In contemporary United States all professional positions require special education and experience, in sharp contrast to the times of Thomas', Jefferson or Edison. But the investment bankers, high-powered lawyers, journalists and political operatives are considered suitable for anything: planning military strategy, negotiating international treaties or regulating a giant industry.
Cass Sunstein is no exception. The book is based on his understanding of extreme events in cost-benefit analysis. His main thesis is that, because some policy decisions are irreversible and can have truly dire consequences, they justify almost any mitigation measures. This is similar to Pope Borgia's reasoning in the British series who claimed that because the salvation of souls is at stake, any cost comes as a bargain. Sunstein uses this reasoning to justify activist climate mitigation policy, and I am on his side this time.
Yet, the reasoning smacks of Rumsfeld's "unknownable unknowns" and Cheney's admonition that, in case of terrorism, nothing less than 100% surety suffices. So, as Cheney went, any measures -- wars, torture, law-breaking and violations of the Constitution -- are justified in his "war on terror".
First, no human endeavor, no matter how carefully planned, can assure 100% success. Second, more philosophically, not all problems can be formulated in a linear "cost-benefit" paradigm. Every engineer or urban planner intuitively understands that any design involves inevitable compromises.
Take battle tanks. Increasing armor for protection also increases weight and reduces maneuverability. To compensate for increased protection, the tank needs a more powerful engine, which weights more and requires more space, which also requires protection. More powerful engine also burns more fuel, which in turn takes weight and space and so ad infinitum. In many cases, no compromise, which is technically possible, insures adequate performance and the customer, military in the above case, has to plan for different equipment, for instance, using several types of fighter planes. Each type has its own embedded set of compromises in the coordinates of "cost", "performance against air targets", "performance against ground targets" and so on. While cost criteria can be reasonably well established, performance criteria are frequently iffy and can be ascertained only in a real-life test, i.e. war, and even then not with certainty. Cold War-style weaponry was pretty useless against Taliban, which did not have a centralized command, extensive arms depots or other identifiable military infrastructure, which could be destroyed from the air by precision weapons.
Climate change mitigation is a very serious issue. Assessing it requires a lot of technical competencies, which can only be acquired through careful research and case-by-case analysis. For example, nuclear power is widely considered indispensable by the specialists to assure carbon-neutral future. Yet, because of NIMBY attitudes, a safe storage of the nuclear fuel is practically impossible. Because no new reactors are constructed, the expertise in designing and operating ones is not accumulated and much of it can be irretrievably lost. Fukushima disaster did not happen because of the violation of some arcane nuclear physics laws. It happened because the Japanese Ministry of Trade and Industry and the Westinghouse engineers ignored an obvious common sense recommendations. "Don't build nuclear reactors on a seismic fault and near an ocean" -- they ignored both -- and "don't place storage of the spent fuel rods above the reactor hall".
Humans are not mean-variance optimizers and environmental policy cannot be evaluated by the same methods banks price financial securities. Dear Cass, the fact that you are smart about law, politics and women does not mean that you are smart about everything. But leaving life-and-death decisions in modern America in the hands of bankers, journalists and lawyers is our predicament.
