Cookies help us run our site more efficiently.

By clicking “Accept”, you agree to the storing of cookies on your device to enhance site navigation, analyze site usage, and assist in our marketing efforts. View our Privacy Policy for more information or to customize your cookie preferences.

Accept Deny

GoGreenNation news

Transition to telemedicine has come with considerable reductions in carbon emissions: Study

News Feed
Tuesday, April 22, 2025

The use of telemedicine reduced carbon dioxide emissions by the equivalent of up to 130,000 gas-fueled cars per month in 2023, a new study has determined. These findings suggest that telemedicine could have a modest but tangible contribution to curbing the effects of climate change, according to the study, published in the American Journal of Managed Care on Tuesday. “As Congress debates whether to extend or modify pandemic-era telehealth flexibilities, our results provide important evidence for policymakers to consider," John Mafi, an associate professor-in-residence at the University of California Los Angeles's David Geffen School of Medicine, said in a statement. Specifically, those considerations could focus on the idea "that telemedicine has the potential to reduce the carbon footprint of US health care delivery,” Mafi added. Today, the U.S. health system is responsible for about 9 percent of domestic greenhouse gas emission — worsening the impacts of climate change and thereby posing a possible threat to human health, according to the authors. Meanwhile, because the transportation sector accounts for more than 28 percent of the country's total emissions, the authors argued telemedicine would have the potential to decrease the environmental footprint of healthcare services. To draw their conclusions, the researchers used the existing Milliman MedInsight Emerging Experience database to quantify almost 1.5 million telemedicine visits, including 66,000 in rural regions, from April 1 to June 30, 2023. Ultimately, they estimated that between 741,000 and 1.35 million of those visits occurred instead of in-person appointments. As a result of that shift to telemedicine, the researchers estimated carbon emissions reductions of between 21.4 million and 47.6 million kilograms per month. That quantity is approximately equivalent to cutting the carbon dioxide generated by 61,000 to 130,000 gas-powered vehicles each month or by recycling 1.8 million to 4 million trash bags, according to the study. The researchers acknowledged that there were some limitations to their findings, including the fact that the results were based on a single, easy-to-access resource rather than a random selection. They also noted that telemedicine use has dropped since the end of the pandemic — potentially leading to overestimations regarding the emissions averted. Nonetheless, they maintained that telemedicine does provide a significant chance to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and to therefore bring benefits to human health. "The health care sector contributes significantly to the global carbon footprint,” co-senior author A. Mark Fendrick, director of the Center for Value-Based Insurance Design at the University of Michigan, said in a statement. “The environmental impact of medical care delivery can be reduced when lower-carbon options, such as telemedicine, are substituted for other services that produce more emissions," Fendrick added.

The use of telemedicine reduced carbon dioxide emissions by the equivalent of up to 130,000 gas-fueled cars per month in 2023, a new study has determined. These findings suggest that telemedicine could have a modest but tangible contribution to curbing the effects of climate change, according to the study, published in the American Journal of Managed...

The use of telemedicine reduced carbon dioxide emissions by the equivalent of up to 130,000 gas-fueled cars per month in 2023, a new study has determined.

These findings suggest that telemedicine could have a modest but tangible contribution to curbing the effects of climate change, according to the study, published in the American Journal of Managed Care on Tuesday.

“As Congress debates whether to extend or modify pandemic-era telehealth flexibilities, our results provide important evidence for policymakers to consider," John Mafi, an associate professor-in-residence at the University of California Los Angeles's David Geffen School of Medicine, said in a statement.

Specifically, those considerations could focus on the idea "that telemedicine has the potential to reduce the carbon footprint of US health care delivery,” Mafi added.

Today, the U.S. health system is responsible for about 9 percent of domestic greenhouse gas emission — worsening the impacts of climate change and thereby posing a possible threat to human health, according to the authors.

Meanwhile, because the transportation sector accounts for more than 28 percent of the country's total emissions, the authors argued telemedicine would have the potential to decrease the environmental footprint of healthcare services.

To draw their conclusions, the researchers used the existing Milliman MedInsight Emerging Experience database to quantify almost 1.5 million telemedicine visits, including 66,000 in rural regions, from April 1 to June 30, 2023.

Ultimately, they estimated that between 741,000 and 1.35 million of those visits occurred instead of in-person appointments.

As a result of that shift to telemedicine, the researchers estimated carbon emissions reductions of between 21.4 million and 47.6 million kilograms per month.

That quantity is approximately equivalent to cutting the carbon dioxide generated by 61,000 to 130,000 gas-powered vehicles each month or by recycling 1.8 million to 4 million trash bags, according to the study.

The researchers acknowledged that there were some limitations to their findings, including the fact that the results were based on a single, easy-to-access resource rather than a random selection. They also noted that telemedicine use has dropped since the end of the pandemic — potentially leading to overestimations regarding the emissions averted.

Nonetheless, they maintained that telemedicine does provide a significant chance to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and to therefore bring benefits to human health.

"The health care sector contributes significantly to the global carbon footprint,” co-senior author A. Mark Fendrick, director of the Center for Value-Based Insurance Design at the University of Michigan, said in a statement.

“The environmental impact of medical care delivery can be reduced when lower-carbon options, such as telemedicine, are substituted for other services that produce more emissions," Fendrick added.

Read the full story here.
Photos courtesy of

Related News

Remembering Pope Francis on Earth Day: How He Linked Capitalism, Climate & Catholicism

As the Vatican prepares the funeral for Pope Francis and church leaders begin to consider his replacement, we look at the late pontiff’s environmental legacy. Pope Francis frequently called for action on the climate crisis and urged his followers to be good stewards of the Earth. He also openly criticized the role of wealthy nations and capitalism in causing the climate crisis. “He brought together the riches of Christian and Catholic tradition to bear with the prophetic work of social movements around the world in confronting a global crisis,” says Nathan Schneider, professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. Schneider is also a contributing writer at America, a national Catholic weekly magazine published by the Jesuits, where he has been covering Catholic engagement with climate change and the economy. Pope Francis argued that “our relationship with the Earth depends on justice among people, and that in order to address this environmental crisis, we need to also address the crisis of disposability, of treating not only the planet, but each other, as disposable,” says Schneider.

As the Vatican prepares the funeral for Pope Francis and church leaders begin to consider his replacement, we look at the late pontiff’s environmental legacy. Pope Francis frequently called for action on the climate crisis and urged his followers to be good stewards of the Earth. He also openly criticized the role of wealthy nations and capitalism in causing the climate crisis. “He brought together the riches of Christian and Catholic tradition to bear with the prophetic work of social movements around the world in confronting a global crisis,” says Nathan Schneider, professor of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. Schneider is also a contributing writer at America, a national Catholic weekly magazine published by the Jesuits, where he has been covering Catholic engagement with climate change and the economy. Pope Francis argued that “our relationship with the Earth depends on justice among people, and that in order to address this environmental crisis, we need to also address the crisis of disposability, of treating not only the planet, but each other, as disposable,” says Schneider.

Climate
Crisis

Francis was the first climate pope. Who will take up his mantle?

Pope Francis was quick to grasp the risks posed by climate change. But his tenure showed humanity’s limits in confronting the peril.

VATICAN CITY — For 12 years, Pope Francis devoted himself like no other pontiff to what he called “an existential” threat “for our human family.”He started by writing a 184-page encyclical — a formal teaching document — about climate change and the moral duty to care for the planet. Then he kept going: hosting environmental summits, meeting with climate activists and stressing to policymakers how every fractional degree of temperature rise creates new cataclysms.

Climate
Activism

Pope Francis Saw Environmental and Climate Issues as Moral Concerns

In his landmark 2015 encyclical “Praised Be,” Pope Francis cast care for the planet as an urgent and existential moral concern

VATICAN CITY (AP) — Few moments in Pope Francis’ papacy better exemplify his understanding of climate change and the need to address it than the rain-soaked Mass he celebrated in Tacloban, Philippines, in 2015.Wearing one of the cheap plastic yellow ponchos that were handed out to the faithful, Francis experienced first-hand the type of freak, extreme storms that scientists blame on global warming and are increasingly striking vulnerable, low-lying islands.But with another storm approaching Tacloban two years later, Francis had to cut short his visit to get off the island.“So many of you have lost everything. I don’t know what to tell you,” Francis told the crowd in Tacloban’s muddy airport field as the wind nearly toppled candlesticks on the altar.Francis, who died Monday at 88, was moved to silence that day by the survivors’ pain and the devastation he saw. But he would channel it a few months later when he published his landmark encyclical, “Praised Be,” which cast care for the planet as an urgent and existential moral concern. The first ecological encyclical The document, written to inspire global negotiators at the 2015 Paris climate talks, accused the “structurally perverse,” profit-driven economy of the global north of ravaging Earth and turning it into a “pile of filth.” The poor, Indigenous peoples and islanders like those in Tacloban suffered the most, he argued, bearing the brunt of increasing droughts, extreme storms, deforestation and pollution.It was the first ecological encyclical, and it affirmed the Argentine Jesuit, who in his youth studied to be a chemist, as an authoritative voice in the environmental movement. Later cited by presidents and scientists, the document inspired a global faith-based coalition to try to save God’s creation before it was too late.“I think he understood from the beginning that there are three relationships that had to be regenerated: Our relationship with God, our relationship with the created world and our relationship with our fellow creatures,” said papal biographer Austen Ivereigh. A conversion in 2007 in Brazil Francis had a steep learning curve on the environment, just as he did with clergy sexual abuse, which he initially dismissed as overblown. He himself pointed to a 2007 meeting of Latin American and Caribbean bishops in Aparecida, Brazil, as the moment of his ecological awakening.There, the then-Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio had been elected to draft the conference’s final document, and was under pressure to include calls from Brazilian bishops to highlight the plight of the Amazon.Bergoglio, the dour-faced archbishop of urbane Buenos Aires, didn’t get what all the fuss was about.“At first I was a bit annoyed,” Francis wrote in the 2020 book “Let Us Dream.” “It struck me as excessive.”By the end of the meeting, Bergoglio was converted and convinced.The final Aparecida document devoted several sections to the environment: It denounced multinational extraction companies that plundered the region’s resources at the expense of the poor. It warned of melting glaciers and the effects of lost biodiversity. It cast the ravaging of the planet as an assault on God’s divine plan that violated the biblical imperative to “cultivate and care” for creation.Those same issues would later find prominence in “Praised Be,” which took its name from the repeated first line of the “Canticle of the Creatures,” one of the best-known poetic songs of the pontiff’s nature-loving namesake, St. Francis of Assisi.They also would be highlighted in the Amazon Synod that Francis called at the Vatican in 2019, a meeting of bishops and Indigenous peoples specifically to address how the Catholic Church could and should respond to the plight of the Amazon and its impoverished people.“I think the pope’s most important contribution was to insist on the ethical aspect of the debate about climate justice,” said Giuseppe Onofrio, head of Greenpeace Italy, “that the poor were those who contributed the least to pollution and the climate crisis, but were paying the highest price.” How the environment affects all other ills In many ways, those same issues would also come to define much of Francis’ papacy. He came to view the environmental cause as encapsulating nearly all the other ills afflicting humanity in the 21st century: poverty, social and economic injustice, migration and what he called the “throwaway culture” — a melting pot of problems that he was convinced could only be addressed holistically.Some of Francis' strongest calls to protect the environment would come on or around Earth Day, celebrated April 22. “For some time now, we have been becoming more aware that nature deserves to be protected, even if only because human interaction with God’s biodiversity must take care with utmost care and respect,” Francis said in a video message released on Earth Day in 2021. Cardinal Michael Czerny, the Canadian Jesuit whom Francis would later entrust with the ecological dossier, said the 2007 meeting in Brazil had a big impact on Francis.“In Aparecida, listening to so many different bishops talking about what was deteriorating, but also what the people were suffering, I think really impressed him,” said Czerny.Czerny’s mandate encapsulated Francis’ vision of “integral ecology,” covering the environment, the Vatican’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, its charitable Caritas federation, migration advocacy, economic development and its antinuclear campaign.The multifaceted approach was intentional, Czerny said, to establish new thinking about ecology that went beyond the politicized concept of “green” advocacy to something bigger and nonnegotiable: humanity’s relationship with God and creation.“Everything is connected,” Francis liked to say. A legacy from Pope Paul VI He was by no means the first pope to embrace the ecological cause. According to the book “The Popes and Ecology,” Pope Paul VI was the first pontiff to refer to an “ecological catastrophe” in a 1970 speech to a U.N. food agency.St. John Paul II largely ignored the environment, though he did write the first truly ecological manifesto: his 1990 World Day of Peace message, which linked consumer lifestyle with environmental decay.Pope Benedict XVI was known as the “green pope,” primarily for having installed solar panels on the Vatican auditorium and starting a tree-planting campaign to offset the greenhouse gas emissions of Vatican City.Francis issued an update to “Praised Be” in 2023, just before the U.N. climate conference in Dubai. While consistent with the original text, the update was even more dire and showed Francis had grown more urgent in his alarm.He became even more willing to point fingers at the world’s biggest emitters of heat-trapping greenhouse gases, especially the U.S. And he called out those, including in the church, who denied the human causes of global warming.“He showed that he had an understanding of what was happening in the world, and he saw the world from the point of view, as he was like to say, of the peripheries, of the margins,” said Ivereigh, the papal biographer. “He brought the margins into the center.”Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Photos You Should See - Feb. 2025

Climate
Culture
Food

Meet Manhattan’s first housing co-op to electrify heating and cooling

Canary Media’s “ Electrified Life ” column shares real-world tales, tips, and insights to demystify what individuals can do to shift their homes and lives to clean electric power. At 420 East 51st St., nestled in the Midtown East neighborhood of Manhattan, a 13-story beige brick building sits among a handful of…

Canary Media’s ​“Electrified Life” column shares real-world tales, tips, and insights to demystify what individuals can do to shift their homes and lives to clean electric power.  At 420 East 51st St., nestled in the Midtown East neighborhood of Manhattan, a 13-story beige brick building sits among a handful of other hulking structures. Its tidy facade doesn’t particularly stand out. Nor does its height. In fact, from the street it’s impossible to see what makes the cooperatively owned 1962 building unique among most other apartment properties in New York City: Its residents opted to fully electrify the heating and cooling system. The co-op board decided in 2023 to swap out the structure’s original fossil-fuel steam system for large-scale electric heat pumps that provide space heating, cooling, and water heating. Utility and state incentives covered a whopping one-third of the $2.9 million project’s cost. The move, which the seven-member board approved unanimously, puts the co-op well ahead of the curve in complying with Local Law 97, the city’s landmark legislation limiting CO2 emissions from buildings larger than 25,000 square feet. Owners of buildings that overshoot carbon thresholds face financial penalties. The law’s first reporting deadline is May 1, and the 110-unit co-op has hit its emissions reduction targets far ahead of schedule. With the upgrades completed last September, it’ll avoid triggering penalties through 2049. Also known as 420 Beekman Hill, the edifice is among the first multifamily structures in Manhattan to switch to all-electric heating, cooling, and water heating. It also appears to be the first co-op to do so, according to staff at NYC Accelerator, a building decarbonization initiative run by the Mayor’s Office of Climate and Environmental Justice. The retrofit provides a model for the work that will need to happen in buildings around the country in order to achieve climate goals and comply with laws similar to Local Law 97, said Cliff Majersik, senior advisor at the nonprofit Institute for Market Transformation. The co-op had originally relied on the local utility Con Edison’s district steam system, which is primarily fed by fossil gas and some fuel oil. The retrofit design team weaned the building off that piped steam, solving a problem that still bedevils building owners connected to the hundreds of steam loops operating across the country, including in Cleveland, Chicago, and Philadelphia. “Getting off steam is the most challenging transition,” explained Ted Tiffany, senior technical lead at the Building Decarbonization Coalition, who added that he was really excited the Beekman Hill project popped up on his radar. ​“This gives us an example” for how buildings on steam can go electric cost effectively and in a way that doesn’t disrupt tenants’ lives, he said. A heat pump solution for NYC buildings and beyond The vanguard achievement in the Empire City comes as four states and 10 other locales have passed their own laws to rein in emissions from existing buildings, and more than 30 other jurisdictions have committed to adopting similar rules, known as building performance standards. New York City’s policy was among the first such laws to be passed in the U.S. Under Local Law 97, 92% of buildings are expected to meet emissions standards within this first compliance period, which runs from 2024 to 2029, according to the nonprofit Urban Green Council. But getting buildings to make the deeper cuts needed to cumulatively slash emissions 40% by 2030 will take a lot more action. NYC Accelerator, which helped on the Beekman Hill retrofit, exists to support city building owners with free resources, training, and one-on-one guidance to complete decarbonization projects. “What we’re seeing most of all is that these [retrofits] are complex and sometimes difficult,” said Elijah Hutchinson, executive director of the Mayor’s Office of Climate and Environmental Justice. ​“You do need to hand-hold and get to people very early.”

Climate
Water

Santos wins final approval for Barossa gas project as environment advocates condemn ‘climate bomb’

Energy giant to start production off Northern Territory coast at development projected to add more than 270m tonnes of CO2 to atmosphereElection 2025 live updates: Australia federal election campaignGet Guardian Australia environment editor Adam Morton’s Clear Air column as an emailSantos has received federal approval to commence production from its Barossa offshore gasfield off the coast of the Northern Territory.The National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environmental Management Authority (Nopsema) decided to accept the environment plan for the project’s production operations. It marks the final approval required for the project, clearing the way for the gas giant to extract and pipe the gas to Darwin.Get Guardian Australia environment editor Adam Morton’s Clear Air column as an email Continue reading...

Santos has received federal approval to commence production from its Barossa offshore gas field off the coast of the Northern Territory.The National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environmental Management Authority (Nopsema) decided to accept the environment plan for the project’s production operations. It marks the final approval required for the project, clearing the way for the gas giant to extract and pipe the gas to Darwin.The Barossa field is known for its 18% carbon dioxide content, which is a higher concentration than other Australian gas fields.The development is projected to add more than 270m tonnes of heat-trapping CO2 to the atmosphere over its life once the gas is sold and burnt overseas.“This is Australia’s dirtiest gas project and it should never have been given the green light,” said Gavan McFadzean, the Australian Conservation Foundation’s climate change and clean energy program manager.“Barossa is a massive climate bomb that will produce more climate pollution than usable gas.”McFadzean said despite repeated requests by ACF, Santos had not properly explained how the project would comply with Australia’s safeguard mechanism or provided a “proper assessment of how the greenhouse gas emissions from Barossa will affect Australia’s environment”.“Barossa remains on track for first gas in the third quarter of 2025 and within cost guidance,” a Santos spokesperson said in a statement provided to Guardian Australia on Tuesday.Barossa field, Middle Arm Sustainable Development Precinct and Beetaloo sub basin Composite: Guardian graphic/Guardian graphic/Department of Industry, Science and Resources/Northern Territory Government/NOPSEMAKirsty Howey, executive director of the Environment Centre NT, said: “It is unfathomable that it has been approved in 2025, when the climate science is clear that we can have no new fossil fuel projects if we are to avoid dangerous global warming”.“This approval, in the middle of an election campaign, just goes to show the failure of climate policy in Australia to ensure the necessary phase-out of fossil fuels,” she said.“If Barossa was a litmus test for the reformed Safeguard Mechanism, that policy has failed,” she said.The Greens environment spokesperson, Sarah Hanson-Young, said if Labor was reelected at the forthcoming election, the Greens would be “essential” in the new parliament to “ensure real action is taken to address the climate crisis”.“If the Albanese government wanted to, they could have worked with the Greens in this parliament to stop climate bombs like Barossa by putting a climate trigger in our environment laws,” she said.“Instead, on the eve of an election, Santos has been given the green-light to produce some of the dirtiest gas in Australia.”Guardian Australia sought comment from Labor.Approval of the production plan follows legal challenges to other components of the Barossa project, including unsuccessful proceedings related to submerged cultural heritage that were launched by the Environmental Defenders Office on behalf of three Tiwi Island claimants, over a proposed export pipeline.The federal court ordered the EDO to pay Santos’s full legal costs late last year.

Climate
Energy
Conservation

Suggested Viewing

Inside The Grand Canyon

This guerrilla style documentary film captures a Colorado River rafting expedition through the Grand Canyon. Exhilarating and sometimes dangerous expeditions like this are not often considered when discussing global climate change but could be helpful to enlighten more folks about the changes to our planet. This rafting trip will soon be a thing of the past with record draughts continuing due to ongoing global climate change caused largely by humans. This is just a tiny slice of natures many warning signs of things to come. We find ourselves in a world of ongoing disbelief and hesitation in lieu of planning for the clear and present dangers from climate change. The Colorado River has already reached devastating levels for communities that depend on the water and electrical power resource. Government study in 2022 showed that Lake Powell could reach ""dead pool"" by 2023. There is no plan to mitigate the catastrophe that will leave over a million and a half people with no electricity.

Water
Climate
Sustainable

Capturing The Fire

When Louise Coghill saw the first plume of smoke begin to rise behind her parents property, she could never have predicted that in less than four hours, it would become a wall of flames, swallowing everything in its path. A photographer by trade, Louise has travelled the world documenting everything from the nomadic wanderers of Mongolia, to base life at Mount Everest. Capturing the extraordinary comes naturally to Louise, so when her family home in the semi-rural Western Australian town of Gidgegannup became engulfed in flames, her first instinct wasn’t to take shelter, it was to pick up her camera.

Conservation
Climate
Nature

Rise and Fall

A film to provide an awareness of climate change and the individual measures we can take to combat it. The production process of Rise and Fall began as your stereotypical documentary meant to showcase various aspects of the Earth and Ocean Sciences Department at UNCW. Still, as the interview process was underway, it was quickly decided to move in another direction. It is an essay film about the science of climate change, what we can do in our day-to-day lives to combat it, and its impacts. Without using talking heads, the images of the natural world provide a sensual look at what will be affected by climate change.

Climate
Nature
Documentary

The Whale Guitar: Instrument of Change

Inspired by Herman Melville's epic tale, "Moby-Dick or The Whale", a late-blooming singer/songwriter and former toy designer, Jen Long, acts on a startling vision and commissions the design and build of a remarkable custom electric guitar. It's body is "The Whale" itself as it snags the mad Captain Ahab in the tangled ropes of his own obsession, and prepares to launch a boat of his whalers to their doom. The entire guitar reinterprets Melville's tale as an Anthropocene climate change warning, with the whale representing the seas and storms of climate change arising on this "third day" of late stage capitalism. Hundreds of guitarists, including J. Mascis of Dinosaur Jr., and Marissa Paternoster of Screaming Females, have played and signed this "Instrument of Change" to amplify the alarm to turn our ship of over-production and over-consumption around while there is still time. As the embroidered strap featuring Starbuck's last words implores: "oh! Ahab, not too late is it, even now, the third day, to desist."

Music
Activism
Climate

THE SPRAYER

In the land occupied with the sprayers army, no one has the right to grow any kind of plants either in public or private. So many of the people and soldiers do not even know how a plant grows or looks like, until one day one of the soldiers finds a seed buried deep down in the dust and his curiosity is just the beginning of something extraordinary, something big, something revolutionary.

Plants
CO2
Animation

Join us to forge
a sustainable future

Our team is always growing.
Become a partner, volunteer, sponsor, or intern today.
Let us know how you would like to get involved!

CONTACT US

sign up for our mailing list to stay informed on the latest films and environmental headlines.

Subscribers receive a free day pass for streaming Cinema Verde.
Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.