نظریه قوی سیاه: برنامه های کاربردی برای سوابق بازار انرژی و فن آوری

This article provides an overview of several key shifts in energy supply and demand within the analytical framework of Taleb's famed Black Swan Theory (BST). The BST illustrates the low probability and low predictability of highly impactful events. Through a detailed review of extant academic literature and government reports, our paper focuses on black swans in the form of historical disruptions in energy security and technological innovation (the latter of which has been a key contributor to the recent explosion in the rate of development of unconventional fossil fuel resources). The piece concludes by emphasizing the need to adopt a considerably more conservative approach to energy forecasts. Policy recommendations are provided and include the need for skepticism in long-term projections, avoiding picking specific technology winners, and the need for enhanced valuation systems for environmental externalities.

To an unsettlingly large extent, the world is a chaotic and random place wherein formative events are often unexpected and hugely impactful. However, few models – quantitative or qualitative – properly account for this entropy. To compensate for this recurring failure of economics, finance, public policy, and other fields, Black Swan Theory (BST) was articulated by the academic and quantitative trader Nassim Nicholas Taleb. His powerful writing is a stirring indictment of those who prescribe scientific solutions to social science issues, eschew unorthodox thinking, integrate unknowable variables into Gaussian probability curves, and attempt to label themselves (or are labeled by others) as “experts” in their specified field – even when they know little more than, to quote Taleb, “cabdrivers” ([1]. p. 14). His findings have been justifiably lauded by many leading thinkers and have been applied to a large number of fields, including health, law, engineering, and statistics. But perhaps no field provides a greater testing ground for this theory than energy policy. At over $5 trillion dollars per annum, it is the world's largest industry – and it comes laden with idiosyncratic shortcomings of the Black Swan variety [2]. For example, security of energy supply is increasingly threatened by unpredictability in hydrocarbon recovery rates, the dwindling accessibility of inexpensive conventional reserves (historically responsible for providing high energy returns on energy invested), mounting political risk, and pervasive market failures [3]. Myopic energy decisions are often disproportionate contributors to anthropogenic climate change, major causes of public debt burdens, and a surprisingly inertial source of unequal stakeholder interest consideration [4]. From the recent disaster at the Fukushima nuclear plant to the controversy surrounding the Chinese Three Gorges Dam to questions surrounding the optimal role for nuclear energy in a robust supply mix, the world is constantly encountering difficult questions around the limitations and deficiencies of current energy practices.