As readers of this site know, I am convinced that one of humanity’s greatest challenges is The Fossil Fuel Depletion Crisis. The following article is reposted from The Washington Post.
Joel Achenbach
The grid was out there all along, huge, humming and yet forgotten. People on the grid do not think about the grid. That’s the essential charm of GridWorld. Technologies start as novelties, as toys and gizmos and contraptions, but when fully mature they become invisible, like the air.
And when they vanish, we gasp.
“All of a sudden it seemed like we were in a fog,” says Thomas Homer-Dixon, a political economist trapped all night in blacked-out Toronto. “As soon as the grid went down, we lost access to information. We didn’t have TV, we didn’t have the Internet, a lot of cell phones went down. . . . No one really knew what was happening. At least with 9/11 you could turn on the television. It was really disconcerting.”
He had predicted it, almost. He’d written an article for Foreign Policy last year about a hypothetical power outage in the summer of 2003, though in his scenario the blackout was caused by terrorists. He warned that the grid had too many vulnerable nodes, or hubs, and that an attack on a single point might lead to the very thing we’ve been hearing about since Thursday afternoon: cascading failures.
In classic American fashion, we are capable of looking beyond the current crisis—no matter its severity—and pondering the much more catastrophic one that we assume will eventually happen. Former energy secretary Bill Richardson said on MSNBC that if this had been terrorism, “the whole country could have been blacked out, because our grids are all interconnected.” Fortunately, this time only the financial center of America, huge chunks of the Northeast, Midwest and Canada, and 50 million people were affected.
The experts, at last report, were still trying to find the cause. Lightning? Could it be that darn Niagara Mohawk power grid again? No one could definitively rule out the Blaster worm that plagued computers this week. It is not a banner moment for the experts. They seem to know very little. Perhaps there is an extremely fried squirrel somewhere, sizzling in the weeds beneath a shorted-out transformer.
“You have an increasing level of complexity of systems,” says Edward Tenner, a historian of technology and author of “Why Things Bite Back” and “Our Own Devices.” “More things are interacting with more other things in ways that may not be easy to model.”
He continues:
“This is something that really goes back to Thomas Edison, to his experience as a telegrapher. The word ‘bug’ really originated among telegraphers. There was a new kind of problem. An artisan could previously find what was wrong with a machine, and fix it, but in this new world of electrical systems, things weren’t easy to diagnose.”
This crisis has given us a crash course in the grid. We’ve learned about the Eastern Interconnect and the PJM Interconnection and the 22 nuclear power plants that had to shut down quickly. One has to guess that turning off a nuclear reaction isn’t quite like throwing a light switch.
Broadcast news coverage of the greatest blackout in history was particularly fascinating for its low-tech, vintage-1962 quality. The coverage was refreshingly free of the usual slick graphics and dramatic World War IV theme music. On ABC Thursday evening, Ted Koppel, mysteriously unseen, narrated the news while a phone kept ringing distinctly in the background, making it sound like he was simultaneously running a telethon.
Ray Kurzweil, author of “The Age of Spiritual Machines,” says the Blackout of 2003 shows that the electrical grid is merely a first Industrial Revolution technology. It’s highly centralized. It’s old-fashioned. We are now in the midst of the second Industrial Revolution, which favors decentralized technologies such as the Internet.
“The second is based more on emulating the ways of biology, and biology tends to be decentralized. Consider the brain. There’s no chief executive officer neuron,” says Kurzweil, reached by phone on the comfortably electrified island of Martha’s Vineyard.
Beyond the obvious fact that the grid provides the power that drives modern civilization, it also radically reorganizes human society. Specifically, the grid allows wimps to be alpha males. There are tens of millions of men (and women too, but let’s not complicate the theory we’re working up here) whose social stature is inextricably dependent on consistently available electricity. Men with concave chests and zero muscle tone can plug into the grid and dazzle the world as, say, mergers-and-acquisitions lawyers.
But take away the grid, and their world collapses. The computers shut down. The electronic databases disappear. The wimpy-man jobs go extinct, while real-man jobs become more valuable. Soon the wimpy men will see their social dominance give way to the reign of large, brutish, club-wielding men who drag women around by the hair.
Strangely enough, in either scenario Arnold still becomes governor of California.
(True story: Several years ago, when Bethesda lost power for several days due to an ice storm, a highly educated lawyer discovered to his astonishment that a neighbor had made a cup of coffee. “How did you do that?” he asked. She said she boiled water. But how did you boil water? he asked. She said she had a gas stove. Stunned, he said he had a gas stove, too, but noted that it had an electronic ignition to create a spark. She said, “I used a match.” In a state of nature, this man would be eaten alive by field mice.)
There are people out there who have deliberately gone “off the grid,” using alternative energy, like solar cells or wind power, or they simply give up any hope of a hot shower. The rest of us do this only for a few days at a time, and we call it camping. Camping liberates us from the tensions of GridWorld. And then after a few days, filthy, scratching our bug bites, we go home, thrilled to plug back into the grid. After very long camping trips, people have been known to weep at the sight of a microwave.
In the future we will become even more tied to the grid and gridlike technologies. Kurzweil foresees a day when computer chips are embedded in our clothes and eyeglasses.
“Contact lenses will have very high-bandwidth connections to the Internet at all times. We’ll be online all the time,” he says.
Lloyd Dumas, a political economist at the University of Texas at Dallas, says, “More and more technologies have become what engineers call a black box. Automobiles are like that for many people. People don’t understand technological systems very well, they can’t distinguish well between technology and magic. It all seems magical.”
Until it doesn’t work, and you have to crawl out of a subway like a sewer rat.
Henry David Thoreau was possibly the first American to go off the grid, when he went to the woods near Walden Pond. There was no electrical grid then, but there was an Industrial Revolution.
Thoreau wrote:
“Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.”
Perhaps this is time for everyone to take stock of their dependence on invisible technologies. We should think like Thoreau. We should imagine our lives without the grid.
And then go to the store and buy batteries.