The Precautionary Principle
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect. — Mark Twain
The precautionary principle is often suggested as a rationale for policy and action to combat global warming/climate change. What is the meaning of the precautionary principle? It is the principle that it is sensible to take precautionary measures to mitigate damage when the scientific evidence about an environmental or human health hazard is uncertain AND the stakes are high. Both standards should be met in order to invoke the principle. If the evidence is uncertain but the stakes are low, then the cost of applying the principle is not warranted. If the stakes are high and the evidence is certain the principle is not necessary. Precautionary measures would be a half step in that scenario—we must act definitively. An example of the precautionary principle in action is the requirement by the FDA for drugs to be tested before they are put on the market. The stakes (potentially deadly side effects) are high, and the evidence for the efficacy and safety of new drugs is not certain, so they must be tested.
Although most in the mainstream of climate science would be loathe to acknowledge any uncertainty in their statements of what is wrong and what we should do about it, I have seen others, mainly lay people, try to soften the blow. They still advocate a rapid move to substitute electricity from solar and wind for energy from hydrocarbon fuels, but then they add something cheery like this: If it turns out that climate change turns out to be not as much of a problem as thought, well, then the actions taken will have created a better world regardless.
This formulation is presented as if there’s no downside. As if we can move seamlessly, without disruption or difficulty, from a world economy largely powered by hydrocarbon fuels to one powered mainly by the wind and the sun. I’ve said it before, but it can’t be said enough. The rapid abolishment of energy from hydrocarbon fuels will cause profound suffering, misery, and death, basically everything that is said to happen if we don’t abolish them. In 2022 the global services conglomerate Deloitte presented the results of economic models built to forecast the effects of a net-zero by 2050 energy transition. The models acknowledge that the transition would result in some loss of economic output, and the author, professor, and pundit Jordan Peterson commented thusly: “Yet any reduction in economic output (however “temporary” and “necessary”) will be purchased at the cost of the lives of those who are barely making it now. Period.” There is a very real downside.
The worst thing is that a net-zero by 2050 transition is not even a proper use of the precautionary principle. Why? Because the measures taken are only a guard against one possible outcome, which is a radical warming of the world. What happens if the climate modelers are wrong, and the continued use of hydrocarbon fuels, with its attendant prosperity and economic growth, causes the atmosphere to warm, but benignly so, and gently, such that the general living conditions on the planet are enhanced, rather than hurt? Have you noticed that warm spells in the history of the earth are referred to as climate optimums and not climate mediocres? Such an outcome would render our precautionary actions, and their forced austerity and hardship, all for nothing. We could spend trillions and gain little or nothing in the future when those resources could be used to solve real problems today.
Worse, what if the earth and its climatic systems tip into a cooling phase just as we strip away the prosperity and resiliency that current, modern energy sources provide? If there is one thing that the practice of applied geoscience has taught me, it is that we are too often blind to the full range of possible outcomes. It is laughable that people claim that climate science, and what to do about it, is settled. This is a field as broad and complex as the search for a single, unified field theory. No one today has THE answer.
So the proper use of the precautionary principle, it seems to me, is to take the precaution of making humanity more prosperous and resilient, so that we are better able to withstand whatever curve balls and hardships the climate chooses to throw our way. And since the advancement of the modern world, from the industrial revolution to the information economy of today, has ridden the back of affordable energy, it follows that making humanity more prosperous and resilient means providing it with reliable, affordable energy. Today that means coal, oil, natural gas, hydroelectric, and fission energy. I don’t include wind and solar in that mix because they increase costs and destabilize grids. Tomorrow, if the goal is to produce less CO2 as we meet the demands of prosperity and resiliency it seems axiomatic that we must increase the proportion of world energy produced by fission.
Let’s apply the principle properly, and let humanity prosper. Prosperous humans dream of better futures and there will be among us those who make them happen. The author Dean Koontz said it beautifully in the second of his excellent Jane Hawk novels, and here I’m paraphrasing: If God represents the promise of the next world, then people, rightly, are the promise of this one.