The Consultation Paper for the National Electric Vehicle Strategy, so vital for Australia’s greenhouse emission strategy, notes that “Australia will also gain social, health and environmental benefits. These include industry growth; less air quality related health costs, less noise and reduced emissions”.
“For our health and environment, greater adoption of EVs can reduce air pollution. Air pollution due to vehicle emissions may cause more deaths than the national road toll. It is also linked to health conditions including respiratory disease, cancer and dementia”.
It is now evident to all Australians that climate change due to greenhouse emissions (carbon dioxide and methane) will increasingly wreck our economy and cause death and injury from floods, storms, fire and heat waves. Its solution requires us to work with all other nations.
A parallel issue which we can solve in Australia is the death and illness caused by vehicular air pollution. These have been ignored by federal governments for decades with failure to improve the standards of air quality, fuel efficiency and noxious emissions.
This article summarises the human health benefits that will result from the transition and indicates the ways in which they should be included in the implementation of the Strategy. This article is a summary of a submission to the government’s Consultation Paper for the National Electric Vehicle Strategy.
Long-term exposure to air pollution in Australia leads to over 2,500 deaths and costs Australians $6.2 billion every year, though the additional costs from illness probably lead to total costs of up to 24 billion p.a. depending on which costs are included. Health benefits are achievable proportional to the degree of pollution reduction.
The magnitude and urgency of the ill health need to be recognised and be used to facilitate transition.
Implications for Health Services
Currently all health services continue to be overwhelmed by recurrent waves of Covid, increased mental health and stress disorders, backlogs of untreated illness because of Covid demands, and inadequate aged care and disability services. With the increasingly complex issues confronting society there is no relief in sight. We must grasp any opportunity to reduce the load.
It is vital that the Strategy provides every possible financial and legislative measure to enhance the transition from diesel vehicles.
So first let’s recognise that as many as a quarter of motor vehicles run on diesel. Their exhaust contains higher amounts of fine particulates and NOx than petrol engines. The World Health Organisation and the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) list diesel as a Class 1 carcinogen with increasing risk of cancer, particularly of the lung. Consequently, diesel vehicles are already banned in some major cities in Europe.
For a doctor it is a horror movie to see a diesel vehicle belch its exhaust into the environment of patrons sitting on the pavements outside coffee shops. The patrons are indulging not only in coffee and cake but in inhaled Grade1 carcinogen.
Money saved from reduced illness should be ploughed into financial incentives to encourage the transition. Priorities would be substantial; subsidies to get diesel vehicles off the roads, perhaps commencing in with older vehicles; subsidies for replacing all aging petrol vehicles particularly when large ongoing use can be demonstrated; providing substantial financial help for transport use in aged care and disability; subsidies to transition diesel and petrol trucks and public transport.
Health in all Policies
The fact that the transition to EVs Strategy failed to include details of health gains and their use as incentives requires us to look critically at the interaction of government departments in solving major problems.
Indeed a major impediment to a coordinated approach to the closely interrelated problem of health and transport is the existence of government departments as enclosed silos or ministries. As society becomes increasingly more complex so does the needed interaction between silos.
In 2007 South Australia recognised this problem with a South Australian Health in All Policies (SA HiAP) approach intended to stimulate cross-sector policy activity to address the social determinants of health to improve population wellbeing and reduce health inequities.
By 2017 a public health study found that some support existed for progressing an equity agenda through SA HiAP, but subsequent economic pressures resulted in the government narrowing its priorities to economic goals. Today these goals continue to be prioritised.
Indeed the SA Legislative Council Select Committee inquiry into Public and Active Transport recently completed its deliberations without including the health aspects in the terms of reference.
Indeed to carry the argument for interaction even further, health and the environment are indivisible; it is therefore inconceivable that environmental considerations should not be integral to transition strategy. Essentially this implicates urban planning decisions, so planning departments need to be involved.
Together these departments should use the transition to produce mentally and physically health lifestyles for city and suburban life and the Green City concept which has already benefited health so much in some European cities.
This healthy lifestyle will put economics in its place as our servant and not as a driver of so-called ”advancement”. The time may be right for such a revolution with the Treasurer flirting with ‘well being’ as one measure of national progress.
Professor David Shearman AM PhD FRACP is emeritus Professor of Medicine, University of Adelaide
