Reason 1. Errors need to be distinguished from an emergency’s risks and uncertainties

Reason 2. Averted losses from disasters avoided are the huge missing middle in emergency calculations

Reason 3. It is the professional’s duty of care that questions dominant methods for emergency risk management

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1. Errors need to be distinguished from an emergency’s risks and uncertainties.

That is to ask: Have known errors in emergency response and initial service restoration been corrected before the next emergency?

It seems odd to talk about known errors when uncertainties and risks are massive and widespread in terrorist attacks, earthquakes, river flooding, forest wildfires, and grid failures in electricity and water.

But there can be and often are an urgency, clarity and logic about what to do by way of just-in-time or just-for-now emergency response. What needs to be done is evident to front-line infrastructure staff and emergency management professionals in ways not so for those in incident command centers or higher-level management or official positions. For experienced front-line staff, not doing what needs to be done in these circumstances constitute errors to be avoided in real-time. They are avoidable errors because they can be corrected beforehand.

In particular, research with Paul Schulman on interconnected critical infrastructures found:

–Under conditions of shifting or shifted interconnectivity, it would be an error for infrastructure operators and emergency managers not to establish lateral communications with one another and undertake improvisational and shared restoration activities where needed, even if no official arrangement exists to do so.

–In related fashion, it would be a management error in anticipation and planning not to provide robust and contingent interinfrastructure communication capabilities, including communication connections between the control rooms of interconnected infrastructures. This communication, it has been demonstrated, is also greatly facilitated by establishing lateral interinfrastructure personnel contacts prior to emergencies.

–Further, it would be an error not to have some contingent resources for restoration and recovery activities such as vehicles, portable generators and movable cell towers in differing locations available across infrastructures if needed, particularly where chokepoints of interconnected infrastructures are adjacent to each other.

While these known errors are not the entire set, our interviews and prior research convince us that they are primary because they seriously degrade effective resilience in emergency prevention and responses. Here, errors are not to be managed, more or less like risks, but rather managed categorically as: Yes or no, have they been avoided?

A number of policy and management implications follow. One deserves underscoring here: It may well be some activities presently funded under state and federal “emergency risk management” aren’t as important as having dedicated support and staffing for such error correction, now and ahead. It is long past time to review the risk biases in conventional emergency management.

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2. Averted losses from disasters avoided are the huge missing middle in emergency calculations.

I

Last year, I attended a conference on sea-level rise, storm surges and flooding in the greater San Francisco Bay Area, now and projected into the near decades. Among other things, I was told that:

**The Bay Area would need some 477 million cubic yards of sediment–the vast majority of which can’t be sourced locally–so as to restore area wetlands and mudflats;

**Also required would be an estimated US$110 billion to locally adapt to higher sea levels by 2050, this being based on existing plans in place or used as placeholders for entities that have yet to plan; and

**We should expect much more sea-level rise locally because of the newly accelerated melting of the ice cap in Antarctica and Greenland.

Millions of cubic yards equivalent to over 420 Salesforce Tower high-rises? Some $110 billion which has no possibility whatsoever of being funded, locally let alone regionally? And those massive local requirements posed by the melting ice caps? How are these unprecedented high climate-related losses to be compensated for?

It’s not surprising that the individual interventions presented that day and all the hard work they already required paled into insignificance against the funding and work challenges posed by the bulleted challenges.

What to do? How to respond?

II

You respond first and foremost by critically rethinking the direct or underlying estimates of losses (economic, physical, lives, and more) incurred if we don’t take action now. It’s been my experience that none of these estimated losses take into account the losses already prevented from occurring by infrastructure operators and emergency managers who avoid systemwide and regional system failures from that would have happened had they not intervened beforehand, sometimes at the last moment.

Why are these uncalculated billions and billions of saved dollars important when it comes to responding to sea level rise, increased storm surges, more inland flooding, rising groundwater levels and other sequelae?

Because it from this pool of real-time talent and skills and practices that society will be drawing for operationally redesigning the inevitable shortfalls in new technologies, macro-plans and regulations for climate restoration and recovery.

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3. It is the professional’s duty of care that questions dominant methods for emergency risk management.

I

We researchers estimated the annual probability of a major stretch of an island’s levees failing ranged between 4% to 24% due to a slope failure. (Slope instability in this scenario would be caused by flooding behind the levee as well as high water levels on its water side.)

Our estimates were considerably higher than the official one, in large part because the research project relied on methodologies validated against benchmark studies.

We presented the findings to the island’s management board. Their first and really only question was whether our estimates would be revealed to the island’s insurers.

II

We undertook a hotwash afterwards to figure out their–how to put it?–underwhelming response:

Didn’t they understand the upper range, 24% per annum, implied a levee breach nigh inevitable with respect to our failure scenario? Or to put the question to our side, in what ways did the 24% per annum estimate fall short of being a failure probability of 1.0?

But if as high as 24% per annum, why hadn’t there been a levee breach over the many decades since the last major one on the island?

And what about the islands nearby? Assuming even a few of these had a similar upper range, why weren’t levee failures happening more often?

The 4% – 24% range was with respect to annual levee failure due to slope instability only. If you add in all the levee failure modes possible (e.g., due to seepage rather than overtopping and flooding), the combined probability of levee failure would have to be higher. (But then again, what are the conditions under which the more ways there are to fail, the more likely failure is?)

You could say one reason why levee failure there hadn’t happened–yet–was because it had been long enough. That is: a long enough period to observe levee breaches so as to form the distribution from which the 24% could be established or corrected empirically. But, methodologically, the burden of proof was on us, the team of levee experts, to explain why the decades and decades of levee use wasn’t “long enough” or what that long-enough might actually look like.

Also, the levee stretch in question could be “failing to fail.” It might be that this stretch had not undergone events that loaded it to capacity or worse. (But then again: How much worse would the conditions have to be in our expert view? Just what is “a probability of failing to fail”?)

To put all this differently, was this levee stretch on that island more diverse and more resilient (say, in the way biodiverse ecosystems are said to be more resilient) than current methods capture but which islanders better understood and perhaps even managed?

III

But the most significant point from the hotwash was the one none of us saw need to voice: How could we accuse the management board and islanders of being short-sighted, with so much else going on challenging us, the team, to make sense of our own estimates for the purposes of island emergency preparedness and management?

After all, we’d be the first to insist that these island levees are themselves a key infrastructure protecting other infrastructures, including river-water supplies, island agriculture and adjacent wetlands. It is our duty of care to follow up on the errors and induced risks associated with current ways in thinking about risk management for and during crises.

Recent academic literature has shown that climate change has significant implications for inflation. First, climate-related events (such as hurricanes, draughts, heatwaves and floods) can lead to supply-side disruptions that can increase inflationary pressures − the so-called ‘climateflation’ (Schnabel, 2022). Physical supply-side effects of climate change include the reduction in labour and capital productivity, the destruction of capital equipment, the decline in agricultural productivity and the increase in crop output failures (Beirne et al., 2021a; Storm, 2022). Climate-related physical changes can also affect the demand side of the economy, since they can lead to a decline in consumption and investment. For example, households might increase precautionary saving and firms might reduce investment due to uncertainty about profitability (Dafermos et al., 2018).

There is evidence that climate-related events have already affected inflation across the globe. For example, Parker (2018) finds that the impact of weather-related disasters on inflation is significant and persistent in low-income and middle-income counties, but less significant in high-income countries. He also shows that the effects on inflation differ between disaster types, a finding that is consistent with the empirical results of Kabundi et al. (2022). Beirne et al. (2021a) focus on the euro area and show that disasters have, on aggregate, a positive effect on inflation, with heterogeneous results across inflation sub-indices. Using a sample of high-income and medium-income countries, Faccia et al. (2021) find that hot summers tend to increase food price inflation in the short run. However, in the medium term this impact is insignificant or negative. Kunawotor et al. (2022) find a positive impact of weather-related disasters on inflation in African countries. Moreover, higher temperatures tend to increase inflation according to the empirical results of Ciccarelli et al. (2023) and Kotz et al. (2023).

Second, the policies that might be implemented for achieving the transition to a net zero economy (such as carbon pricing and environmental regulation) can lead to increasing costs for firms which might be passed on to prices − the so-called ‘fossilflation’ (Schnabel, 2022). For example, the climate scenarios that have been developed by the Network for Greening the Financial System (NGFS) show that in the case in which carbon prices increase significantly in the coming years the impact on inflation can be substantial (NGFS, 2023). The econometric literature is a bit less conclusive. Moessner (2022) finds that carbon prices have a positive impact on inflation in OECD countries. Santabárbara and Suárez-Varela (2022) show that cap- and-trade systems have increased inflation volatility in OECD countries – the same is not, however, the case for carbon taxes. Konradt and Weber di Mauro (2023) do not find significant effects of carbon taxes on inflation in Europe and Canada. However, all these empirical studies should be treated with caution: carbon prices have so far been relatively low, and inflation might react differently in the case in which carbon prices increase abruptly in the future.

Third, green technologies, such as electric vehicles, solar panels, wind turbines and batteries rely extensively on minerals like copper, lithium and nickel. If the green transition takes place within a short time period, it might be inevitable that some of these minerals will face excess demand and this can lead to inflationary pressures (see also Storm, 2022). Schnabel (2022) has called this possibility ‘greenflation’.

Central banks have limited control over most of these climate-related inflationary sources. For example, an increase in prices caused by a climate-related food supply shock cannot be addressed by increasing interest rates. Or, if governments decide to increase carbon prices as part of their decarbonisation plans, an increase in interest rates can do little to address the fossilflation that this increase can cause. Of course, central banks can affect demand by increasing interest rates. However, this is unlikely to be sufficient to keep inflation under control, unless perhaps interest rates increase substantially, which could have severe side effects, including debt repayment problems and increases in unemployment rates.

But, on top of it, climate change also impairs the so-called transmission channels of monetary policy, including expectations channels, credit channels and asset price channels (NGFS, 2020). For example, climate change can overall make the banking system more financially fragile. This can be the case due to both transition and physical risks (Battiston et al., 2021; Campiglio et al., 2018; Semieniuk et al., 2021). Transition risks capture the impact that an abrupt climate transition might have on the financial position of carbon-intensive companies which can then have spillover effects on the financial system. Physical risks are associated with climate-related economic disasters or financial losses that stem from gradual global warming and climate events, and can lead to an increase in defaults on household and corporate loans or asset price declines.

The fact that the financial system is exposed to these climate-related financial risks implies that in a scenario, for instance, in which central banks reduce interest rates to stimulate credit in a period of low inflation, this might have very negligible effects on credit provision, as banks might be under-capitalised or might find it difficult to identify creditworthy borrowers. The climate exposure of the financial system might also result in asset prices being unresponsive to changes in interest rates.

Overall, these fundamental changes in the determinants of inflation and the transmission channels of monetary policy call into question the ability of central banks to control inflation. Controlling inflation in the future might require a more systematic use of other instruments that are under the control of governments, such as price caps or product market policies that prevent oligopolistic structures.”

Yannis Dafermos (2024), The climate crisis meets the ECB: tinkering around the edges or paradigm shift? SOAS Department of Economics Working Paper No. 264, London: SOAS University of London (accessed online at https://www.soas.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2024-07/economics-wp264.pdf)

It’s a commonplace to argue that scientists and experts need to be talking to and engaging much more with the traditional knowledge folks. What’s less often the case, save for the proverbial call for curing cancer, are examples of mutual benefit of doing so. One priority area for reciprocity, I suggest, is that of geoengineering.

Geoengineering is offered up as a last-ditch effort to save the planet in the midst of its very real climate emergency. Even so, one must wonder: What better way to bring the governments of the world to their collective knees than solutions like those that would ballon the skies with mirrors and sulfur dioxide and the seas with chemical changes to capture more carbon, all because the climate emergency has left humanity no choice—no alternative—but to be unreliable on unprecedented scales?

Such indeed is the rationale for having in place robust monitoring and evaluation (M&E) systems of the geoengineering interventions. Now of course, much of the current debate is about the unintended consequences of geoengineering and about the early warning systems for monitoring and evaluating them. But those consequences are almost exclusively dominated by concerns of global North and South experts and scientists.

I suggest that the major priority of governments and the regulators of geoengineering initiatives–and there is no stopping this experimentation!–is to ensure that the early warning systems for droughts and bad weather still in operation among pastoralists and agriculturists of the developing world are also included and canvassed.

The latter are, I believe, a quite specific case where the intersection of measurable and nonmeasuable indicators is of mutual benefit to far more than the presiding scientists and experts in the Global North and South. For my part, I wonder what will be the decrease (or increase for that matter) in the murders of local “rainmakers” (forecasters) because of geoengineering.

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On the murder of rainmakers during drought, please see Isao Murahashi (2024), “Climate change or local justice? On frequent drought and regicide in South Sudan.” Presentation given on August 8 2024 as a part of the International Hyflex Sessions, “Living in the Anthropocene, living in uncertainty: Reconfiguring development and humanitarian assistance as ‘care’ with relational approach,” held at IDS Sussex.

Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel economist, confirms: “Only around half of Americans born after 1980 could hope to have earnings higher than their parents (down from 90 percent for the cohort born in 1940).”

But even if true, is the implication that capitalism was better then than now?

In the same vein, pathologies arising from increased financialization have been “blamed on the disappearance of capitalism in its classical form, with the latter now painted in retrospect as a system in which market logics led to productive investment, more-or-less shared growth and functional politics.” But haven’t we always been told capitalism is bad, albeit winners and losers vary across space or time?

In contrast, it is easy to make an empirical case that recent developments in capitalism are not all that new:

In the field of study I’m in — platform labour studies — there is this story that platformisation is tied to the rise of a precariat, that we have these social and labour norms from the postwar era, and that they have been degraded by neoliberalism, of which one feature is platformisation. It’s one part of a broader narrative of the decline of the postwar social contract. For me, what’s missing from this story is that the postwar social contract was only ever a reality for a very small group of workers at a very historically specific moment.

Actually, that postwar social contract had very much been based on exclusions, exploitation and extraction from the majority of the world’s workforce. What we’re seeing now is simply the category of people that have access to that social contract is rapidly shrinking. That’s being read as a new kind of phenomenon when actually, it’s the generalisation of a phenomenon that has existed for a huge number of people.

In other words, many of our parents and grandparents were suffering under capitalism all along just as we are.

But any such conclusion leads to an obvious question: What if the seriatim crises of capitalism are treated as proof-positive not of its death rattle but of its vitality in morphing losers after losers?

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Sources

https://ourtime.substack.com/p/seven-theses-on-brenner-and-rileys

https://www.common-wealth.org/centre-for-democratising-work/interview-dalia-gebrial 1/211/21

https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Road_to_Freedom_Economics_and_the_Go/xWHpEAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=Stiglitz+%22Only+around+half+of+Americans+born+after+1980+could+hope+to+have+earnings+higher+than+their+parents+(down+from+90+percent+for+the+cohort+born+in+1940).%22&pg=PT44&printsec=frontcover

Recalibrating politics: the Kennedy White House. . . https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2019/12/16/recalibrating-politics-the-kennedy-white-house-dinner-for-andre-malraux-longer-read/

Spread the word: We need more Extreme Climate Resilience Desks for real-time infrastructure operations!. . .https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2024/04/23/spread-the-word-we-need-more-extreme-climate-resilience-desks-for-real-time-infrastructure-operations/

What the Thai BL series, “Bad Buddy,” has to tell us. . .https://mess-and-reliability.blog/2022/02/26/what-the-thai-bl-series-bad-buddy-has-to-tell-us-about-societal-reset-updated-2/

First itemize a few of apocalyptic predictions that have failed to materialize over the past five decades: global nuclear war, communist world hegemony, global starvation, oil depletion, nuclear winter, a prolonged night/new ice age, and the international meltdown because of the millennium computer bug.

Now itemize—again an arbitrary few—crises we have actually lived through in the last three decades or so: the banking crisis of the early 1990s, the Mexican near-default in early 1996, the Asian financial crisis in 1997, Long Term Capital Management collapse in 1998; the bursting of the dot.com/stock market bubble in 2000, the terrorist attacks of September 11, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the breakdown in the Doha round of multilateral trade talks, the 2008 financial crisis and Great Recession, the default of Greece, the resurgence in Western populism and nativism. . .(and don’t forgot the Argentine default of 2001 and the world fisheries collapse and. . .)

And yet, the habitual response: “But, but. . .it still could get worse!” Well, yes, it could. What, though, are we getting from this psychological habituation to it-always-could-get-much-worse? One answer: Doing so saves us all the trouble and worry of having to figure out the details.

I

“We told you there’d be a pandemic and you didn’t listen to us.” Truth told, I’m a bit sour hearing public health experts repeat this continuously.

So I relish my own “I told you so!” back at them. “I’m now telling you you’ve been talking to the wrong people all along!”

II

It’s clear that the people who should have been informed about the dangers of a pandemic were not among the people addressed by experts. I have in mind the professionals who operate our real-time critical infrastructures, like water, electricity, telecommunications and transportation. No one told those men and women in the control rooms and out in the field that COVID-19 would wreak such havoc as it did in systems mandated to be so reliable.

From our interviews in Oregon and Washington State, it’s obvious no one predicted the actual, mega-impacts and interruptions that COVID has had on the real-time operations of core infrastructures, there or beyond. You probably already know essential workers were sent home to work offsite. Arguably less known is that those on-site had to get vaccinated, and some very experienced personnel left as a result. Far less appreciated, COVID put a brake on major infrastructure investment, improvement and management activities. Said one logistic manager of his state’s response, “All [COVID-19] planning happened on the fly, we were building the plane as it moved, we’d never seen anything like this.”

“COVID was a wake-up call,” we were told, again and again, by our interviewees, not something you’d expect to hear had the case actually been: “We told you there’d be a pandemic and you didn’t listen to us!”

III

So what? We wouldn’t have an economy, we wouldn’t have markets, if it weren’t for electricity, water, telecoms and transportation being reliable. Yet to my knowledge the professionals responsible for real-time operations in the infrastructures were never specifically warned and were never specifically talked to by the pandemic experts.

So: Pandemic experts, the next time around–and yes I agree there will be a next time–it’s you who are going to fail because those who didn’t hear were those you didn’t care to know, let alone talk to. Your duty of care is to talk to the right people.

I

In the mid-1970s a group of physicists and political scientists met at MIT and “arrived at the conclusion that if a World Government was not implemented soon, the probability of a nuclear war before the year 2000 would be close to 100 percent”.

But what were their nuclear war scenarios? Without sample details to evaluate, the experts are like the early astrologer who cast Christ’s horoscope and found the end of Christianity in sight.

II

In the early years of World War I, Rainer Marie Rilke, the poet, wrote that “the misery in which mankind has lived daily since the beginning of time cannot really be increased by any contingency. . . Always the whole of misery has been in use among men, as much as there is, a constant, just as there is a constant of happiness; only its distribution alters.” Here too is the literary all-rounder Jean-Paul Sartre, “essentially, there is not much difference between a catastrophe where 300 or 3000 die and one where ten or fifteen die. There is a difference in numbers of course, but in a sense, with each person who dies, so also does a world. The scandal is the same.”

But the numbers do matter in determining whether or not misery is a constant. “From a statistical point of view, which is that of social and political life and of history, there is an enormous difference,” Maurice Merleau-Ponty said of Sartre’s remark. We know from survey research that conclusions are drawn much more confidently from structured surveys and samples consisting of 3000 people than, say, 30 persons.

I may be misremembering, but I think it was Kenneth Boulding, the early heterodox economist, who thought that the greatest contribution of the social sciences to humankind was the sample survey, as imperfect as it is.

Panama, El Salvador and Ecuador import maize for domestic consumption. They paid in dollarized currencies for imports grown on ghost acres (i.e., not in-country) and reliant on virtual water from these other areas embedded in the tonnes of arriving maize. What, in any of this, is “domestic”?

In the same breadth, their governments are told to: promote policies that increase the inflow of remittances but reverse the outflow of skilled talent; mitigate the takeover of domestic sectors by multi-national corporations, but nevertheless ensure the corporations are properly taxed; and couple social protection to production more effectively, but also undertake specific degrowth needed in these unsustainable economies.

“Their” “sectors” “there”?

For the policy analyst, being relevant means offering an alternative to what is criticized. But there are other ways for criticism to be good-enough without offering an alternative. Critique, for example, is pertinent when solutions are not on offer and where “offering solutions” may well make bad messes worse. Indeed, the position of permanent critique resists anything like aiding and abetting sanctioned modes for “acting practically.” Then there’s bearing witness, which can make silent critique very loud indeed (e.g., the Black Sash in apartheid South Africa).

It seems to me that criticism is good enough when it provokes (even if discourages), disturbs (even when debatable), and sharpens attention even because it goes no further.

An example. Science and economics have been much chastised as: religion (e.g., each with metaphysics); imperialist (e.g., colonizing the traditional “why?” and “how?” of the humanities); and for being socially-constructed (i.e., not “the truth”). Also, critiques of science and economics as Big Business stress their production of so much Bad as to shadow any Good.

Good-enough criticism, I think, doesn’t take the position that Bad cancels out Good, as if a profession’s blind spots cancelled its strengths, when on reflection the former are clearly part of the latter. It differs from the kind of critique that wants to buttonhole people and positions once and for all. It’s good enough when the other side of a criticizing “no” is “yes, but.”