Quote of the week

A week ago, Henry Paulson, a Republican, and former US Secretary of the Treasury wrote in the New York Times about his concerns about climate change. He said there were lessons to learn from the financial crisis of 2008, when he was secretary. There is one important part for you to reflect on:

The nature of a crisis is its unpredictability. And as we all witnessed during the financial crisis, a chain reaction of cascading failures ensued from one intertwined part of the system to the next. It’s easy to see a single part in motion. It’s not so easy to calculate the resulting domino effect. That sort of contagion nearly took down the global financial system.

With that experience indelibly affecting my perspective, viewing climate change in terms of risk assessment and risk management makes clear to me that taking a cautiously conservative stance — that is, waiting for more information before acting — is actually taking a very radical risk. We’ll never know enough to resolve all of the uncertainties. But we know enough to recognize that we must act now.