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Michael A. Livermore, Catastrophic Risk Review, (forthcoming 2023), available at SSRN.

Dan [Billy Bob Thornton]: Well, our object collision budget’s a million dollars, that allows us to track about 3% of the sky, and beg’n your pardon sir, but it’s a big-*** sky. ***

President [Stanley Anderson]: What kind of damage are we…

Dan: Damage? Total, sir. It’s what we call a global killer. The end of mankind. Doesn’t matter where it hits. Nothing would survive, not even bacteria.

President: My God. What do we do?

In the 1998 disaster film, Armageddon, a Texas-sized asteroid is on track to smash into the Earth, finishing the job started by the asteroid that did in the dinosaurs. Fortunately, a NASA official, Billy Bob Thornton, finds an oil driller, Bruce Willis, who (SPOILER ALERTS!) digs a deep hole in the asteroid and blows it up, sacrificing his life but only after giving his blessing for his daughter, Liv Tyler, to marry Ben Affleck, whom Bruce Willis loves like a son.

Professor Michael Livermore’s thought-provoking essay, Catastrophic Risk Review, makes the case that there is a better way than killing Bruce Willis to avoid massive death and destruction from asteroid strikes: Put the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) on the job.

Professor Livermore starts from the premise that our government does a poor job marshaling its resources to address catastrophic risks, “including those arising from advanced artificial intelligence, asteroid impacts, pandemics, weapons of mass destruction, and bioengineering.” (P. 6.) This unhappy state persists in part because a complex set of legal, political, and psychological reasons prevents control of low probability events carrying catastrophic risks from rising to the top of agency agendas. In setting these agendas, agencies must respond to the competing demands of Congress, the White House, the courts, and influential outside interests (e.g., Chamber of Commerce, Sierra Club). Agencies also tend to follow grooves established by internal agency culture. There is always something more pressing in the moment than responding to a one-in-a-million chance that an asteroid will in the next year or so vaporize a continent or that super-smart artificial intelligence might come to the realization that it doesn’t like people much.

Other factors that discourage agencies from tackling catastrophic risks include: Some catastrophic risks implicate the functions of many agencies, muddling lines of authority and discouraging action. Agencies with a finger in the climate change pie include EPA, DOE, DOA, FERC, NRC, NASA, and FEMA. (Pp. 16-17.) Some catastrophic risks, by contrast, are orphaned as no agency has clear authority over them. Professor Livermore cites artificial intelligence and bioengineering as examples. (P. 17.) Electoral politics presents a problem as American politicians and voters tend to ignore global costs incurred outside the United States. (Id.) Temporally speaking, they also are much more sensitive to immediate concerns rather than those that are unlikely to eventuate for thousands of years. And, let’s face it, the many billions yet unborn do not vote. (Pp. 18-19.) In addition, humans are not psychologically equipped to handle consideration of low probability events very well—which isn’t terribly surprising for a species that has spent most of its time on Earth wandering over savannah, hunting, gathering, and avoiding predators.

Professor Livermore believes that application of formal cost-benefit analysis (CBA) would identify means for mitigating catastrophic risks that create net benefits. This process, he readily admits, would raise methodological problems as formal CBA has trouble addressing harms that are unlikely to occur until far in the future. He notes, for instance, that “a trillion-dollar harm five hundred years from now, discounting to present value at a five percent discount rate, is a bit over twenty-five dollars.” (P. 5 n.2.)

In Professor Livermore’s view, however, the real barrier to applying formal CBA to mitigate catastrophic risks is institutional. Agencies need somebody—or some entity—to push control of catastrophic risks onto their agendas. Ideally, this entity would both have expertise in formal CBA and a measure of power, perhaps derived from an executive order and a close connection to the White House, to coordinate action across many agencies.

In other words, we need OIRA to help save us from asteroids (and pandemics, super-smart AI, bioengineering, etc.).

To this end, Professor Livermore proposes a draft executive order that charges OIRA with convening “a Catastrophic Risk Review Working Group to develop and initiate a government-wide assessment and review of catastrophic risks.” (P. 3.) Agencies would submit preliminary plans for addressing catastrophic risks to the Working Group, these plans would be subjected to public comment, and then the Working Group would issue recommendations for cost-beneficial legislative or regulatory actions designed to mitigate catastrophic risks. (Id.)

Allow me to confess that, in a half-educated way, I approach the topic of formal CBA with some skepticism. Its efforts to monetize are sometimes extremely strained (e.g., placing a value on reducing the incidence of prison rape). Discounting costs and benefits that will accrue far in the future presents difficult technical and ethical problems. The numbers that formal CBA generates create a scientistic appearance that tends to cover underlying value judgments. Of course, there is a huge literature that addresses these and many other controversies relating to formal CBA and centralized review by OIRA. A good-sized chunk of this literature has been written by Professor Livermore, a leading expert and proponent of the view that progressives, rather than run from CBA, should use it to support positive environmental, health, and safety protections.

I mention this skepticism only to throw into sharper relief that I think Professor Livermore’s proposal sounds terrific. I am sure that a survey of agency activity would reveal that many are taking positive actions to reduce catastrophic risks. In September 2022, for instance, NASA, as part of an effort to develop a planetary defense, slammed its DART vehicle into the asteroid Dimorphos, altering its orbit—which is awesome. But Professor Livermore’s essay makes a strong case that, given the incentives and constraints facing agencies, it is likely that they are leaving cost-beneficial mitigation strategies on the table. (A recent pandemic may be influencing my intuition here.) He also makes a strong case that OIRA is well positioned to play a coordinating role that could help solve this problem. Using formal CBA to identify strong candidates for catastrophic risk mitigation would, as Professor Livermore concedes, raise methodological problems. Still, it seems plausible that the best strategies might prove so obviously beneficial that methodological problems might fall by the wayside. Also, many progressives find formal CBA objectionable because they see it as a tool for blocking agency actions that, properly understood, are in fact beneficial for society. Use of formal CBA as Professor Livermore proposes would, by contrast, prompt positive actions rather than constrain them.

I think we should try it.

Tough movie pitch, though.

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Cite as: Richard Murphy, Armageddon, but with OIRA Instead of Bruce Willis, JOTWELL (March 23, 2023) (reviewing Michael A. Livermore, Catastrophic Risk Review, (forthcoming 2023), available at SSRN), https://adlaw.jotwell.com/armageddon-but-with-oira-instead-of-bruce-willis/.