There has to be a detailed and in‐depth analysis of why we don't solve looming disasters.

Capitalism in its present form is not the promoter of freedom its champions proclaim, but rather a direct threat to it. It also makes the hardest problem of climate change insoluble.

To optimize choices, it is important to understand the cognitive processes underlying judgment and decision making.

It is possible that mythic and fictional catastrophes are able to place real catastrophes in perspective.

As the number of noncapable poor countries increases, as in the case of eliminating terrorist safe havens, free‐riding concerns intensify, because so many countries need shoring up. Many difficult‐to‐handle global challenges today are of a weakest‐link variety where asymmetric abilities apply.

To date, no one has proposed a politically acceptable approach to limiting, as opposed to simply attenuating, climate change.

Advances in estimating the costs and benefits of climate change policies are a welcome development, but a full‐scale cost/benefit analysis that seeks to reduce complex value tradeoffs to a single metric of net benefit maximization hides many important public policy issues, especially for disasters and catastrophes that are large, discontinuous, irreversible, and uncertain.

Expert analysis is crucial not only because of public neglect of uncommons risks, but also because the case for increasing attention to rare extreme uncommons risks does not necessarily mean that these risks outweigh or deserve greater priority than other serious current and chronic risks, nor does it directly point to optimal policy responses.

Although not all public good problems are looming disasters, many of them are, e.g. climate change, depletion of fisheries and biodiversity, infectious diseases, antibiotics resistance, hormone active chemicals leading to infertility of human beings as well as animals, water depletion, grave financial crises, desertification and asteroids, to name only a few. All those problems are transnational or global and thus require international cooperation.

There is a potential catastrophe when the most important factor limiting our efforts to control infectious disease and antibiotic resistance, namely evolution, takes a minor stage in the biomedical research and regulatory community.

Evolution has dealt with environmental change by random mutation and experimenting with novel variants – policy and management needs to take a lesson from evolution and do the same.