All their disads are non-unique – a Privatization’s inevitable internationally
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2ac – at: fitch rating Fitch changed nothing Poole 8 – Searle Freedom Trust Transportation Fellow and Director of Transportation Policy at the Reason Foundation (Robert Poole, 9/1/8, “Airport Policy and Security Newsletter #38,” http://reason.org/news/show/airport-policy-and-security-ne-37)//twemchen I've fielded several media calls regarding a Fitch Ratings report earlier this month revising its outlook for U.S. airports from stable to negative. The report focused mostly on the near-term, citing higher fuel prices and a sagging economy as causes of reduced enplanements. "While many [U.S.] airports have seen reductions of as much as 8% in the first and second quarters of 2008, many could well see further declines." Longer term, if the underlying pressures continue for several years, there may be more fundamental changes in airline pricing that could lead to larger reductions, especially in low-fare passengers. Despite this gloominess, the airport privatization trend shows no sign of flagging. In Reason's Annual Privatization Report 2008 (a major report produced every year), I wrote the section on airports and air traffic control, and as you will see if you read it, the past year has been very active in airport privatization. (www.reason.org/apr2008/air_transportation.pdf) That chapter was written in April and May. Since then, there has been no let-up. Last month Spain's government announced that it will sell an initial 30% stake in state-owned airport operator AENA, which operates most of the country's important airports. A cabinet minister estimated the economic value of AENA at $46.7 billion. A week later South Korea's government said it would offer a 49% stake in Incheon International Airport. The government hopes to secure a strategic tie-up with a global airport operator. Several existing airport companies have restructured some of their holdings recently. Macquarie Airports last month announced the sale of nearly a billion dollars worth of assets, including a 27% stake in Copenhagen Airports and 26% of Brussels Airport. In addition to a share buyback, Macquarie Airports is using the proceeds to purchase a 5.6% stake in ASUR, one of three privatized Mexican airport operators. And Spain's Ferrovial, parent company of BAA, sold Belfast City Airport to Amro Global Infrastructure Fund. The point here is not just that some companies are selling but that others are eagerly buying. Germany's privatized Fraport, after initial success as part of the team that is modernizing New Delhi's Indira Gandhi Airport, announced the opening of a permanent office in India, to pursue additional business opportunities. And in Russia, companies are queuing up to bid on a $1.3 billion, 30-year concession to develop and operate St. Petersburg's Pulkovo International Airport. Back in the USA, this summer the City of Chicago eliminated two of the six teams that had submitted qualifications to lease Midway Airport-Abertis/Babcock & Brown and Carlyle Infrastructure Partners. With Macquarie's subsequent decision to withdraw, that leaves three teams still in the running for Midway: Hochtief/Goldman Sachs, YVR/Citi Infrastructure, and Morgan Stanley/Aeroports de Paris. My sources tell me of interest in several other cities in being the next participants in the Airport Privatization Pilot Program, including Austin, Milwaukee, and New Orleans. - See more at: http://reason.org/news/show/airport-policy-and-security-ne-37#sthash.XjKjBqQ7.dpuf ***ADD-ONS 2ac – privacy/civil liberties The plan underpins privacy and civil liberties in airport screening Edwards 13 – Director of Tax Policy Studies at Cato (Chris Edwards, 11/19/13, “Privatizing the Transportation Security Administration,” No. 742, Lexis)//twemchen Aviation screening is an important element of aviation security, but that does not mean that all TSA actions are appropriate.93 Some TSA practices push the legal boundaries of permissible searches and seizures. Another issue is whether the TSA is using its screening activities to discover evidence of crimes that are beyond the scope of its proper role in aviation security. The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution bars unreasonable searches and seizures. With airport searches, individuals do have a reduced expectation of privacy, and federal courts have held that warrantless searches of all passengers prior to boarding are permissible.94 But some of TSA’s current practices, such as full body pat-downs and the use of Advanced Imaging Technology machines, may be over the legal line. AIT machines were designed as secondary screening devices, but their current use as primary screening devices arguably fails the legal tests set by federal courts.95 When the AIT machines were first deployed, the invasiveness of the machine’s full-body images led to a public backlash. In response, Congress now requires TSA to use the machines with software to protect privacy. There are two types of AIT machines: millimeter wave and X-ray backscatter. The latter machines raised both privacy and health concerns and have been removed from U.S. airports.96 The millimeter wave machines have been upgraded with software that renders a stick-figure image of a person with dots appearing for potentially threatening items.97 The intrusiveness of TSA pat-downs has also caused a lot of concern. Americans have been appalled at reported incidents of offensive pat-downs of young children, the disabled, the elderly, and people with medical conditions that require them to wear items such as insulin pumps, urine bags, and adult diapers. In one case, a woman dying of leukemia was taking a trip to Hawaii. She had called the TSA ahead of time to ask about her special needs. But in the airport security line, TSA agents lifted her bandages from recent surgeries, opened her saline bag and contaminated it, and lifted her shirt to examine the feeding tubes she needed to prevent organ failure—all in front of other passengers and after the TSA refused her request for a private screening.98 Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) and other policymakers have condemned the needless harassment that some passengers have received from the TSA.99 Another civil-liberties concern is that the TSA sometimes acts as if it had broad police power outside of its transportation security role. For example, recent sweeps by teams of TSA agents at rail and transit stations have resulted in arrests for minor offenses such as drug possession, and this activity seems to simply duplicate local police functions.100 When Americans travel by air, they do not surrender all their privacy, and case law bars TSA airport screeners from looking for evidence of crimes beyond plots against aviation security.101 Yet TSA seems to have developed mission creep at airport checkpoints.102 In one incident in 2009, TSA harassed Steven Bierfeldt, who had just left a convention in Missouri and was flying out of a local airport when he was subjected to detention by TSA screeners.103 He was carrying $4,700 in a lockbox from the sale of tickets and paraphernalia from a political group that he belonged to, but TSA screeners considered the cash suspicious. They interrogated Bierfeldt and threatened him with arrest and prosecution unless he revealed why he had the money. Bierfeldt was eventually released, but he recorded the incident with his cell phone. The American Civil Liberties Union filed suit on his behalf, and in response TSA revised its screening guidelines. Current TSA rules now state that “screening may not be conducted to detect evidence of crimes unrelated to transportation security.”104 However, there have since been other troubling incidents. In 2010, TSA screeners scrutinized Kathy Parker while she was departing from the Philadelphia airport.105 Parker was carrying an envelope with $8,000 worth of checks, about which Philadelphia police and TSA screeners interrogated her. They told her that they suspected her of embezzling the money and leaving town in a “divorce situation.”106 Police tried to contact her husband by phone, but they were unsuccessful and eventually released Parker. Aside from invasions of privacy, the frequent congestion at U.S. airports caused by security procedures has a large cost in terms of wasted time. There are about 740 mil-lion passenger flights a year in the United States.107 For example, if a new security procedure adds 10 minutes to each flight, travelers would consume another 123 million hours per year. That is a lot of time that people could have used earning money or enjoying life with their families. Policymakers need to remember that citizens value their time and that unneeded bureaucratic procedures destroy that precious resource. TSA surveillance decks civil liberties Poole 14 – Searle Freedom Trust Transportation Fellow and Director of Transportation Policy at the Reason Foundation (Robert Poole, 1/23/14, “Airport Policy and Security News #97,” http://reason.org/news/show/1013705.html#d)//twemchen Two branches of the Department of Homeland Security—Customs & Border Protection and TSA--have been conducting (or condoning) warrantless searches. Unexpected ramp searches of general aviation aircraft by CPB have aroused the Aircraft Owners & Pilots Association (AOPA). The second type of search, in which TSA has encouraged operators of valet parking at commercial airports to search cars parked there, has received far less publicity. Over 40 GA pilots have told AOPA that they and their plane have been searched by Customs & Border Protection agents (or by local law enforcement acting at CBP's request). In September AOPA President Mark Baker met with Rep. Sam Graves (R, MO) to discuss the issue, which led to Graves requesting the Inspector Generals of both DHS and DOT to investigate these actions. Graves pointed out that no evidence of criminal activity has been found in any of these searches. Thomas Winkowski, acting commissioner of CBP, has responded that various federal regulations permit "any federal agent" to check pilot and aircraft documents as the basis for stopping, searching, and even detaining law-abiding GA pilots on domestic flights. AOPA General Counsel Ken Mead cites an internal CPB memo that calls such searches "zero-suspicion seizures" as indicating that the agency has overstepped its bounds. "We don't object to law enforcement officers stopping and searching general aviation aircraft when they have a legitimate reason to do so—in other words, when they have probable cause or reasonable suspicion of illegal activity." But he adds, "It is our position that federal law enforcement officers have absolutely no authority to stop GA aircraft without meeting that legal standard." In a troubling sign that CPB has no intention of backing down, it has recently moved to reclassify the data in its Air and Marine Operations Surveillance System (AMOSS) to exempt them from the Privacy Act, which makes them unavailable to reporters, attorneys, and everyone else. Stories also appeared in the media last year about a number of cases in which TSA-approved airport security plans call for inspecting every vehicle left in the care of airport valet parking. Shocked passengers at Birmingham, Rochester, and San Diego have complained about learning—sometimes via a card left inside the car—that the vehicle had been searched "under TSA regulations." Bob Burns of the TSA Blog Team responded to the initial outcries by trying to deflect attention from the agency itself to the airport's own security plan (which of course is worked out under the direction of the airport's TSA Federal Security Director). The rationale for searching valet-parked cars is that such cars may be left at curbside, next to the terminal, for an uncertain period of time until the valet attendant drives them to the valet parking area. And that if a bomb were inside the car when next to the terminal, it could kill or injure many more people than if it went off inside the nearby parking structure. But many other vehicles linger for a while at the terminal curbside and could be an equally large threat—but they are not searched. The underlying problem with both the GA aircraft searches and the valet parking searches is that they are done without probable cause and without a warrant. The Fourth Amendment supposedly protects Americans from such searches. In historical context, it was a huge change to "search" every single airline passenger before permitting him or her to proceed to the gate. But given what appeared to be the dire threat to aircraft and passengers exemplified by Al Qaeda, Congress and most Americans agreed to this exception to the Fourth Amendment. More than 12 years later, even mandatory screening of every passenger is looking like overkill. And searching private planes and passengers' cars without probable cause and a warrant is exactly the kind of DHS mission creep Congress should put a stop to. 2ac – dhs risk analysis The plan institutionalizes effective DHS risk analysis Poole 6 – Searle Freedom Trust Transportation Fellow and Director of Transportation Policy at the Reason Foundation (Robert Poole, 1/1/6, “Airport Security: Time for a New Model,” http://reason.org/news/show/airport-security)//twemchen There are three basic flaws in the current model. First, the law presumes that all air travelers are equally likely to be a threat, and mandates equal attention (and spending) on each—which is very wasteful of scarce security resources. Second, the TSA operates in a highly centralized manner, which is poorly matched to the wide variation in sizes and types of passenger airports. And third, the law puts the TSA in the conflicting position of being both the airport security policymaker/regulator and the provider of some (but not all) airport security services. DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff and TSA Administrator Edmund “Kip” Hawley have called for re-orienting security policies along risk-based lines. At the same time, the Government Accountability Office has found that today’s very costly airport screening is little better than what existed prior to “federalization” of this function—and that the performance-contracting approach implemented on a pilot-program basis at five airports appears to have worked slightly better than the TSA-provided screening. Both factors set the stage for fundamental reform. This report calls for three such reforms, to address the three fundamental flaws in the current approach. First, to remove the inherent conflict of interest, the TSA should be phased out of performing airport screening services. Instead, its role should become purely policymaking and regulatory (and better balanced among all transportation modes). Second, the screening functions should be devolved to each individual airport, under TSA oversight. And third, screening and other airport security functions should be redesigned along risk-based lines, to better target resources on dangerous people rather than dangerous objects. Devolving screening responsibilities to airports would mean that each airport could decide to meet the requirements either with its own workforce or by hiring a TSA-approved screening contractor. This model has been used successfully in Europe and Israel since the 1980s and has worked very well. Funding would be re-allocated to airports on a monthly (or at least quarterly) basis, rather than annually as at present. This would permit a much better match of screener numbers to actual passenger throughput, in the rapidly changing airline environment. And with the funding managed at the airport level, airport managers would have strong incentives to finance the upgrading of baggage-screening systems to make them less labor-intensive. At most larger airports, this would mean replacing lobby-based EDS machines with automated, in-line EDS systems. At smaller airports, it would replace labor-intensive ETD installations with EDS machines transferred from larger airports. These changes alone would save over $700 million per year in screener staffing costs nationwide. A risk-based model would separate passengers into three groups: low-risk, high-risk, and ordinary. Low-risk travelers would be those who qualify for Registered Traveler status. They would get expedited checkpoint processing and their bags could usually bypass EDS screening. This change would cut future EDS acquisition costs by $1 to $2 billion, and would yield another $200 million annual savings in baggage screener costs. High-risk travelers would receive mandatory body scans and explosive-detection inspection of both checked and carry-on baggage. These changes would free up resources to use for increased security in lobby areas and on the tarmac, as well as improved control of access by non-passengers to secure areas. Overall, this set of risk-based changes would put much greater emphasis on guarding against the threat of explosives (as opposed to just weapons) getting onto planes, as well as the threat of suicide bombers in terminals and on planes. In addition, by putting all airport security functions under the control of the airport (instead of dividing them between airport and the TSA, as today), and putting all these functions under armslength TSA regulation, overall airport security would be more integrated and more effective, and the whole program would be more accountable. And freeing up nearly $1 billion a year from screening would provide the resources for reconfiguring passenger checkpoints and beefing up the other aspects of airport security. Spills over to broader risk assessment within the DHS Loehr et al 93 (Dr. Raymond C. Loehr, Chair, Science Advisory Board; Dr. Kenneth L. Dickson, Chair, Ecological Processes and Effects Committee; and Dr. Alan W. Maki, Chair, Ecorisk Subcommittee; “Commentary on the Ecological Risk Assessment for the Proposed RIA for the RCRA Corrective Action Rule,” 11-19-1993, http://nepis.epa.gov/Exe/ZyNET.exe?Client=EPA&Index=1991+Thru+1994&Docs=&Query=%28model%29+OR+FNAME%3D%22P100JOWW.txt%22+AND+FNAME%3D%22P100JOWW.txt%22&FuzzyDegree=0&ZyAction=ZyActionD&User=ANONYMOUS&Password=anonymous&SortMethod=h%7C-&MaximumDocuments=1&ImageQuality=r75g8%2Fr75g8%2Fx150y150g16%2Fi425&Display=p%7Cf&DefSeekPage=x&Time=&EndTime=&SearchMethod=1&Toc=&TocEntry=&TocRestrict=n&QField=&QFieldYear=&QFieldMonth=&QFieldDay=&UseQField=&IntQFieldOp=0&ExtQFieldOp=0&XmlQuery=&SearchBack=ZyActionL&Back=ZyActionS&BackDesc=Results+page&MaximumPages=1&ZyEntry=&SeekPage=x&ZyActionID=&File=D%3A%5C%5CZYFILES%5C%5CINDEX+DATA%5C%5C91THRU94%5C%5CTXT%5C%5C00000030%5C%5CP100JOWW.txt&Doc=%3Cdocument+name%3D%22P100JOWW.txt%22+path%3D%22D%3A%5CZYFILES%5CINDEX+DATA%5C91THRU94%5CTXT%5C00000030%5C%22+index%3D%221991+Thru+1994%22%2F%3E&QueryTerms=) In conclusion, we support the inclusion of an ecological risk assessment in the RCRA Corrective Action RIA. However, we are concerned that the current draft does not incorporate the approach contained in the Ecorisk Framework, and the assessment of ecological risks is incomplete. We recognize that resource limitations may preclude a complete ecological risk assessment in this document, yet the approach taken may serve as a model for other risk assessments and RIAs. Consequently, we recommend that the RIA be modified to: a) more explicitly follow the Ecorisk Framework; b) discuss which ecorisk factors were considered in the RIA and why; c) discuss which ecorisk factors were not considered and why; and, d) discuss uncertainties associated with insufficient knowledge, inadequate data, natural variability, etc. All the extinctions Roberts 8 (Patrick S. Roberts, Fellow with the Program on Constitutional Government at Harvard University, Assistant Professor with the Center for Public Administration and Policy in the School for Public and International Affairs at Virginia Tech, Ph.D. in government from the University of Virginia and former postdoctoral fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, “Catastrophe: Risk and Response,” Homeland Security Affairs, 4(1), Jan 2008, http://www.hsaj.org/pages/volume4/issue1/pdfs/4.1.5.pdf) In Catastrophe: Risk and Response, Richard Posner makes the case that the risk of global catastrophe is higher than most people think, and he analyzes the reasons why the U.S. under-prepares for natural, technological, and terrorist catastrophe. Attempts to mitigate the risk of catastrophe will incur heavy costs, whether economic (as in proposals to reduce the effects of climate change) or civic (as in policing reforms that infringe on civil liberties). How might the U.S. and the world weigh the extraordinary costs and uncertain future benefits of avoiding catastrophe? Posner advocates economic tools, especially cost-benefit analysis, as a guide in determining which catastrophes are worth protecting against and which are so unlikely to happen or so trivial that they are not worth the cost of defense. Catastrophe is a central work in the burgeoning literature on how to deal with rare but high-consequence events. Long the domain of engineers, statisticians, and the reinsurance industry, the unique properties of rare, high-impact events drew attention after the attacks of September 11 and Hurricane Katrina. Nassim Taleb’s recent bestseller, The Black Swan, documents the unpredictable nature of rare, high-consequence events. 1 He shows how traditional “Gaussian” statistics use past events to predict future ones according to the properties of the bell curve. With rare events, however, we do not know the underlying properties that define the curve. Mapping these non-linear relationships proves difficult. Recent work in behavioral economics shows that people have trouble calculating risks. They often wildly over- or under-estimate numbers, but rarely provide a large enough margin of error. 2 When social scientists bother to check the predictions of “experts,” of when and where international political events such as revolutions and wars are to take place, the experts fare little better than chance. 3 Most historically important events are impossible to predict with confidence. We know that disasters will occur, just not precisely when. Scholars from a variety of disciplines have documented the myriad reasons people fail to take steps to reduce the damage caused by inevitable disasters. Sociologists focus on macro-level trends such as urbanization that lead to high concentrations of people and resources attractive to terrorists and vulnerable to accident and disaster. 4 Another line of inquiry examines the components of “social vulnerability” in race, class, and gender. 5 Disasters affect different social groups in different ways, and identifying patterns of how particular groups respond to disasters can help mitigate consequences. The elderly, for example, may lack social networks to help them evacuate. Political scientists, as a rule, analyze the political incentives behind intervention in disaster policy. The system of presidential disaster declarations suits the federal nature of U.S. government by providing a role for governors in the request process, but it also provides few incentives for presidents to limit disaster spending. 6 Other studies examine how entrepreneurial bureaucracies such as FEMA attempt to find a mission and build capacities to meet that mission, sometimes running into conflict with the short-term goals of politicians. 7 Posner’s work, however, descends from the macro level of social and institutional theory to the individual, drawing on the literature of economics to understand how individuals think about the risk of rare events. Catastrophe locates the source of disaster risk in individual behavior such as living in floodplains, not purchasing insurance, or not taking the possibility of technological accidents seriously. Posner’s contribution is to synthesize the literature in economics and cognitive psychology to explain the obstacles to efficient risk calculation imposed by the human mind. Most people have difficulty thinking about abstract probabilities as opposed to events they have observed. Human mental capacity is limited, and startling events such as the attacks of September 11 trigger our attention. But evaluating risk requires paying attention to what we do not see. There has been surprisingly little attention in the popular media given to pandemic flu, even though influenza killed approximately twenty million people in 1918-1919. The disease has no cure, and vaccines are difficult to produce because of the mutability of the virus. People from all walks of life pay greater attention to issues in recent memory and tend to give greater weight to confirmatory evidence; the cumulative effect is to under-prepare for catastrophe. Many Threats Posner makes a persuasive case that the risk of global catastrophe is growing. Some critics emphasize the increase in the perception of risk in industrialized Western nations, but Posner explains why objective risk is on the rise.8 New technologies such as nuclear power and high-energy physics are potentially more destructive than technologies of the industrial era. Urbanization concentrates targets and terrorist groups have more destructive weapons and a greater global reach than ever before. To some degree, these risks compound. Terrorists can mimic natural disasters by, for example, destroying dams to cause flooding. Global warming contributes to the loss of biodiversity. The likelihood of these risks is so slight that people have trouble taking them seriously, unless one of them has been realized in recent memory. Americans worry about terrorist attacks, and the U.S. government devotes millions to preventing and protecting against terrorism, even thought the risk is quite small. While some critics have argued that the risk of terrorism has been vastly overstated, Posner acknowledges that the threat is serious. He, however, wants to put it in perspective by comparing terrorism to a host of other risks. Some of his suggestions seem to come from a science fiction movie. For example, he worries that high energy physics experiments could trigger a “strangelet scenario” in which a chain reaction condenses the earth into a tiny ball. The book’s wide range of scenarios, from global terrorism to global warming and asteroid collision, suggest what a truly all hazards approach might mean. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) attempts to reconcile preparation for natural disasters and terrorist attacks in “all hazards” plans, but these represent only a narrow range of catastrophic threats, or dangers, that could lead to massive loss of life and property in a concentrated period of time. One possibility for the future, undeveloped in this book, is for DHS to morph into a department of risk assessment in which it analyzes a range of threats and devotes resources to reducing vulnerabilities. While Posner usefully identifies risks that threaten the American way of life, he neglects some disasters that are costly, because of their frequency, but are not catastrophic. Floods cause billions in damage each year, and the total cost over time could reach that of a catastrophic disaster, depending on the threshold.9 A department of risk assessment might address frequent small but cumulatively costly disasters as well as rare but catastrophic ones. Posner’s focus on catastrophic disasters highlights their global nature. A “strangelet” scenario, asteroid collision, or global warming would harm, and perhaps extinguish, the entire planet. Remedies for catastrophic disasters require global coordination because one country’s vulnerability increases the vulnerability of every other country. The “global war on terror” adopts some of this logic, and homeland security experts advocate globalizing security by locating port facilities abroad and increasing cooperation in screening for dangerous materials overseas.10 Though he is often associated with limitedgovernment libertarians politically, Posner’s analytic law and economics approach here leads to the proposal for a new bureaucracy, an international version of the Environmental Protection Agency. One nation’s actions affect the rest of the planet, he argues, and just as a national agency regulates environmental protection among states, an international agency could provide information and regulate standards to reduce the cost of global warming or loss of species among nations. COSTS AND BENEFITS IN AN UNCERTAIN WORLD Recognizing the most serious risks is one problem, but figuring out what to do about them is another. Airport baggage screeners and law enforcement fusion centers may interdict terrorist attempts, but at a cost. How much is enough? Global warming provides a hard case for determining how much to spend on prevention and mitigation because the threat is highly uncertain. Posner’s analysis begins with a sober recognition of the problem. “No species has so stressed the environment as modern human beings are doing, and at an accelerating pace as China, India, Brazil, and other large, poor countries modernize rapidly,” he writes. “The human impact on the climactic equilibrium is inherently unpredictable.” (p. 50) Scientific experts who publish in peer-reviewed journals have reached a near-consensus that the climate is growing hotter, which exacerbates other threats such as loss of species and political instability. Posner favors a conservative approach that reduces the human impact on the environment, but cautions that the costs of intervention should not outweigh the benefits. In other words, it may be easier to accept the inevitability of climate change but slow its effects by taxing emissions to reduce pollution and funding new agricultural programs for countries in which climate change disrupts the food supply. Whether it is better to address the causes of global warming or the effects, Siberia will not become the breadbasket for the world without a high cost. Cost-benefit analysis provides more accurate predictions of doomsday scenarios than science fiction, and it can provide helpful guidelines for decisionmaking because, as Posner shows, human intuition does not produce optimal results. But in his zeal for applying cost-benefit analysis, Posner understates the uncertainty found in the world. We know that catastrophic bioterrorism and global warming pose threats, but we do not know their likelihood. We can calculate the consequences of, for example, a nuclear explosion but we cannot fully calculate risk because we do not know the underlying probabilities of a terrorist attack. We cannot even predict where and when an earthquake will strike, or how many will strike the U.S. in a single year and of what magnitude. The earth’s physical processes remain mysterious and contingent, and predicting the behavior of human-caused disasters is even more challenging. The Department of Homeland Security confronts uncertainty in attempting to adopt a “risk-based” strategy trumped by department leaders.11 The basic DHS strategy document released in spring 2005, the National Preparedness Guidance, is based on fifteen scenarios, including a major hurricane and a dirty bomb attack.12 These represent “worst-cases” rather than a pure risk-based strategy because there is no way to calculate the probabilities of each of these scenarios with accuracy. We simply do not know the likelihood of a bioterrorism attack in the next year. Estimating complex processes such as global warming, loss of species, and the “strangelet scenario” that are affected by the development of new technology is even more complicated. Scientific progress could either mitigate risk by creating clean energy or exacerbate risk by producing new technology with catastrophic possibilities. The best theories of invention portray it as a semi-random process similar to natural selection.13 There is simply no way to predict the future impact of technology on the risk of a particular disaster with certainty. Faced with uncertainty, Posner recommends a conservative approach. He proposes a regulatory body to screen scientists, especially foreign ones, and to review potentially dangerous technologies. He also recommends more science education so that citizens will have the acumen and the interest to question whether research and development is worth the cost, rather than allowing the scientific establishment to proceed on its own. With Catastrophe, Posner brings his often witty, sometimes counterintuitive economic rationality to bear on thinking about high consequence rare events and the costs of humans’ unprecedented impact on the natural environment. Posner is the author of more than twenty books and, according to one list, the seventieth most frequently cited public intellectual. (Granted, he compiled the list). As with rare events, what readers do not get in Catastrophe may be as important as what they are offered. The book shows what it might mean to think about allocating resources among a wide variety of catastrophic risks, a truly all hazards approach, but it neglects the institutional politics that have bedeviled homeland security. DHS has struggled to define what it should protect, whether government sites, private buildings, or networks that perform essential functions such as power generation and transportation. In addition, the department lacks a single approach to what it should protect against, and the question of what homeland security really is remains open. FEMA prepares for natural disasters (though most capacities rest with state and localities) while the Secret Service, for example, worries about crime and terrorist acts. A host of other potential catastrophes are outside the mission of DHS. If homeland security is to last as a concept, it will have to include more than preparation for the last terrorist attack. Posner’s approach to cost-benefit analysis provides a starting point for thinking about how to allocate resources among threats, a task that does not come easily (or naturally, if we accept Posner’s premises borrowed from evolutionary biology). To go further, DHS will have to institutionalize risk assessment and provide clear guidance to states, localities, private industry, and even politicians about what risks are worth preparing for and how. Cost-benefit analysis is not a self-enforcing process. Instead, it is a tool that can help discipline the unavoidably messy process of deciding which risks to prepare for. Directory: file -> view view -> Western Europe after wwii view -> Author study: paul fleischman view -> Qpa1 7ela study Guide view -> Arctic Oil/Gas Neg view -> November 1970 Approximately 150,000-500,000 deaths Bhola Cyclone Bangladesh view -> Grade Level: 6 Unit of Study: Caribbean glce view -> Citation: Duffield, Katy view -> Table of Contents Lesson # view -> Chinese Wind Energy Disad Download 1.61 Mb. Share with your friends:
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