Texas has been on my mind lately. No, I’m not a Republican, and I’m not crazy about hot weather. That is, in fact, the problem. Texas has been in the recent news, but not because of its heat. Quite the contrary.
An unexpected winter storm last month stressed the electric grid in Texas and almost brought it down. Bill Magness, president and chief executive of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), said Texas was “seconds and minutes” from complete energy system collapse. Mr. Magness in fact went as far as to say that if ERCOT had permitted a blackout to occur, we’d be talking “about how many months it might be before you get your power back.”
The especially unsettling matter is that, while somewhat anomalous, the storm was far from a once in a century event. The fact that it was nevertheless almost able to bring down the Texas grid vividly illustrates the extreme vulnerability of the country’s networks and infrastructure. Texas came perilously close to a “tipping point” that might have ultimately led to a social unraveling. And unfortunately, Texas is no outlier.
I’m not just talking about states’ electrical grids. Tipping points refer to any threshold beyond which a minute change in something can produce major consequences. About a year ago, Nature magazine published an article that documents how climate change threatens to bring us close to a number of distinct tipping points with highly unpredictable consequences.
One salient example that has not received sufficient coverage is the presumed localized climate change effects on the pre-civil war Syrian situation. Without going into the details, evidence exists that about a decade ago a severe drought precipitated the social conflicts that triggered the Syrian civil war. Social tensions had already been present. The point is that the severity of the drought “tipped” matters over to where they raged out of control.
Another example once again receiving attention is the Atlantic Gulf Stream. For decades scientists have been concerned with the long-term effect on the oceanic current of freshwater deposits into it around Greenland. The freshwater is the result of substantial glacial melting. The growing fear is that it will cause sufficient dilution to halt the Gulfstream flow. And who knows, a tipping point might even be reached without a complete stopping of the flow. It could produce unknown effects on ambient air temperatures, especially in Europe.
As you know, in economics we like to use mathematics to represent dynamic situations such as these. I mostly want to avoid doing so here, of course. But I think that a few simple diagrams could clarify what I am talking about and help answer the question posed in the title of the article. So, for example, Graph A in Diagram 1 depicts the simplest possible case, a linear relationship. It is difficult to conceive of any real-world relationships that can be represented in this manner, so let’s just keep things abstract and leave the interpretation as ‘y’ is a function of ‘x.’
Diagram 1
The next picture could, however, adequately represent many different relationships. And not only in economics. For example, if ‘x’ stood for an average population height, and ‘y’ for an average weight, the relationship would probably look something like that shown on Graph B. That is, while they do not move in a perfectly linear pattern, they likely move in a monotonic one. That means unidirectional. Or in this particular case that weight never decreases with height. Both linear and monotonic relationships can also slope negatively. Think, for example, per capita income and infant mortality.
The term “exponential” is often used in colloquial speech – I would venture more now than ever – and Graph C is simply a picture of such a relationship. Here, ‘y’ increases with ‘x,’ initially gradually but eventually very rapidly. An example here might be population or financial asset growth over time. An example of a negative exponential relationship (not shown) is radioactive decay.
Now we get to the interesting part. Each example we have seen so far has shown a type of continuous function. Without formally defining it, you will see what I mean now when I show a function that is discontinuous. Graph D illustrates a relationship between ‘x’ and ‘y’ where, beyond a certain x > x*, y suddenly jumps to a much higher value. The threshold x*, then, represents the so-called “tipping point” beyond which we see a sudden and dramatic change.
Ok, back to Texas. We can use illustration D to depict its recent crisis. We can let “x” stand for some measure of weather-related stress on the electric grid. And “y” can represent the number of households without electricity or, alternatively, the number of person-months. Last month’s storm came very close to stress level “x*,” which would have caused an abrupt change from a minor challenge to a major catastrophe.
Before concluding, however, that the Texas situation is a microcosm of what humanity faces early in the 21st century, allow me to offer an alternative narrative (Diagram 2). In it, x* represents what is known as an inflection point. Here there is no necessary discontinuity as before. But it is a very unstable point. Movement away from it in either direction gathers momentum and distances itself increasingly rapidly (ok, we can say exponentially). Depending on what “y” represents, movement away from x* can result in either a rapid improvement or a rapid worsening. Not so a tipping point, which suddenly increases the magnitude of a change in only one direction.
Diagram 2
If you’ve been reading my recent posts, like the one on social complexity, you know my views about the instability of our present situation. Might then not climate change, political polarization, pandemic-fueled economic collapses – not to mention other severe and mounting crises like mental health and vulnerability to cyberattacks – constitute a perfect storm of the kind that could approach multiple tipping points simultaneously?
As I’ve discussed with my students in the seminar on progress, we have the technological capacity to withstand numerous major crises. The problem is social progress is at least decades behind technological progress. Yet rapid improvement in this area could change the game in the other direction. It is why I hope that humanity finds itself at a historical inflection point instead of a tipping point. Call me naïve but what else, really, is there to do?