We are watching the planet burning up, with thousands of wildfires, with some so big that smoke from Oregon fires are choking out New York, and record-setting temperatures, with temps in the 120s in many areas now, and they are still denying every bit of it. The right wing and people like them will certainly doom the human race, one way or the other.
Great! Our infrastructure investment needs all the champions it can find in order to hold off Republican opposition. Our power grid needs help NOW, let alone the risk of being blasted by the sun.
republicans would deny it, call it fake news, we would all die or it would miss and they would say, see, we were right all along dems would research it more, see if it could be diverted and try to make that happen if posible
the power grid really does need work, that is for sure, we need to build in redundancy and better distribution, our power grid is very outdated
That's an infrastructure project I can get behind, securing our power grid against EMP/Carrington events. But I think the interest in Congress for this is around zero.
I'd bet a lot of congressmen have no idea about Carrington events. But, I think they may know about Texas in a cold snap, our increasing use of electricity, etc. My hope is that we do work on our totally inadequate power grid, as our use of electricity is increasing and it is vulnerable to attack, too. Then, I hope those working on this problem know something about EMP events.
We know how the New York Times would respond: LIFE ENDING KILLER ASTEROID TO DESTROY EARTH Women and Minorities hardest hit. You get an A+ in Disaster Planning & Management I have to wonder about people who aren't smart enough to make the distinction between Conservatives and Religious Conservatives. And you would have experienced the exact same thing during the last Inter-Glacial Period, except sea levels would be more than 3 meters higher and global temperatures would be 7.5°F to 15.3°F warmer. So, what of it? Uh, more like negative 10,000. EMP and the Carrington Event are the same thing. The only real difference is with nuclear weapons, and you'd need two 450 kt warheads detonated about 85 miles up, one west of the Rockies and the other about St Louis or so, you have neutrons, x-rays and gammas. With solar flares, and they have to be X-Class and greater than magnitude 15, you have protons, x-rays and gammas. An EMP field is 3-dimensional, with height, width and depth. The only things in the US unscathed are not in the US, namely Alaska, Hawai'i and the US Virgin Islands. Yes, nuclear EMP is politically correct and doesn't believe in borders, so it would include southern Canada and northern Mexico. Solar EMP is more like blasting a shot-gun at Earth.
Yes, they get "informed" of all sorts of stuff that they don't jump to solve. And, let's face it. There is no way they have the time and staff to care about all the stuff they get informed about. So, while I think many make bad choices, we as citizens need to raise the temperature (lol!)
It seems an uphill battle, unless you can think of a current interest group that has influence with this administration that might be open to making this argument. I can't think of any.
True. At this point, I think getting a serious infrastructure bill passed is probably the important step. From there, one can hope that those addressing our electric grid will be smart enough to care about it. And, the various failure modes of our grid are something they will care about.
The effects are the same but the scope of an EMP and a Carrington Event is quite different. A Carrington Event could devastate an entire hemisphere, but an EMP attack would be (more or less) limited to the target country and nearby areas. Luckily, the mitigating solutions are the same.
It never could be. Hardening the electrical grid from any type of EMP is cost-prohibitive. The cost to fully modernize your electrical grid is currently $3.7 TRILLION and it will increase at ever rapidly rising rates. The truth of the matter is Americans have never paid the true cost of electricity. Granted, from an economics stand-point, electrical power is inherently problematic, and there's no easy way to deal with it, but no one paid their fair share. You only paid enough to generate power, maintain the system, and provide some profits. In order to generate power, maintain the system, continually upgrade it, and provide some profits, you'd have pay what the rest of the world pays. Because you didn't pay the true price, your main stations, sub-stations, switching stations and transformer stations are a mish-mash of 19-teens, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s and early 1950s equipment -- which is inherently EMP-proof -- and late 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s transistor-based systems that won't survive EMP, and late 1980s, 1990s and 2000s mirco-processor-based systems that won't survive, and then the latest technology, which means it's wired to the internet and won't survive. The other thing is your low- and high-tension power transmission lines. The life span is only 50 years and the vast majority of that is well over 50 years. We're talking well over 150,000 miles of high-tension power transmission lines that go from generation stations to transformer stations, and then literally several Million miles of low-tension power transmission lines that run to the main stations, sub-stations and switching stations. They're gonna fail all by themselves. It's a question of when, not if.
And the sky falls once again. Most of the fires in California are started by the electric utility or people. They aren't started by global warming. The 120 temperatures were very temporary and very limited in geography. They were a weather phenomenon, not a short term change in climate. Calm down. Enjoy life. Don't let politics get you down. Fear mongering is a common tool used by government to tell us how we should live our lives. View it as entertainment. Incidentally, the largest forest fire in Oregon history was named the Tillamook Burn. It occurred in the 1920's and is no longer visible through the new growth forest. I used to drive past the area every time a traveled from Portland to the coast.
Electric utilities are not owned by government in the U.S. They are highly regulated private sector businesses. There is no uniformity. Some companies have very modern infrastructure like the company that serves people a mere three miles from us. On the other hand, the company that serves us is referred to locally as the amateur electric company. The point is that capitalism provides for lower prices from competition - even with companies that are allowed to be monopolies like utilities. It is that capitalist competition that provides all the wealth to the world's wealthiest nation. If electric utilities were owned and managed by government here, the price of electricity would have become un-affordable long ago. But thanks for the criticism, My knuckles are appropriately sore from the ruler strike.
The only way an asteroid could "divide" American society any more than it already is would be to cut the country in half when it hit.....hey, maybe not such a bad outcome after all!
Gosh... has the AGW narrative devolved into this these days? There is actually a pretty high probability that in something ike 2036? unless the current orbit of an already identified asteroid is "changed" when it passes close to earth in 2029? that an asteroid the size of the rose bowl is going to hit miles from the Kalifornia coast. Folks, like Neil DeGrasse are trying to build financial support for a mission to "move" the asteroid to a safer orbit. Degrasse refers to this as an extinction event.
Translation.... Democrats will simply pass a law making it illegal to impact the earth. Problem solved.....
The only logical thing to do is to build a huge ark and sail it away from Earth, then when the oceans recede it will be safe to return home, to both complete devastation and to a reborn and new Earth where it will be vital to be fruitful and multiply.