Fear in life and policy

Fear plays an important role in human life, sometimes constructive and sometimes not. It keeps people from, for example, straying too close to the edges of cliffs. It also can make them take irrational leaps.

Fear worked curiously last week in international affairs. In Kyoto, Japan, representatives of more than 160 nations met in response to the fear that greenhouse gases in the atmosphere will overheat Planet Earth. And in Baghdad, Iraq, a man whom the world has reason to fear went freely about his business, which has chiefly to do with exerting his will by killing people.

Warming fears

The Kyoto meeting represented the beginning of the end-game in a contest of fear over global warming. The scientific foundation for that fear has weakened since the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change sounded its first loud alarm in 1990. The amount of warming thought to be the possible result of a CO2 build-up has shrunk in line with growth in sophistication of computer models and in knowledge about the climate. The menu of recognized influences on both the climate and on CO₂ levels themselves has broadened. The consequences of hypothetical warming have been shown to be potentially beneficial to human life.

Yet there's a small chance for catastrophe. Warming might be extreme. The consequences might be all bad.

How small is that chance? Nobody knows. But it's enough to create fear.

In response, many people are prepared to jump over an economic cliff in order to reduce the CO₂ emissions that originate in human activity. The mission at Kyoto was to fashion an international agreement to cut human output of the gas.

What effect would the effort have on the atmosphere's total level of CO₂? Nobody knows. How, if at all, will deliberately reduced human emissions of CO₂ influence global temperatures? Nobody knows.

Some people just want to do something and do something now. They're afraid. They also will suffer economically if fear leads them into hasty responses to a climate phenomenon that's probably not a major threat to human life or livelihoods and that people may not be able to do much about anyway.

By contrast, people should fear Iraqi President Saddam Hussein more than most of them do. He's hiding something, probably the manufacture and storage of chemical and biological weapons. And he'll use those weapons when he thinks he can get away with it, which will be when he quits fearing the consequences of his misdeeds.

According to at least one high-ranking defector from the Iraqi military, Saddam didn't deploy his chemical arsenal during the Persian Gulf War because he feared nuclear retaliation. Thus works fear's constructive dimension.

There's no reason to jump over dangerous cliffs out of fright over Saddam. There is reason to acknowledge that he embodies an unfortunate potential in a few individuals for ultimate cruelty. He is extreme but not unique. Bullies willing to do anything to get their way do live in the world. And the only thing that keeps them in check is fear of retribution.

The policy-makers of the world should look closely at how fear influences these very separate issues. At the core of the global warming debate, after all, lies this question: How much should people fear, and therefore pay to resist, a climate effect they don't very well understand?

What bullies fear

And about Saddam Hussein and others like him it is worth asking this: To what extent do bullies fear what a mostly decent world will do to keep from falling victim to implements of terror that only they would stoop to use?

There is nothing cynical behind the suggestions that some circumstances legitimately inspire fear, that some do not, and that some people need to be frightened as a matter of policy. The challenge for leaders of the decent world is to keep the causes of fear in perspective, the responses to fear rational, and the role of fear in human life-on balance-constructive.

Copyright 1997 Oil & Gas Journal. All Rights Reserved.