Preparedness for What? Evaluating the Risks of Terrorism and Peak Oil

Threats to health by far outstrip our resources to deal with them. In public health The Precautionary Principle guides us in addressing major yet not fully defined or known health threats; but it is a limited guide to risk assessment, often merely used as a rationale to support public sentiment or the panic of the moment. This is born out in our nation's response to the threat of terrorism since September 11, 2001. It is now clear five and a half years later that subsequent large-scale attacks by “sleeper cells” inside the United States –a fear that was given widespread mainstream credence as imminent—have not come to pass. It is time to reflect on the significance –if any—of this fact. This is best done in a framework comparing the threat of terrorism to an issue that has received virtually no attention from public health: the impending twilight of the fossil fuel era, colloquially know as “peak oil.” This paper will set out a Health Impact Assessment framework for comparing the health threats of terrorism to those of peak oil. This is a formidable undertaking, given that each phenomenon, a terrorist attack and the consequences of peak oil, is not empirically precise and is best approached as an aggregate variable or polysemetic concept. The findings of this comparison indicate that the risks of peak oil are significantly greater for public health than are those of terrorism, primarily because peak oil threatens the complexity of modern society, while terrorism does not.