The still-developing disaster of Hurricane Katrina has some obvious parallels with the Kobe earthquake ten years ago. Both were predictable (and widely predicted) events. The damage from Kobe took years to fix, and it’s already obvious that the same will be true of Katrina.

Equally significantly, weaknesses in the state response to Kobe had big psychological impacts in Japan. The earthquake came at a time when the Japanese economy was recovering from the bursting of a huge property bubble, but when triumphalist rhetoric about the strengths of the Japanese state, and the inevitable dominance of Japanese ways of doing business, was stronger even than during the 1980s. The failure of the initial government response to the disaster and the mismanagement and pork-barrelling that characterised the reconstruction effort went a long way towards reducing confidence.

So far the response to Katrina seems even more chaotic and ineffectual than the Japanese government’s response to Kobe. It seems as if, even over the weekend, when the odds of disaster were already better than even, there was no serious attempt to prepare for the implementation of contingency plans. In fact, judging by the statements coming out of FEMA, it appears that no contingency plan exists, beyond hoping for the best.

So far, there hasn’t been time to think much about the reconstruction and long-term relief effort that will be required. At a minimum, it will be economically necessary to get the ports and energy infrastructure working again. Then there’s the question of what kind of assistance can be provided to half a million or more people who’ve been displaced from their homes for months at least, and perhaps permanently. A coherent and well-run response would do a lot for confidence: a continuation of the current shambles will not.

It’s also worth thinking about the relationship between Katrina and the Kyoto agreement. Of course, it’s impossible to tell whether the severity of the hurricane was increased by global warming, and it remains unclear whether the frequency and severity of tropical storms has increased, though most models predict such an increase in the long run.

Moroever, the Kyoto protocol is only a modest first step towards a response to global warming. Even if the US had ratified Kyoto, there would not yet have been more than a minuscule effect on the rate of warming and effects like tropical storms.

There is one important similarity though. The policy of hoping for the best, even in the face of strong evidence that a disaster was likely, shown up in the failure to plan for an event like Katrina is exactly the same as the one we have seen in relation to Kyoto. As Mark Kleiman observes, “failing to plan is planning to fail�.