Affiliate Spotlight: Jonathan Buonocore
Each newsletter we feature a CCH affiliate to learn a bit more about their work. This month we speak with Dr. Jonathan Buonocore, assistant professor of Environmental Health.
Tell us a bit about yourself and how you arrived at the intersection of climate and public health:
I have been concerned about climate change for as long as I can remember, but for a long time, talking about climate change and doing research on it seemed intractable as a way to make progress. I discovered public health my senior year of college, and decided this was what I wanted to do after realizing that in the U.S. there is a lot more scientific and legal infrastructure to deal with environmental health issues and that people get a lot more excited about fairly immediate health harms than they do about abstract and (at the time) far-away-seeming impacts of climate change. During my master’s, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 4th Assessment Report came out and painted a dire picture of what we are in for. Shortly after that, I got an opportunity to work on a research project attempting to catalog all the environmental and climate harms of coal use in the U.S. During this project, I uncovered a lot of research modeling effects of climate policies on emissions, and life cycle assessments demonstrating that renewable energy had much much lower impacts than generating electricity from fossil fuels. However, no research modeled the air quality benefits and consequent health benefits of building renewable energy. That topic became my dissertation, and became one of the first papers to model what is now called “health co-benefits” of climate mitigation. That set me on the path to where I am today. Since the energy system is responsible for about 75% of the greenhouse gas emissions contributing to climate change, and since air pollution from the energy system is responsible for about 1 out of 5 deaths globally, I came to energy and health, since intervening on the energy system is primary prevention of both of these issues.
You have previously collaborated with HEET on several projects, including evaluating scalability and potential health and climate benefits networked geothermal pilot projects in MA. How might initiatives like this be beneficial to communities?
The geothermal networks/thermal energy networks, one of which is currently operational in Framingham, MA, with many more on the way, promise to be hugely beneficial to communities. They are the most efficient (meaning cheapest to operate) building heating and cooling technology that I’ve seen, and don’t have the emissions that a gas furnace or oil-based heating system do. What’s not to love?
While cornerstone policies for protecting public health, such as the Clean Air Act, are primarily administered at the federal level, what levers can states or local governments pull to advance health protections at a regional level? Given the potential shifts in priorities with the next administration, how might state actions play a crucial role in bridging any gaps or enhancing federal efforts?
State and local governments have a lot of levers they can pull to help along the transition. The bill that just passed the MA legislature is a great example (more information here). This bill allows for gas utilities to transition to thermal utilities and sets up a process for permitting and constructing new infrastructure with a process for community input. This bill also has provisions encouraging more EV chargers to be built. Boston and New York City both have building performance standards – a regulation which limits on greenhouse gas emissions on buildings. Washington state has a carbon price. New England has a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions from electricity generation. Many of the existing policies could integrate health and environmental justice more than they have historically, and new policies could be designed to be to be more health-forward from the start than previous policies have. There really is a lot out there that states and local governments can do!
Looking ahead, what do you see as the most pressing research questions or challenges in the intersection of climate, energy, and public health?
We have a pretty good understanding of the health harms of some hazards from the energy system, especially air pollution and climate change. However, to mitigate the worst effects of climate change, time really is of the essence to decarbonize the energy system. To me, the biggest research gaps are around designing a healthy and equitable transition. We are building a lot of new renewable energy infrastructure, while trying to retire the old as we can. So, to do this in a way that promotes health, equity, and justice, we need to have a better understanding of all the hazards of the existing energy system so we can prioritize retirement of the most hazardous old energy infrastructure, and ensure that we are not transitioning to new technologies that still have health harms. The major air pollutants are well-understood, but there are a number of other stressors from energy infrastructure that are not as well understood – hazardous air pollutants, water pollutants, effects of noise, stress, induced traffic, accident risk, among potentially many others, and we do not know how these hazards interact and what the cumulative impacts may be. There are historically marginalized communities hosting, for example, power plants, compressor stations, pipelines, and storage facilities, how these hazards interact to cumulatively impacts the local community is not well understood. Additionally, much of the energy transition will occur indoors, as gas-fired home heating, cooling, and cooking appliances get swapped out for electric versions. We have little knowledge of which homes have gas stoves, which homes have hazardous gas leaks or old, high-emitting furnaces, and therefore little knowledge of who to prioritize to receive cleaner versions first. Information like this will be necessary to ensure that the energy transition promotes health, equity, and justice, and does not produce any unintended side effects.