3008 Guaranteeing Liability of Press and Speech on Environmental Issues
Hideki Kakeya · The proceedings of the JSME annual meeting · 2005
In this paper the author presents the idea of guaranteeing the readers and the audience to pay back the profit of press and speech when the description turns out to be wrong in the future. Historically engineering has mainly dealt with phenomena which can soon be checked and confirmed by other people. In the environmental issues, however, predictions by engineers cannot be reconfirmed soon by others because the effect of environmental damage may prevail after a long period of time. Though this is a matter of imperfection of knowledge, many journalists and some specialists misuse this uncertainty to attain their political goals by stating that things less probable can happen with a high probability. To avoid this kind of irresponsible press and speech, we propose a voluntary deposit system where specialists owe liability for their wrong predictions.