Reducing the Risk Surplus

On New Years Eve I was driving to Vermont to meet up with my college friends for a good 'ol fashioned 'Barn Dance.' Everything on the radio was feeling very profound, most likely a combination of my own year end self-reflection and a marketing ploy that had read my mind and tapped right into it. And what better to get me going than the author of "The Big Questions," Steven Landsburg telling me to think hard about what kind of lawyer I wanted to be on NPR's Talk of the Nation.

Landsburg, has come up with what he calls, "the economist's golden rule." The rule states that you should account for the effects you are having on other people the same that you account the effects on yourself. Now while he admits that this is not always possible, human nature is such that some things are more important to you

than the general public, it serves as an interesting guidepost and perhaps an even more interesting experiment. Even just thinking about what that would look like may surprise you. I encourage you to engage in the experiment and let me in on any epiphanies! I plan on doing the same.

But Landsburg went on: Can you be a lawyer and follow the economists golden rule? Many lawyers just transfer wealth from one individual or company to another and some defend actions that are clearly not in the best interest of other people as a whole. So Lansburg left me with: You can be a lawyer and follow the rule but you must think hard about the kind of lawyer you want to be. To follow the rule you must leave the world wealthier than you found it.

So I thought about my career path, as an aspiring environmental attorney, and how I could formulate an economic framework that would allow me to determine by the end of it whether I had followed the economist's golden rule.

In his new book, What the Dog Saw, Malcom Gladwell revamps an old New Yorker article entitled Blowup. In the article he discusses the work Target Risk by Gerald Wilde. I discovered within the chapter an opportunity to calculate my effect. What Wilde observed throughout the course of his work, looking at human reaction to risk, was that changes that one would think would make conditions safer don't. For example when anti-lock breaks were installed in taxis there were more accidents! The drivers felt safer and therefore they drove faster and more recklessly. Humans have a tendency to want to consume the savings they acquire by reducing risk and therefore act more dangerously in some other area. In Sweden in the 1960s the government switched the side of the road people drove on and accidents went down, people were more uncomfortable and therefore more cautious. Some argue that this creates risk-homeostasis, however in the realm of climate change and energy consumption I would argue we are running a risk surplus and don't even realize we're driving on the wrong side of the road!

Energy consumption is increasing despite 2009 being the hottest year on record in the Southern Hemisphere. Moreso, consumption of as Tom Friedman calls them in Hot, Flat and Crowded, the fuels from hell, is increasing faster than the consumption of renewable fuels. This is why small positive action (recycling) cannot be a license for large negative action (driving an SUV), we cannot cash in small environmental victories for even more dangerous behavior. We need to act like we are driving on the wrong side of the road and we need to do it for a long time.

So as an environmental attorney my goal is to reduce the risk surplus by reminding my clients and adversaries and anyone who will listen that unsustainable behavior is dangerous and limited responsibility cannot be cashed in for recklessness.