The events of Sept. 11, 2001 have caused large changes in U.S. and world politics, and may yet involve the United States in a major war, but their economic effect has been minor.
The recession ongoing before Sept 11 was alleviated after the attacks by monetary pump priming and homeland security-related spending, but now seems to be resuming owing to factors independent of terrorism. However, it is unfortunately only too easy to postulate a disaster worse than that of Sept. 11, so it’s worth looking at the world’s options for disaster recovery, and what the chances would be for a successful resumption of high-level economic activity.
The chances of a devastating economy-destroying catastrophe are not all that remote, because there are several such catastrophes that might happen. First, and maybe least worrying, archaeological evidence is now pretty clear that not only were the dinosaurs wiped out by a meteorite impact, but that other such impacts, large enough to disrupt the world’s climate, happen with some frequency — maybe one every million years or so, thus giving a probability of 0.01 percent in the 21st century — considerably more likely than winning the lottery.
Such an impact, by throwing up a cloud of dust spanning the globe, could cause a period of years of global winter, which by destroying food production would cause widespread famine. Probably humanity itself would survive such an event better than did the dinosaurs, but certainly world population could be reduced by 50 percent or more. A moderate event of this type would probably cause only localized physical and economic damage, a severe one might be physically survivable by the human species, but would it be economically survivable?
A second possibility is that of atomic war. Not a single terrorist nuclear attack, which would be a truly terrible event, but with an economic impact only moderately greater than that of Sept 11, but an outright nuclear war with exchange of multiple warheads. This is the nightmare of the 1950’s and 1960’s, in which 70-90 percent of the U.S. population is wiped out. In the sci-fi stories of that time, such an event generally reduced humanity to a stone-age existence; would it do so in reality?
A third possibility is that of disease, a more contagious equivalent of AIDS (or maybe a mutant form of AIDS itself), for which a cure could not be found before it had raged through the population, leaving only a small residue of people who were either immune or extremely isolated (like the Chilean grapes, which escaped the 1873 phylloxera blight that devastated world wine production.) As AIDS has shown, even a moderate version of this catastrophe has horrendous economic costs. The full version would simultaneously cause both economic collapse and catastrophic demands on the health system; it might therefore be the worst of the four visions of apocalypse.
The fourth possibility is of course that of ecological disaster. Here the trauma is presumably slower (though from “chaos theory” one can certainly imagine an ecological disaster that builds slowly, but reaches a critical point after which it causes collapse within a year or two.) One can for example think about a “global warming” that is more pronounced than currently postulated, perhaps a temperature increase of 25 degrees Celsius by 2100. Such an event would at some point cause economic collapse, and decimation of the world population, but the climatic degradation would then halt, as the smaller population and lower economic activity would reduce the warming factors.
There are undoubtedly other possible triggers of apocalypse, but the four outlined above seem to provide a reasonable range of scenarios to consider. The first and third do no significant damage to structures, and the first and fourth do not significantly damage health (for those with adequate food sources.) The first three, once they have occurred, are more or less gone (other than lingering radioactivity in the second case or weakened health in the third) while the fourth possibility differs in that global warming, once it has happened, would presumably remain, at least for a prolonged period.
Clearly there is a point beyond which an advanced civilization cannot survive. If a disaster left only 50 people alive worldwide, it is most unlikely that a return to the Stone Age could be avoided. If global warming extended to 50 degrees Celsius above present levels, the planet would become uninhabitable by our species. Yet the middle outcome, in which the advanced economy is destroyed but can be rebuilt, is, I believe, a surprisingly large portion of the “phase space” of disaster possibilities. It’s therefore well worth looking at the options for disaster recovery in that case.
Suppose, for example, that 80 percent of the world’s population has been wiped out by such a disaster. What would one do to recover, and how would one do it?
If 80 percent of the population has been wiped out, some problems become considerably easier. In Western countries, for example, everybody would have access to five used cars, so there would be no need of an automobile industry in the short term, and no need for expenditure on road construction — the serious traffic jam would be a thing of the past. Most other consumer durables, too would be in oversupply, at least in the short term, unless the nuclear war or meteor-imposed winter had damaged the stock of such goods in some way.
Consumer perishables, in particular food, are a very different matter. If 20 percent of the world’s population remains, then the supply of canned goods is adequate for only a few weeks, and hence it would be essential to re-start the mechanisms of food production and distribution as soon as possible.
This could not be done with Stone Age tools and power sources. 20 percent of the current world’s population is 1.2 billion people, approximately the population at the end of the nineteenth century, and far above Stone Age levels. Consequently, if modern agriculture cannot be restarted, the situation where 20 percent of the world’s population remains would be unstable; starvation would reduce population to Stone Age levels.
The missing link, that will enable the world’s machinery to continue operating, is of course power. Gasoline is likely to be in short supply, because the disruption in world trade will have prevented the production, shipping and refining of new gasoline stocks to replace those used. Similarly, electric power that is dependent upon coal is likely to suffer from shortages of raw material, while nuclear power requires a number of outside inputs, the production of which may be disrupted. However, hydroelectric power depends only on a sufficiently large source of running water; in at least the second and third scenarios, where climate has not been disrupted, that is likely to continue without interruption and hence, provided sufficient power station technicians remain alive, the production of hydro-electric power can be restarted immediately. Similarly, many power stations fired by natural gas, transmitted through pipelines, should be fairly easily recoverable.
The return to production of power, in turn, will allow the restarting of the information technology systems on which we have come to depend, including of course the Internet, which will allow the scattered remnants of humanity worldwide to co-ordinate their recovery activities.
Once world communication has been re-established, if climate has not been disrupted, and worldwide radioactivity is sufficiently low to allow crops to be grown, the recommencement of food and petroleum production should be a relatively simple matter, provided technicians are available. With the two immediate requirements of food and an energy source satisfied, and planet-wide communication intact, the rebuilding of an economy sufficient to support 1.2 billion people will be an arduous but eminently feasible operation, provided any damage caused by atomic war or fallout is confined to the big cities, which will not be needed with population so much smaller. Over a generation, 21st century civilization will be re-established, possibly with some necessary improvements.
In the two cases where climate has been affected, the task may be more difficult. If a meteorite impacts, causing several years of winter, starvation will be the principal reducer of the world’s population, and it is likely that stability will be attainable only when conditions are returning towards normal. On the other hand, in that case, it is likely that non-food industrial operations will still be fairly close to normal, with adjustments having been made similar to those of a hard winter. Hence the recovery process would be relatively straightforward — though hydroelectric power would probably be unavailable because of freezing, other sources would be intact. It would simply be a matter of determining the point at which crops can successfully be grown (other than in controlled conditions) and organizing an appropriate planting program.
In the case of global warming, there is likely to be huge disruption to the world’s industry and an epidemic of disease before the food problem becomes acute. Moreover, as discussed above, the problem is likely to occur over a period of decades, giving plenty of time to plan adjustments in food supply (if such adjustments are indeed possible.) On the other hand, conditions after the disaster are likely to remain very hostile, so that food production would need to be shifted northwards as far as possible, and drought- and heat-resistant strains of crops developed to maximize the output from what temperate land is left. In this case, the long-term problem would be more acute than in the other three cases, although the existence of time to plan would make the short-term difficulties more manageable.
From observing the mayhem caused initially by the Sept. 11 attacks, I think it unlikely that there exist viable contingency plans for dealing with the catastrophic events postulated above. Nevertheless, provided conditions allow for the survival of a substantial human population, the re-establishment of an advanced civilization in such circumstances should indeed be possible, with consequent benefits to mankind. Since the probability of a cataclysmic disaster of one of these kinds in the next century is clearly non-zero, perhaps of the order of 1-2 percent, it has to be worth devoting resources to planning for these and other possible apocalyptic eventualities.
Such plans should not be hidden in a government bureaucracy, which could well be wiped out by the cataclysm. Instead, they should be available, at least in outline, for general review over the Internet, and citizens with specialized expertise should be encouraged to add to them or amend them to ensure that everything has been properly considered.
As Sept. 11 showed, sometimes the worst really does happen.
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(The Bear’s Lair is a weekly column that is intended to appear each Monday, an appropriately gloomy day of the week. Its rationale is that the proportion of “sell” recommendations put out by Wall Street houses remains far below that of “buy” recommendations. Accordingly, investors have an excess of positive information and very little negative information. The column thus takes the ursine view of life and the market, in the hope that it may be usefully different from what investors see elsewhere.)
This article originally appeared on United Press International.