Dick
Pountain/November 25, 2008/Political Quarterly
TITLE: "Global Catastrophes
and Trends: The Next Fifty Years"
AUTHOR: Vaclav Smil
PUBLISHER: MIT Press
PUBLISHED: September 2008,
hard cover, 320 pp, £19.95
REASONING ABOUT RISK
“What is the likelihood that Islamic
terrorism will develop into a massive, determined quest to destroy the West?” “What
is the likelihood that a massive wave of global Islamic terrorism will
accelerate the Western transition to non-fossil fuel energies?” Two questions,
plucked from a late chapter, exemplify both the style and the substance of
Vaclav Smil’s impressive and important review of the factors that will shape
our global future over the next half century. Firstly there’s that word
“likelihood”, which for Smil is a quantitative concept, something we must try
to measure to the best of our ability while not kidding ourselves about how
good our answers are. Secondly, the questions seek to relate two separate
disciplines, politics and energy usage. Smil’s answer to both questions is that
we don’t know and that our best guesses provide “at best some constraining
guidelines but do not offer any reliable basis for relative comparisons of
diverse events or their interrelations”.
Smil is not a proponent of any grand
theory about how the world works, but neither is he a passive agnostic
wallowing in history-as-a-torrent-of-accidents, nor yet just a smug empiricist.
He believes we have a duty to extract all the information we can from past
events using the methods of science (particularly statistics intelligently
applied), and that even where we can’t know for sure we can often put a figure on
the extent of our ignorance. But he’s acutely aware that risk assessments based
only on figures fail to capture the psychological dimension: how unsafe we feel is as important politically as how
unsafe we actually are.
Global
Catastrophes and Trends is a review and
interpretation of nearly 800 recent papers in economics, demographics,
environmental and political science, but Smil’s book goes well beyond mere collection
or even distillation. Smil, a professor at the University of Manitoba and
himself an acclaimed expert on the energetics of complex systems (those ~800
papers include 15 of his own), largely succeeds in imposing on this mass of
technical material a uniform and rational framework for thinking about risks
and challenges. We are currently living through a period of doom and gloom in
which we face not only a variety of real threats – economic recession,
terrorism, climate change, political instability – but also a constant
bombardment of sensationalized predictions from our attention- and
sales-seeking mass media that make it very difficult to think straight about
such threats. Smil is determined not to join this babble and so eschews forecasts
and scenarios: you will find no predictions here that “X will happen by year Y”
or that “trend X will peak in year Y”.
Instead Smil starts by drawing a basic
distinction between fatal discontinuities, that is low-probability events that
could “change everything” like a huge volcanic eruption or collision with an
asteroid, and persistent, gradually unfolding trends that might have equally
profound effects over the long term, like global warming. He establishes common
units for assessing and comparing the probabilities of such threats and for quantifying
the damage they would cause. Chapter 2 attempts to compute the probabilities of
various fatal discontinuities, concluding that the least unlikely – and the
ones we can do something about –
remain nuclear war (accidental or deliberate) and virulent influenza pandemic. It
is worth spending money on vaccines and antiviral drugs, and also on
astronomical surveys of asteroid orbits, but otherwise resources are better
spent to avert more gradual threats like global warming. Chapter 3 discusses gradual
trends, which covers both the transition to an economy based on non-fossil
fuels and the rise and decline of the most prominent nations over the next 50
years. He is skeptical about the prospects for alternative energy sources – on
scientific grounds based on energy density which he explains with great clarity
– and for carbon sequestration, concluding that our best hope of slowing global
warming is to reduce overall energy consumption through more efficient usage
and serious lifestyle changes. Smil’s approach to environmental degradation
avoids moralizing and ideology, usefully pointing out that the carbon cycle is
not the only one with whose operation we are interfering, and that the nitrogen
cycle is even harder to mend.
His summary of the prospects of each
competitor for global supremacy is equally devastating: Europe and Japan are
doomed to runner-up status by ageing populations; Islam is too divided to
achieve the New Caliphate despite high fertility; US power is already waning
(here Smil preempts and confirms the recent National Intelligence Council’s
report Global Trends 2005) thanks to its decline of manufacturing relative to
China and colossal trade deficit; China itself has insuperable environmental
problems and lacks “soft power” thanks to language and restricted intellectual
freedom. He expects a turbulent next 50 years without a single hegemonic power,
and with many conflicts over resources and dominance.
Smil writes prose that is mercifully jargon-free,
though unavoidably rich in technical terms: he makes judicious use of
well-chosen graphs, but I should warn non-mathematical readers that familiarity
with logarithmic scales, in particular log/log graphs, will help in following
some of his arguments. He quantifies risk starting from the central fact of
human life, general mortality (we all die eventually) which he assigns a value
of 10-6 deaths/person-exposure-hour: in the West, one person in a
million dies every hour on average. Other risks are compared to this baseline
value on a log/log scale, which chillingly suggests that death in hospital from
preventable medical error is a greater danger than smoking, terrorism or car
crash, and that young black male citizens of Philadelphia actually reduce their chance of gunshot death by
serving in Iraq rather than staying home. For me the book’s most significant
omission is that Smil doesn’t quantify the risk of not living in the affluent
West…
Any bookie will tell you that we’re pretty
poor at estimating risk, but our behavior suggests we have an innate grasp of
general mortality because we only accept risks within around one order of
magnitude of it in everyday life – say when we travel by car (10-7
d/peh) rather than safer train or plane (10-8), or smoke cigarettes
(2x10-6, about the same as hang gliding). Only a handful of
thrill-seeking extreme sport nuts will embrace a 10-2 risk like BASE
Jumping for fun. However such figures only tell part of the story: psychological
factors like Understanding, Exposure and Dread are equally important. A citizen
of Baghdad faces the same statistical risk of death from bomb or kidnap that a
New Yorker does from car crash, but risks we understand like car driving are
better accepted than inexplicable acts of random violence; the Baghdadi is
exposed 24 hours a day while the New Yorker only 1-2 hours; and the idea of
being blown to bits is peculiarly horrible. Politicians pay more attention to
this psychological dimension than to the underlying physical risks, leading to
the paradox (also remarked in David Runciman’s recent book Good Intentions) that the
more responsible the politician, the more
rather than less likely they are to
over-react to crises like terrorist attacks.
I found this book an enormously
refreshing, if demanding, read. In place of the untestable scenarios presented
by most “futurologists”, Smil offers hard facts where they are available and
sensible cautions where they are not. He offers few concrete policy proposals
but rather a rational method of assessment that ought to constrain and guide
thinking about policy. Smil ends on this note: “There is so much we do not
know, and pretending otherwise is not going to make our choices clearer or
easier. None of us knows which threats and concerns will soon be forgotten and
which will become tragic realities. That is why we repeatedly spend enormous
resources in the pursuit of uncertain (even dubious) causes and are repeatedly
unprepared for real threats and unexpected events”. I think Smil should
probably be set as homework for every member of parliament, and there will be a test later…
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