The Age of Uncertainty
As I’ve stated before, I have no idea what the future of oil supplies looks like. That’s cool; most people don’t. (On a side note, you would figure that the experts might know, but given that some of them have different predictions, the ones with incorrect predictions are wrong, so they don’t really know what’s going to happen. And even the ones with predictions that will indeed be borne out … do they really know that they know what’s going to happen?) I find it troubling that our government makes decisions without regarding the possibility of uncertainty in its judgments.
Exhibit A here would be the Iraq war, where our planning basically assumed best-case scenarios all around. Allies cooperating, Iraqis not fighting, Iraqis hailing us as liberators, Iraqis working together to rebuild their country. Unfortunately for everyone involved, it hasn’t turned out that way, and we’ve been struggling ever since.
Our current energy policy posits that we do know what is going to happen: plenty of oil out there for the next thirty years plus; we just need to drill for it and enforce order in the Middle East. I don’t see much in the way of preparation for if those assumptions are wrong.
Take another example, that of global warming. Our current policy is to deny that it exists. The strategy, if any, that our government has is:
· Determine if global warming will be a problem. Collect enough data to convince the skeptics.
· When/if it is determined to be a problem, come up with a plan to solve the problem.
· Execute the plan.
That plan works great if global warming is all a big hoax, but if not, we’ve lost valuable time. That’s important since most proposed solutions take decades to have any significant effect.
Here’s my point: instead of rolling the dice and hoping we’re right, we should be hedging our bets more. Too often I hear people ignore evidence of warming by saying we shouldn’t wreck the economy on the off chance that global warming will be disastrous. I would certainly agree with that, but there is some middle ground between full-scale mobilization and doing nothing.
Exhibit A here would be the Iraq war, where our planning basically assumed best-case scenarios all around. Allies cooperating, Iraqis not fighting, Iraqis hailing us as liberators, Iraqis working together to rebuild their country. Unfortunately for everyone involved, it hasn’t turned out that way, and we’ve been struggling ever since.
Our current energy policy posits that we do know what is going to happen: plenty of oil out there for the next thirty years plus; we just need to drill for it and enforce order in the Middle East. I don’t see much in the way of preparation for if those assumptions are wrong.
Take another example, that of global warming. Our current policy is to deny that it exists. The strategy, if any, that our government has is:
· Determine if global warming will be a problem. Collect enough data to convince the skeptics.
· When/if it is determined to be a problem, come up with a plan to solve the problem.
· Execute the plan.
That plan works great if global warming is all a big hoax, but if not, we’ve lost valuable time. That’s important since most proposed solutions take decades to have any significant effect.
Here’s my point: instead of rolling the dice and hoping we’re right, we should be hedging our bets more. Too often I hear people ignore evidence of warming by saying we shouldn’t wreck the economy on the off chance that global warming will be disastrous. I would certainly agree with that, but there is some middle ground between full-scale mobilization and doing nothing.
posted by Jim at
8:26 PM
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