People worry about many risks, but generally about the wrong ones. We tend to be obsessed with personal and societal risk that is “fast.” What will the Fed Reserve announce next? Should I trust Tesla’s auto steering? These are risks where outcomes are realized quickly. That’s why I call them fast risks. As it turns out though some of the biggest risks today are slow. Outcomes will not be realized for decades or longer. The impact of nutrition and exercise on health is an example of a slow risk. The mother of all slow risks is climate change.
It has proven difficult, maybe impossible, to get people to care about slow risks. We all wear seatbelts now because being killed in a car accident is a fast risk. But we are blithely heading into a species level catastrophe with climate change. Even as the signs are all around us, they are still too dispersed (other people’s homes are flooded) and too similar to the past (we have always had hurricanes) to spur sufficient action. I don’t see that changing with the latest IPC report which is now arguing that dramatic changes will occur much sooner than previously forecast. But still a decade or two out. Hence still slow risk.
I continue to be amazed by how much fear and anxiety people are experiencing daily based on fast risk. Will I get a good grade on my exam? Will this investment succeed or fail? These risks completely pale compared to the climate change risk of global upheaval of life as we know it, with the potential for tens of millions of human deaths (and that’s being optimistic, the range of possible outcomes likely includes billions of deaths). Ironically, our obsession with fast risks is one of the things that distracts us from taking action on slow risk. We have already spent too much of our energy and attention!
A fair question then is what I am doing personally, if anything, about the slow risk of climate change. The most important thing so far has been to back research into geo-engineering. Because we are so bad with slow risks, I have concluded that we will not get on top of greenhouse gases in time. That means we will need more dramatic interventions to halt a further heating up of the atmosphere. I will write more about that in a separate post.
