Expensive Oil Is Bad for Your Health

Imagine a world in which ambulances travel under 20 kilometres an hour to conserve fuel. Where discharged patients sit in hallways because their relatives can’t pick them up. Where non-emergency surgeries are cancelled.

By Lindsey Norris

It’s an all-too-real possibility, warns Dr. Donald Spady, an associate professor of public health sciences at the University of Alberta. Spady, who gave a presentation to Capital Health workers in June about the effects petroleum scarcity would have on public health, said it happened in Britain in 2000 during a fuel transport workers’ strike and it’s likely to happen here as the world’s oil reservoirs decline.

Some experts believe that peak oil – which occurs when the world’s oil supply reaches its highest sustainable output, production plateaus and supplies permanently decline – is estimated to hit by 2015. Others estimate 2030; others say we’re already on the downward curve.

Regardless of when peak oil occurs, Spady says public health departments must have a plan. Not only are hospitals extraordinarily energy-hungry, there are less obvious consequences, like rising costs of drugs and diminished supply. Research, too, often relies on endowments, which are supported by interest. But less interest is generated during a recession.

Spady has come across some communities that are preparing: Portland, Ore., for example, created a peak oil task force in 2006. “I don’t know of any public health departments that are doing anything,” Spady says. “It’s very frustrating. You feel like you’re spitting in the ocean … If we don’t plan, we are going to have a disaster.”

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