energy is power; comment on “energy as a social and commercial determinant of health: a qualitative study of australian policy”

Baum et al analyse the australian energy sector’s influence on health. this commentary suggests that their valuable work may be further enhanced by shifting the gaze in five ways: first, by leaving the health field’s dictate of linear analysis into circularity; second, by removing humans from the centre of analysis; third, by regarding the planet as an indivisible whole system and recognising, for instance, that australia is not africa; fourth, by recognising that energy is a source of – sometimes perverse, as demonstrated in the russia-ukraine conflict – political power; and fifth, by really starting from the energy point of view rather than the human health perspective. to reorient the debate, the commentary ends with a proposal of the energy cycle as a heuristic to explain global and local health equity.