This new book is essentially a condensation and concise description of those ideas. It tries so hard to be upbeat and reader-friendly that the audiobook could be narrated by Peppa Pig. It’s ridiculous sometimes. (We’ll get to that.) Still, it’s a more useful book than Begley’s original book. It has countless task lists and sidebars. This will get you started.
What interests me most about “The Emergency Playbook” is how, beneath the sunny tones, a quiet but insistent moral outrage is on display. Common scenarios covered: blackout, earthquake, fire, hurricane, flood, pandemic, bioterrorism. But the book rests heavily on the assumption that, as American democracy disintegrates into kleptocracy and worse, we may already be up to our knees in social ruin.
This is not an original concept. But the writers gathered the details into a giant pile and, in the context of contingency planning, set them on fire. When the worst happens, we’ll realize what it means that the budgets of NOAA and FEMA and CDC are going to waste. We have a government that distrusts science and suggests outlandish lies, like the joys of injecting disinfectant into one’s veins.
Edelman and Begley chart falling dominoes: political repression, revoked rights, armies of masked agents, passports revoked, division fueled by fear and anger. There is suddenly a billionaire in the world; He believes that wealth inequality often precedes collapse. With a broken CDC, disease outbreaks can go out of control. Groundwater-sucking AI data centers are exacerbating the drought.
The authors write, “Knowing who to listen to – and who to ignore – could save your life.” He notes that media companies owned by Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg, the Murdoch family, and Ellison control a large portion of the American media, and that many X users are careless or malicious bots. When will weather reports be privatized? Donald Trump is not mentioned in this book, but he dominates it.
