An 18-Month Blackout and Other Horrors

By now you might have seen the piece in the New York Times that resurfaced a warning from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission about an "18-month long blackout" in the United States. This warning was first issued in 2013–and, frankly, I don't know what the NYT piece says because I refuse to click anywhere near the damn rag. But I have seen a lot of writing around this and I think it is a good thing to talk about. We'll be looping in a few other things, while we're at it, because it feels inadequate, to me, to discuss only one awful thing at a time anymore–part of the reason why things are so bad right now is that we're being assailed from multiple directions at once. While you may be worried about one main blaze, several more are smoldering around us.

I also want to take a moment to let you know that we're getting close to the publication of my book. You can preorder it now, and use code PREPPER30 for 30% off.

The Blackout

What FERC warned about was the incredible fragility of US energy infrastructure. In their warning, they stated that the disabling of just nine particular substations across the United States would plunge the whole country into darkness for up to 18 months. If you're wondering the specifics of what a substation is, they are, in fact, the relatively small fenced-in areas you're thinking of. They have transformers, circuit breakers, and a small control room typically, controlling voltages and other things that are frankly too close to math for me to care. Most of this equipment is open to the air. Substations are everywhere–there's one outside my hometown of 3,000 people, and roughly 55,000 of them across the country. This precludes simply sitting a security guard or police officer out front of them all to try and save us from this problem. Not that it would matter anyway; you can wreck them with a sniper rifle from a thousand yards away, which happened in 2013, prompting the warning. You may recall it happened in 2022, as well, in the PNW.

Facing the crumbling of all we once knew, do you think this infrastructure has been hardened at all, or is it, if anything, more frail? It's a very disconcerting thought, not just because of how easy it would be to cut the power to 300 million people, but because FERC warned it would take more than a year for power to be restored. After that length of time, I think you can imagine, the country would have simply ceased to be as we know it. It's not just that these substations are vulnerable to attack, either–this scenario does not presuppose continued attacks. It's that, for whatever reason, we don't maintain a stockpile of the parts that constitute a substation, and that these substations are not maintained especially well nor our infrastructure overall especially robust.

Preparing for an 18-month blackout is not possible for anyone other than billionaires. The world, and the country, is far too interconnected to not have a point of failure somewhere in your life. You need meds, water, air conditioning, which all require power. This is not to say that we're facing an impossible hurdle–it's to say that we need to reframe the problem.

There Is No Time Left

A UN report has officially, finally, admitted that we have passed the 1.5C goal agreed as the target limit for warming in the Paris Accords. This comes several years early, in a way, because the measure of the Accords states that we won't officially pass 1.5°C for something like ten years, maybe more. It's been three. What that should tell you, coming from a body as cautious as the UN, is that they see what's on the horizon for us. The last three years were the start, and the train is not turning around. You'll recall this is all but set in stone: 1.5°C is the threshold at which we start dropping tipping points, making climate change run fully away and ecosystem failures cascade.

I found this piece by Adam McKay particularly worthwhile. I'm not a fan of him, generally speaking (I did like The Big Short), but McKay says most of what needs to be said about climate change: it is going to kill people, a lot of people, soon, and we are not holding anyone to account for it. Quite the opposite; the people in charge continue to lie, obfuscate, or simply fail to mention the enormous burning elephant in the room.

Climate change is not the the only problem we face; it is simply the most important one. We face this potential blackout, other infrastructure failures, and generally the complete abdication of responsibility–at best, outright aggression is more likely–of our government. I say this, of course, eliding the fascism. I strongly suspect that even the death of fascism here in the United States is insufficient to save us; nothing short of revolution and the removal of all structures of power does. All that along with resource scarcity (which loops back around into climate change) brings us toward collapse. Think of it less like distinct fights and more like the many heads of a biblical monster called collapse, or a political cartoon depicting same. Collapse is all these things, but it is also a monster in its own right–an imperfect metaphor, to be sure. I'll work on it.

The Genocide in Gaza, Sudan, and Congo, and the Iran War

How fucking awful that there is a list of active genocides in that subheading. Which is actually my point. There is nowhere to turn in human history in which we were exceedingly kind to one another, but the way that we conduct warfare has taken an unabashed turn toward ruthlessness. We–and I'm indicting all of us, this is the big we–attack desalination plants, cancer hospitals, ambulances, gatherings of aid seekers, in the conduct of war. We bomb schools, power stations, civilian infrastructure. Nothing is off the table.

I didn't hear about the sabotage of two German power distribution systems until I'd written most of this article. I think it's worth mentioning, as Russia appears to have started including Germany in their attacks following a drone attack on the Leipzig airport–itself a non-traditional target. If it's not clear, the era of attacking only military targets in war is over. Everything, everyone, is a target. Russia recently utilized an all-AI drone to attack, and kill, three civilians in Ukraine. This is the first, and certainly not the last, instance of a robot deciding on its own to kill people. Considering we're only like a year away from Google's AI saying we can put glue on pizza, I don't think we can trust these machines to be judicious in their targeting. It does not seem far-fetched, then, for our power infrastructure to be attacked, whether fully intentionally or not, and for the country to fall into chaos.

We're all tired of living in unprecedented times, I know. But that's not going to stop. It won't stop until everyone reading this, to be completely honest, is dead–and I mean that to say decades from now, a century from now. This is our lot. It's an old saw I reach for at the end of every one of these letters, anymore, but I've already talked about what we need to do. We must simply do it, now. We simply must do it.