Luddites: The Fourth Emergency Service?

Sean Moran 30/12/2025

216 3 minutes read

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Back in 2002, The United Nations Environment Programme defined an environmental emergency as a “sudden-onset disaster or accident resulting from natural, technological or human-induced factors, or a combination of these, that causes or threatens to cause severe environmental damage as well as loss of human lives and property”. Note the reference to loss of human lives: that’s what differentiates a proper emergency from a fake one. There are three emergency services, all for threats to life and, to a lesser degree, property.

There are such things as environmental emergencies: tsunamis, floods, droughts, wildfires, hurricanes, oil and chemical spills, and so on. These get dealt with by the emergency services.

Fake emergencies have however abounded since 2002. Most prominently, there is probably global warming as the result of human activity, but there is no “climate emergency”. Even if there were, the appropriate response to an emergency is not to throw reason out of the window, or to say that we cannot address the emergency without fundamental changes to the entire social system of the world. If you phone the police to report a burglary in progress, they hopefully don’t tell you that they really can’t help since, until capitalism is abolished, people are going to steal stuff.

Emergency planning is part of chemical engineering. Chemical plants can cause real environmental disasters, killing people and destroying property at a scale not often seen outside a war scenario. Contrary to the muddle-headed ideas of NGOs, this is something chemical engineers care about.

In order to care about it usefully, we consider the costs of failure, including costing loss of life, just as those responsible for providing medical care do. We might argue about the exact costs we put on environmental harm but, ultimately, society sets a baseline cost. Regulators and the courts will exact a price for loss of life, property and environmental quality. It is sound business sense to take these into consideration.

The risk matrix – hated by many LinkedIn pundits – reflects this way of thinking. The likelihood of something happening, together with the costs of it happening are considered jointly, in order to see how much resource has to be put into making it unlikely.

Public discourse is however dominated by publicity from organizations who wish to set the value of loss of life, property and environmental quality at infinity. They also want to consider every “problem” arising from this false accounting to be an emergency.

Since chemical engineers have been at this game rather longer than the scientific illiterates responsible for this propaganda, we know that there is a fundamental problem with this approach. You must prioritise “emergencies”, or you get what is known as “alarm flooding”. Overly conservative designers of control systems might want to sound a siren every time things don’t go quite to plan on a plant, but this just results in alarms being ignored, bypassed, or switched off by operational staff.

A similar phenomenon “alarm fatigue” is observed in medical care. People cannot live in a constant state of alarm. They just tune it out, and the real emergencies consequently get ignored. Perversely, this leads to the very thing which those afraid of their own shadows had hoped to avoid.

Society might do well to learn from us engineers, but of course we are supposedly the enemy, and setting any value on environmental harm is evil. Understanding that people and the environment are resilient and can handle a bit of stress is also apparently wrong. The only people who understand what to do are apparently those not contaminated by any technical knowledge of how to solve the problem at all, with clear political agendas for the destruction of the entire chemical industry.

“Seems legit”, as my students used to say (“a sarcastic response to obvious fraudulent activity or false claims”- Urban Dictionary).