With solar, we can solve non-profit hospitals' carbon and community
benefit problem simultaneously
Hospitals account for a significant amount of health care's enormous
550 million metric ton greenhouse gas (GHG) footprint. That is largely
because hospitals are remarkably energy inefficient.
In 2023, just 37-- substantially less than 1 percent -- were Energy
Star certified by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for Scope
1 and 2 energy efficiency. The innumerable and unrelenting health
harms associated with GHG emissions disproportionately harm Medicare
and Medicaid beneficiaries and minorities. They pay the greatest
climate penalty.
Nevertheless, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has
failed to issue regulations to reduce and eliminate health care's
greenhouse gas emissions by, for example, reforming Medicare and
Medicaid Conditions of Participation. On its own, the health care
industry has not taken meaningful steps to decarbonize, much less
publicly report their emissions or divest from fossil fuels. To
appreciate the impact of health care's carbon footprint, per recently
published data from the EPA, the social cost of just three industry
greenhouse gas emissions conservatively equals upward of $3.6 trillion annually.
https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/4500802-with-solar-we-can-solve-non-profit-hospitals-carbon-and-community-benefit-problem-simultaneously/
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