Michiko Kukutani's New York Times review of Ron Suskind's new book, "The One Percent Doctrine" starts out with this paragraph:  
The title of Ron Suskind's riveting new book, ''The One Percent Doctrine,'' refers to an operating principle that he says Vice President Dick Cheney articulated shortly after 9/11: in Mr. Suskind's words, ''if there was even a 1 percent chance of terrorists getting a weapon of mass destruction -- and there has been a small probability of such an occurrence for some time -- the United States must now act as if it were a certainty.'' He quotes Mr. Cheney saying that it's not about ''our analysis,'' it's about ''our response,'' and argues that this conviction effectively sidelines the traditional policymaking process of analysis and debate, making suspicion, not evidence, the new threshold for action.

It's disappointing, but not surprising, that Mr. Cheney's doctrine only covers actions that involve blowing things up, torture, and killing people.  But shouldn't his doctrine also apply to Climate Change and environmental policy?   If there is a 1% chance that huge areas of U.S. coastal cities will be destroyed by rising sea levels, shouldn't the U.S. "act as if it were a certainty"?  Or if there is a 1% chance that increasing levels of ozone in California will cause a generation of children to have seriously underdeveloped respiratory systems, shouldn't we "act as if it were a certainty"?    

If there is a 1% chance that huge areas of U.S. coastal cities will be destroyed by rising sea levels, shouldn't the U.S. "act as if it were a certainty"? In this age of a transnaiontal capitalist class, "the U.S." is just a raiding ground for profit-hungry corporations.  Since there's no money to be made in fighting global warming, the government will just pay the corporations later to have the coastal cities relocated upstream.

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