Morally, legally, financially, environmentally: can we really create huge unprecedented risks in pursuit of our own comfort, and manage them successfully? I am coming to agree with Thomas Homer-Dixon that our destructive capacity has far outstripped our ability to manage or even understand it.
But we keep pretending that better planning, better management, more training is all we need; plus some public punishment of the occasional offender. The US National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drillingfalls into this trap, I think. See my column in this month’s SLAW, the award-winning legal blog, for more details.