From WNYC Studios.

I'm Brian Lerer.

This is my daily politics podcast.

It's Tuesday, January 7th.

As many of you know for the last two years, we've done a climate story of the week on this show.

The idea was that the climate

doesn't change at the pace of the news cycle, right? So whether or not there was an extreme

weather event or some other visible climate shock that week, we would talk about an aspect of

climate change to help increase understanding of what was happening, plus the pros and cons of

various approaches to it. We think and we hope that's been useful and informative. Now, we're

going to experiment with expanding our weekly climate story to a Health and Climate Tuesday's feature.

Each week, we will mention several health and climate headlines and then take a deeper dive into one of them.

We're adding health for a few reasons.

One is to emphasize that climate isn't just about the planet in some abstract or nature preservation kind of way,

not that there's anything wrong with nature preservation, but it's very much about human health.

Another is that there is so much about our health and health care systems that are in flux

with life expectancy declining in the U.S. compared to other wealthy countries, as we discussed

on yesterday's show, medical debt increasing compared to our global peers.

Trump and RFK Jr. possibly about to introduce big controversial health reforms that will need

analysis and debate.

And the revelation of how much public anger there is for our private health insurance industry,

the shocking outpouring of disdain, not just sympathy, after the murder of United Healthcare CEO.

...