Underestimating the dangers of peak oil and climate change

The threats of declining oil production and a changing climate are more serious than we think, Cobb writes.

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So, even a 5 percent chance that you will die on a routine plane flight is too big a risk to take. Yet, the world's political leaders and peoples have been given convincing evidence that the chance that unchecked climate change will imperil the very stability of modern civilization is far more likely than 5 percent. True, it's not certain that this will happen, but then every forecast is uncertain. The question is: How do we handle this uncertainty?

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Kurt Cobb is the author of the peak-oil-themed thriller, 'Prelude,' and a columnist for the Paris-based science news site Scitizen. He is a founding member of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas—USA, and he serves on the board of the Arthur Morgan Institute for Community Solutions. For more of his Resource Insights posts, click here.

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Let me provide another illustration. When it comes to home fires, every sensible person knows how to handle the risk: purchase insurance and take steps to reduce the chance of a fire. At yet, fires that warrant the filing of an insurance claim remain exceedingly rare. So, given the low probability of such an event, why do we insure against it? We do so, of course, because even this very low probability event can have catastrophic consequences should it occur.

And, this frames the proper understanding of risk. Risk is not just about probability; the proper measure of risk is probability times severity. Measured this way, small probability events that are expected to have severe impacts become worthy of preparation.

Oil production will certainly start to decline some day. We know this in advance because oil is a finite resource. There are warning signs, an emerging plateau in world production since 2005 and persistently high prices. These are not definitive, but they are worrisome. Given that a rapid, unexpected decline in oil availability has shocked us before, and given that oil continues to be the central commodity of our age--supplying a third of our energy, 80 percent of our transportation fuel, and the basis for innumerable chemicals essential to modern society--given all this, can we not conclude that a persistent decline in oil supplies might be civilization-wrecking if we are not prepared for it?

We know that climate is changing. The record lows in Arctic sea ice are probably the most telling and troubling result. This ongoing warming at the poles affects weather patterns that already have and will continue to threaten crop yields around the world. We are almost completely certain--nothing is absolutely certain in science--that human activity is the main cause of climate change. It is not a leap to conclude that continuing on our current course has a definite, but not precisely calculable risk of undermining the stability of our society.

Whether you believe that severe outcomes are certain, merely probable or very improbable if our behavior does not change, you are forced by a proper evaluation of risk to agree that at least something ought to be done; the possible outcomes include ones that are simply unacceptable.

We never make policy or even personal decisions based on absolute certainty. Instead, we do formal and informal assessments of the risks of any given path based on the information we have at the time. No one--not you, not me, not the pundits, not the oil industry, not the government, not the world's scientists--can have certain knowledge about future oil supplies. The same applies to the future of climate change. We can, nevertheless, describe the severity of possible outcomes. From a policy and preparedness point of view, benign outcomes need not concern us much. In the case of oil supplies and climate change, however, the possible outcomes include some which are truly alarming.

There are too many variables and unknowns to calculate precisely what the chances are for an irreversible decline in oil production starting, say, by 2020. There are too many variables and unknowns to calculate precisely the course and exact severity of climate change. But our understanding of the possible extreme outcomes should tell us that we need to do a lot to address both problems and soon.

Even if we could calculate that the chances were merely 5 percent that one or both problems might result in civilization-shaking outcomes, it would behoove us to take steps to head off possible disaster--just as we would step off a plane that we know has a 5 percent chance of crashing before it reaches its destination.

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