That Used to Be Us_ How America Fell Behind in thted and How We Can Come Back - Friedman, Thomas L. & Mandelbaum, Michael [108]
Why do we call it that? In 2006, Ron Suskind published The One Percent Doctrine, a book about the U.S. war on terrorists after 9/11. The title came from an assessment by then vice president Dick Cheney, who, in the face of concerns that a Pakistani scientist was offering nuclear-weapons expertise to al-Qaeda, reportedly declared: “If there’s a 1% chance that Pakistani scientists are helping Al Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response.” Cheney contended that the United States had to confront a very new type of threat: a “low-probability, high-impact event.”
Soon after Suskind’s book was published, the legal scholar Cass Sunstein, then at the University of Chicago, pointed out that Cheney seemed to be endorsing the same “precautionary principle” that animated environmentalists. Sunstein wrote in his blog: “According to the Precautionary Principle, it is appropriate to respond aggressively to low-probability, high-impact events—such as climate change. Indeed, another vice president—Al Gore—can be understood to be arguing for a precautionary principle for climate change (though he believes that the chance of disaster is well over 1 percent).”
Cheney’s instinct on nuclear weapons in the hands of rogue states is the right framework for thinking about the climate issue. It’s all a game of odds. We’ve never been here before, but we do know two things. First, the CO2 we put into the atmosphere stays there for several thousand years, so it is “irreversible” in real time (barring some not-yet-invented technique of geo-engineering to extract greenhouses gases from the atmosphere). And second, the CO2 buildup, if it reaches a certain point, has the potential to unleash “catastrophic” global warming—warming at a level that no humans have ever experienced. We do not know for sure (and cannot know until it is too late) that this will happen, but we do know that it could happen. Since the buildup of greenhouse gases is irreversible and the impact of that buildup could be “catastrophic”—that is, it could create such severe and irreparable damage to the Earth’s ecosystem that it would overturn the normal patterns of human life on the planet—the sensible, prudent, conservative thing to do is to buy insurance.
This is especially advisable when there is every chance our response will eventually turn a profit and serve as an antidote to almost every energy/climate problem set in motion in 1979. If we prepare for climate change by gradually building an economy based on clean-power systems but climate change turns out not to be as damaging as we expect, what would be the result? During a transition period, we would have higher energy prices, while new technologies providing both clean power and greater efficiency achieved scale from mass production. Very quickly, though, we would have higher energy prices but lower energy bills, as well as lower greenhouse gas emissions, as the new technologies dramatically improved efficiency to give us more power from less energy for less money. In its 2009 report Unlocking Energy Efficiency in the U.S. Economy, the McKinsey consultancy found that if serious but affordable energy-efficiency measures were implemented throughout the U.S. economy through 2020, this would yield gross energy savings worth more than $1.2 trillion—more than twice the $520 billion investment in such measures needed in that time frame. Energy efficiency, that is, would save more than twice as much as it would cost.
At