A Catastrophic Blackout is Coming - Here’s How We Can Stop It | Samuel Feinburg | TEDxBaylorSchool

We're terrible at listening to disaster warnings. Back in April, a man named Jack Phillips is in the communications room of a ship crossing the Atlantic. Jack has his headphones on, he's listening to radio communications and I don't know if any of you have ever plugged his headphones into a computer or a phone when he left the volume at maximum one hundred percent. I've done it many times and it was planned. That happened to Jack because he received a message broadcast at maximum volume. from some guy just a few miles away on another boat and then you know this thing happens and he almost rips the headphones out of Jack's head, he goes aah and gets really angry and yells at this guy, you know what you're doing? bozo broadcasts at maximum volume and the guy says something about an ice field and Jack says look, my boat is big enough that I don't have to worry about an ice field, we'll be fine, turn off the radio and come back to work later that night.

Jack goes down to his bedroom, goes to bed and never wakes up because in April 1912 Jack fell asleep aboard the RMS Titanic. We are terrible at listening to warnings about disasters. In the mid-to-late 1990s, a famous woman named Brooksley was the head of one of the government's Regulatory Commissions responsible for preventing terrible financial crises and was making a big fuss about the deregulation of derivatives and was making so much noise that the big banks got angry, took some strength and forced her to leave her position as president about Ten years later, the world entered the great recession.

We are terrible at listening to disaster warnings. In the late 90s and early 2000s, a man named John O'Neill was a great FBI agent, but his colleagues weren't very happy with him because instead of doing his job, he kept shouting about a ragtag group of fighters. called Al Qaeda that were supposedly trying to attack the United States. John was forced to resign and on September 11, 2001 he died at the World Trade Center w

here

he had taken the job of chief security officer. We are terrible at listening to disaster warnings right now, just a few hundred miles from

here

in Florida. thousands of people sit without electricity, imagine what that's like, you go out, turn on your phone, no signal, you leave.

Back inside you turn on the TV with no signal you turn on the radio there is no power you turn on the tap there is no water you turn on the refrigerator there is no refrigeration your food starts to spoil you walk outside the cars pile up there are no lights on the streets in the big cities yes' We are In New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, DC, within three to five days, food is running out in grocery stores and the trucks the city relies on to replenish that food are not arriving. Within a week or two, the sewage system begins to overflow and contaminates what is left of the water supply and people begin to contract cholera the social order begins to crumble there are mass evacuations the first responders who during the first few days were desperately trying to evacuate The people trapped in the elevators have now abandoned their positions like many did during Katrina to protect themselves and their own families but well I get depressed and worried about something like that if there is no way it can ever happen there is no way that we could ever experience a major

blackout

affecting all or much of the United States of America the unfortunate news is that the threat of such a

blackout

is very real now there are some things we all know that could disrupt life as we know it and turn it into something very bad nuclear war or collision of alien asteroids invading horrible diseases pandemic a giant plague and when we think about those things we get scared because they would be very bad, but then we take comfort because there is a very small percentage chance of them happening and it is they almost certainly won't happen, and then we think, you know, it's not worth even thinking about. things because there is no solution for this, well, the threat of a blackout, the threat of a prolonged loss of electrical power is similar in one way and different in two to those other threats, it is similar because it is that scale of magnitude in terms of how much damage it causes. it would do to our society and the rest of the world to the human race, but it is a non-trivial probability that it will happen and there is a lot we can do, but we should not avoid it, so wrote the news anchor, a really famous guy, Ted Koppel . a book on this topic about grid security and in that book he compares the power grid: hey, a big hot air balloon with many vents, many vents, some bring air in, some take air out and obviously you need the right balance of air . and air comes out if there is too much air inside, it explodes and the basket crashes.

If there is too much air outside, it deflates and the basket crashes. So Ted uses this to make an analogy with the electrical grid: you have balanced supply and demand. We have to have the right amount of electricity inside and the right amount of electricity outside or everything will potentially

stop

working for a long time. There are four ways it could happen. The first will not surprise you, it is a cyber attack. Anyone who reads the News will know that Russia and China probably already have that capability, that it's not too difficult for terrorist groups to acquire that capability, and that if North Korea can hack into Sony Pictures and if J.P.

Morgan, which spends hundreds of millions of dollars, a year to protect their systems, the objective can be breached and the objective can be breached and Equifax can be breached, which much smaller companies that manage independent parts of the network, control perhaps only one, two or three of those wings of Our hot air balloon can be breached much more easily and if you are a terrorist group there is no threat of retaliation because where the hell are you and there is no other objective than death and destruction? That kind of threat is why people like Janet Napolitano, who was head of Homeland Security under Barack Obama, threatened a cyberattack on the grid 70 80 90 percent chance in the next few decades of solar climate every 100 to 200 years the Sun hits the Earth with a big burst of energy known as a coronal mass ejection a CME the last big bang was in 1859 it was known as the Carrington Storm and it blew up a lot of Telegraph so those were the big things that depended of electricity, but society didn't care who needs Telegraph, unfortunately, we really need our National Grid much more than the people of 1859. needed Telegraph one of these a CMA a small one hit Quebec in 1989 in 90 seconds six million people lost power Scientists predict there is about a 10% chance (a one in ten chance) that a large CMA will hit Earth in the next decade and wipe out all or a portion of our terrifying National Grid 3 an attack by electromagnetic pulse like the one that North Korea threatened us with just a week or two ago where that works is very simple a large usually nuclear bomb rises into the atmosphere about 30 kilometers high or more explodes and emits a burst of electromagnetic energy that fries any thing with electricity over a foot and a half computers, cars, motorcycles, it's built after the 1984 disaster for a physical attack, our network is a little bit like a hot air balloon, but it's also a little bit like the Death Star because if you hit it in the right place, it doesn't blow up everything, but functionally it

stop

s working if you remove just a handful, about nine of the critical electrical transformers, step-down power transformers, high voltage transformers across the country. of which we have a few thousand, you can destroy the entire network in the late spring and early summer of 2013, an unknown group of individuals attacked the San José Metcalf transformer substation and in less than 18 minutes took down 17 transformers with skillful gunshots fitted with AK-47s. rifles no fingerprints on the casings they cut the communication line and disappeared in less than 60 seconds before the police arrived on the scene we don't know who they are now that substation was not critical but if someone attacked one or god forbid nine Of the critics we would be in a lot of trouble because it is not easy to replace these things they are huge they weigh tons they cost millions, tens of millions of dollars, we have to buy them in Germany South Korea, the delivery time for me is a year, it is almost impossible transport them, they are so heavy that you need special permits from the government to transport them because they could remove the bridges because they waste most of the railway lines that were used to put them in originally or they were dismantled 3040 years ago, really difficult to answer.

You could also attack those transformers using radio frequency weapons. Suitcase-sized materials you could buy at RadioShack when it existed and destroy the greatest civilization in the greatest country. the greatest military power the world has ever seen individually any of these four things is terrifying together they are so much more so the question is what do we do about it and this is where it starts to get really interesting a nuclear war how do we do ? You solve that giant plague that comes from nowhere, how do you solve that asteroid collision? things we can do, but if a big one comes, an alien invasion, but all those things are low probability, so we can forget about them or at least be safer to map them than we can with the threat of a loss of electrical power .

How is this problem solved? It's really easy. The Congressional EMP Commission, the same body that predicted that within a year after one of these attacks, two-thirds of the American population could be lost. The same body. Tasked by Congress to study this problem more than a decade ago estimated that it would cost between two and four billion dollars at most to protect the grid in an eighteen point eight trillion dollar national economy, even if they are out by a factor of ten , it is still a rounding error. So why haven't we done anything? We are really bad at listening to warnings about disasters.

Why didn't we know that Orleans, New England, Houston or Florida protected their infrastructure from the effects of storms and flooding before the hurricanes and not after? Because we are so bad at listening to disaster warnings why people buy life insurance at dramatically higher rates after their spouse dies, not before because we are reactive, not proactive why we start doing gun checks in airports after 9/11, not before because we respond to things after they happen instead of inflicting a little pain on ourselves now to avoid much later no CMA or EMP no cyberattack has hit this country yet so it's terribly difficult to gather the political, financial and political capital, the media attention to change the situation. law and fix ourselves and appropriate funds expand regulation to solve this problem, especially when there are so many other problems in the here and now that remain unresolved at this point in the movie Superman flies with the rest of the Justice League and saves the day and at this point in the presentation I'm supposed to tell you that the real world doesn't work like that, but what if it does?

I worked for Helena, a global think tank of extraordinary people focused on executing projects that improve the world. focused on solving big important problems like this together with our members extraordinary people Nobel laureates four-star generals billionaires financiers former foreign secretaries Academy Award winners human rights activists we have been holding for the last six weeks meetings with experts in this topic people from NOAA from NASA from the USGS from NATO from the CIA from the US Congress from that same Congressional EMP Commission to talk about how to implement their solution to this problem, but unlike Superman we can't do it alone , our success will depend on whether the people in this audience watching online and around the world decide to fight only knowing that all of you are now part of the solution, but knowing that is not enough, our success will depend on whether they leave this audience and They tell their friends, they tell their families, they tell their classmates. tell your coworkers tell your dog about this issue if you tell your senators and your people in Congress how much you care if you donate to an organization that campaigns on this issue if you organize in your communities in your homes in your schools In your workplaces, our success will depend on whether you all remember the story of Jack Phillips and decide to get out of bed and stop the Titanic like it never did, thank you.