Brittle Power- PARTS 1-3 (+Notes) - Natural Capitalism Solutions

Chapter Three: How Systems Fail 29tist, hearing of the unexpected discovery that certain propellant gases inaerosol cans could deplete the ozone layer, exclaimed, “What the hell else hasslipped by?” A great deal, concludes William Clark of the Oak Ridge Institutefor Energy Analysis, “has slipped by, and always will.” 27 That is as true ofenergy as of any other field.Most energy policy analysts spend their professional lives coping with theconsequences of a singular event in 1973. That event, the Arab oil embargo,surprised them: “The acute dependence of the western economies on a continuousoil supply was (rightly or wrongly) not viewed as hazardous, becausesupply was treated as a fixed function of geology rather than a variable functionof politics.” 28 Yet the same analysts who were so caught by surprise in1973 cheerfully go on today to assume a surprise-free future. It is not going tobe like that at all.In 1974, a list was drawn up of the twenty most likely surprises in energypolicy over the next decade or two. 29 Near the top of the list were “a majorreactor accident” and “a revolution in Iran.” Number twenty on the list, ofwhich no examples could be given, was “surprises we haven’t thought of yet.”There will be many of those, not only because there is so much still unknownabout how the world works, but because rare events do happen.A principle enunciated by George Orwell and E.B. White, and known todiscomfited experimental scientists as the Totalitarian Law of Physics, statesthat “whatever is not forbidden [by laws of physics] is compulsory”—it willhappen sooner or later. There are many possible events which may be individuallyvery rare: their probabilities may be vanishingly small. But these surprisesare also almost infinitely numerous, so collectively they will catch up withus, and one or another of them is likely to occur fairly frequently. We live ina world full of nasty surprises, and had better prepare for it.National security, therefore, requires not only that we calculate the probabilityof foreseeable kinds of failure. Our designs must also include the broaderphilosophy of resilience in the face of the incalculable: lunatics, guerrillas,Middle East wars, freak winters, social turmoil, and those unpredicted hightechnologyfailures which all experts insist are impossible—until, like the 1965Northeast blackout, they happen. True preparedness requires not merely anexplicit readiness for foreseeable threats—the subject of the next nine chapters—butalso an implicit readiness for unforeseeable and imponderable threats.The theme of unforeseeable threats to complex, interactive systems, and thedesign principles for resilience that flow from the inevitability of such threats,will return for full development starting in Chapter Thirteen. This theme is thekey to designing an energy system that can survive the surprise-full future.