Health care creates a tenth of US greenhouse gas emissions.

Wildfire deaths. Smoky air. Floods. Droughts. There’s no escaping the reality that global warming is rapidly exacerbating threats to human health and communities in the United States and around the world. As the top scientists have told us over and over, we need to immediately lower our greenhouse gas emissions to avoid climate change’s most catastrophic effects. Governments and businesses are particularly on the hook, but so are citizens — we are all in this together. 

That includes you, doctors. 

In a New England Journal of Medicine commentary published Wednesday, a pair of Boston doctors make the case that it’s high time medical professionals engage more directly in the fight to limit climate change. Lead author Caren Solomon, a physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, tells Vox she was compelled to write the piece as the urgency of the climate crisis has become clearer and clearer.