had to, I guess, for something. And then I would start with health. I would start with a common denominator and then walk through. I wouldn't go through the kind of science that is there. Today, it's a little bit harder because you have all of the misinformation that is out there today. But I will start with that common ground, getting the conversation going, and letting people sort of see where they're actually settling, and then move into the more sort of facts, and this is the direction that we're going in. And if we go in this direction, this is the tipping point that we're going to hit.

It's challenging, but misinformation clicks and connects. It's going to be out there because people are throwing the balls in the air all the time. With social media, but across the board, people are because of sort of the populist movement, not just in the United States, but around the world. And misinformation only grabs, only settles in a vacuum. And that's really why what everybody, the 700 people, however many is here, is really important to be here and to have sessions like the one again two or three ago of how you communicate, how you do advocate itself. But if you don't do it, and how you ended your talk I guess this morning, it takes action, not just vision, not just strategy, but it takes the action in filling that vacuum and filling it. Now, I fill it with science as you do. And but it depends on who the audience is because there's a huge distrust of science today and distrust of Congress, but there's not necessarily a distrust yet of physicians, of doctors. And then if you look at the communications world around climate, first responders, this was all done right two years after COVID, but would be first responders be still health care, nurses, and doctors because there was trust there still. It would be number two is first responders, and then number three would be meteorologist. As the trusted source. So, if you get the message right, then you need the trusted messenger and all of you have to be trusted messengers. So, you have to self-examine, you know, what aspect of you has the trust. But if you get the message, which I base on science, and number two, the trusted messenger, if you can get those two right, there's no question that you can fill the vacuum. If misinformation is going to be out there, but it'll just bounce off them.

You know, the great thing about pledging you're only going to serve 12 years in the Senate. When the 12 years comes up, you can say goodbye.

Yeah, I think this is sort of a much bigger question and then we'll come back to sort of current affairs. I think money coming in to the extent it has has clearly bent the system where a handful of people, no matter who they are, which party it is, because as you said yesterday it can be on the Democrat side or the Republican side. But you're giving an unacceptable voice to one or two people. It may be 50 people, maybe 100, maybe 1,000 people. And they are, and that's just dangerous. And that's why every time something comes up again on the slides about voting and engaging is so important. So important. These midterm elections I think are so important. So important coming in and that's where the engagement is. So I think the money is a challenge, but we shouldn't oversimplify that because if the money is pulled out of it totally, we still I think have the challenge. And it comes back to what we're talking about before. It comes back to trust. It comes back to leadership. It comes back to civility and treatment with respect, again coming back to the communication slides earlier. And that can be reversed. I mean, I really fundamentally I think you're pretty optimistic. We have huge challenges, but optimistic about the trajectory of where we are here. I think we can actually reverse that. Now, currently, when you, you know, sitting right there with everybody and table 15 over there this morning, when you go through the list and you covered so much this morning in such a great way, but when you go through the list of what's happened in the last, you know, 18 months, I appreciate the way you do it, but it just kills me. It's against everything that I believe in terms of nature of conservation, of who we are as people today, of what this country was founded on when it comes to the issues that we're talking about tonight. So, just and that's politically just where I am. Put politics aside, coming. It's where I've consistently been. But clearly things have moved in a different direction now. And so every time one of those check marks come off of some environmental progress having been made, being withdrawn or put aside or undercut, to me, I see it translated directly to destruction of human health, of a disease, of more people dying, of more people suffering, of a lower quality of life, of more mental health problems, more physical health problems. So, that I'm a little bit unusual because otherwise I'd get categorized as a former Republican majority leader. And the reason I now chair the largest conservation group in the world today, I think, is that kind of thinking, which is kind of neutral in terms of political politics, but it's not neutral in terms of ethics, morality, caring about the individual, giving everybody the opportunity to succeed. And so, you know, again, for me, what's good about that is that people know what I feel, and equity and justice and all of the issues of vulnerable populations is what I put out front. But with that, people have chosen me initially to be majority leader of the United States Senate, which you probably wouldn't expect necessarily of that. And then working my way through the Nature Conservancy as chairman of the conservation group. The TNC, The Nature Conservancy, has two priorities: biodiversity loss and which is sort of big. I think in the conference we probably could emphasize that a little bit more here. But that's not where you've come from necessarily, but I think when John Doerr in his top six, he puts nature in there. And I'd cover that a little bit more. 30% of all the human-created emissions are absorbed by the land that we have in the trees. So, when you had that big red thing going up there, I thought it was going to be like last night you were going to start climbing up the big red bar. And then how much carbon capture is doing down here in technology? You know, I wanted you to say, 'Well, but 30% of that is captured by the land in nature and biodiversity.' And once you wreck biodiversity, it won't capture it. It doesn't. And then another 30% is in the oceans, which we talked about a little bit today. And therefore, we need to care for our oceans because for health today, not 10 years from now, 20 years from now, but for today, we can't keep forcing that CO2 up with the blanket around the earth. So, anyway, I just throw that in.

That's right. I like the medical thing. Do no harm. Hippocratic oath. You're getting there.

I did. You're right. I love that slide, too, because it hits it.

Alveoli.