Credit: Bill Frist.com

Bill Frist Wants To Bridge The Partisan Divide Over Climate Change

July 9, 20267 seconds Steve Hanley 0 Comments

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Bill Frist served as a senator from Tennessee from 1995 to 2007. During his last four years, he was the Senate majority leader. He chose not to stand for re-election in 2006 because he pledged during his first campaign for the Senate that he would not serve for more than two terms, so give him credit for being true to his word.

However, during that first campaign, he attacked his opponent, Senator Jim Sasser, for wanting to be Senate majority leader, claiming he would spend less time representing Tennessee residents as a result. Somewhere between 1994 and 2003, he must have had a change of heart — something not uncommon among politicians of all parties.

Frist is also a physician who became known nationally for his pioneering work in heart transplant technology. He trained as a cardiothoracic transplant surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital and Stanford University School of Medicine, and later founded the Vanderbilt Transplant Center.

Frist was a strong supporter of George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq and other Republican ~~crusades~~ causes, but was known for his willingness to work with Democrats as well. That bipartisan approach stayed with him after he left the Senate. He is active in The Nature Conservancy and is co-chair of the Health Project at the Bipartisan Policy Center.

But at the end of his Senate career, the League of Conservation Voters gave him just a lifetime rating of 7 percent for his environmental record, largely because he voted in favor of oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. “Things like the Arctic, I definitely would not have voted that way today,” he told New York Times reporter Cara Buckley.

A Healthier Planet

Now he has become a leading voice in the effort to merge human health and the health of the planet. Frist, in his writings, videos, podcasts, speeches, and congressional testimony, has been highlighting how inseparable the two topics are. “A healthier planet means healthier people. The science shows it. Our experience shows it. Nobody can really argue against that,” he says.

In June, he published a short video detailing how ecosystem collapse and wildlife habitat loss imperils children’s brain development and immune response by reducing their exposure to beneficial microbes. On Substack, he has written about the ways air pollution speeds up cognitive decline. In 2023, he presented data to the Senate Budget Committee showing how rising temperatures led to escalating health care costs. He is also writing a book about how climate and nature shape human health. He said he is aiming to “depolarize” the climate conversation.

Frist grew up on five acres in Tennessee, which he said laid the groundwork for his environmental awareness, as did his career as a cardio-thoracic surgeon. Cyclosporine, a drug that revolutionized organ transplants, is derived from soil fungus and acts as an immuno-suppressant that stops the body from rejecting organs. The FDA approved it just as he was finishing his surgical residency. “It hit me, the power of nature and biodiversity,” he said.

He married his second wife, Tracy, in 2015. She did her graduate studies in animal and human behavior, and oversees riparian and wetland restoration along with regenerative agriculture at their farms — one in Tennessee and one in Virginia. Frist says she helped him connect with the natural world.

“She is born of nature, is part of it, it is written into her soul,” he said. Tracy helped him see the connections with human health and the environment throughout his life. “Chronologically, all of the things bubbling in me, which is this admixture of science and policy and framing things right, and planetary interests like HIV, AIDS, and PEPFAR, the thing that crystallized it really was her when we came together,” he told Buckley.

Connecting The Dots

While in the Senate, he said he was turned off by environmental advocates who attempted to shame polluters. But after studying the science of climate change, he began to see the connections between human well being and planetary health. “Our national leadership too often — and I was probably a part of that at the time — has failed to connect those dots with what the urgency of today requires,” he said.

Frist is now one of just a few Republicans standing up for the environment and exploring ways to slow global warming. A recent poll found that just 6 percent of Republicans are worried about climate change — not surprising given the rabid anti-climate policies of the current administration.

“There’s a very small group of us right-of-center climate advocates, the so-called eco right, who see this really dire forecast,” said Alex Flint, executive director of Alliance for Market Solutions, a conservative group that supports carbon taxes. “It’s lonely.” He and Frist believe a change in conservative policy is coming, however. “In the long run, there is going to be a political response forced by the reality of the changing climate,” Flint said. “It is inevitable.”

Pollution & Health

In his writings, public appearances, and videos, Frist talks about the toll that pollution and extreme weather take on people’s health. After operating on lungs darkened by tobacco smoke and airborne particulates, and seeing how pollution contributes to every coronary artery surgery, he says he is done defending polluters. With his medical background, he knows better than most the damage that fine particulates and nitrous oxide do to human lungs and hearts.

His said his target audience is “people who are reasonable, rational, appreciate science, educated not necessarily in college degrees, but educated in the sense of listening to other people, treating them with dignity, always assuming the other person might be right.”

In May, he was interviewed onstage by former vice president Al Gore, a fellow Tennessean whose office in Nashville happens to be down the hall from Frist’s. “It’s wonderful to have Bill Frist out there saying these things,” Gore said. “He has used his ability to learn and applied it to the climate crisis. He entered the issue through the concerns he’s always had about health, and that, it seems to me, opened up into a full examination of how serious this crisis is.”

Gore told Cara Buckley, “It’s quite important to have a prominent Republican who has been majority leader of the United States Senate forcefully expressing views on why it’s in the public interest to move as urgent as possible to stop using the sky as an open sewer and threatening the future of human civilization.”

Frist said the key to his messaging and bringing people together is highlighting what they value most. “It’s the health, hope, and the healing of themselves, their loved ones and their kids,” he said, “Not 10 years from now, or 20 years, not 30 years from now, but today.”

The Ultimate Aphrodisiac

If there is a lesson here, it may be this: gaining political power and holding on to it often takes priority over governing. There is little medical information Bill Frist knows today that he didn’t know when he arrived in the Senate in 1995, although the connection between the cardio-vascular impact of fine particulate pollution is better understood today. The difference is that he no longer has to utter platitudes and pious mouthings to promote his political career.

Maybe the message here is that governing is too important to be left to politicians. “Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing,” Vince Lombardi said. That attitude now dominates politics in the US. It may prove to be America’s undoing.

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