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

we are terrible at listening to warnings about disaster back in April a man named Jack Phillips is in the communications room of a ship motoring across the Atlantic Jack's got his headphones on he's listening for radio communications and I don't know if any of you have ever plugged your headphones in to a computer or a phone when you've left the volume all the way up at a hundred percent I've done it a lot and it planned ha that happened to Jack because he got a message transmitted at maximum volume from a guy only a few miles away in another ship and so you know this thing comes through it almost blasts the headphones off Jack's head he goes aah and gets really really pissed off and he yells back at this guy you know what are you doing you bozo transmitting at maximum volume and the guy's saying something about an ice field and Jack is like look my ship is big enough not to have to worry about an ice field we're gonna be fine turns off the radio gets back to work later that night Jack goes down into his bedchamber 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 disaster in the mid to late 1990s a woman since famous named Brooksley born was the head of one of the government Regulatory Commission's responsible for preventing awful financial crises and she was kicking up a huge fuss about the deregulation of derivatives and she was making so much noise that the big banks got pissed pulled some strengths and forced her out of her chairwoman ship about ten years later the world entered the great recession we are terrible at listening to warnings about disaster in the late 1990s and early 2000s a man named John O'Neill was a great agent at the FBI but his colleagues weren't too happy with him because instead of doing his work he kept yelling about some ragtag group of fighters called al-qaeda that were supposedly trying to attack the United States John was forced to resign and on September 11th 2001 he died at the World Trade Center where he'd taken on the position of head of security we are terrible at listening to warnings about disaster right now just a few hundred miles away from here in Florida thousands of people sit without electricity imagine what that's like you walk outside you turn on your phone there's no signal you go back inside you turn on the TV no signal you turn on the radio no power you turn on the faucet no water you turn on the fridge no refrigeration your food starts to spoil you walk outside cars pile up no street lights in big cities if you're in New York LA San Francisco Chicago DC within three to five days the food is gone from the grocery stores and the trucks that the city counts on to resupply that food aren't coming within a week or two the sewage system starts to overflow and contaminates what remains of the water supply and people start getting cholera societal order starts to break down there's mass evacuations the emergency responders who during the first few days were desperately trying to evacuate people trapped in elevators have now left 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's no way could ever happen there's no way we could ever experience a large blackout affecting the entire or a large portion of the United States of America the unfortunate news is that the threat of such a blackout is very real now there are a few things that we all know could disrupt life as we know it and make it very bad nuclear war or asteroid collision aliens invading horrific disease pandemic a giant plague and when we think about those things we get scared because they'd be very bad but then we get comforted because there's a really small percentage chance they happen and they're almost definitely not going to and then we figure you know it it's not worth even thinking about this stuff because there's no solution to it well the threat of a blackout the threat of a prolonged loss of electric power is similar in one way and different in two to those other threats it's similar because it's that scale of magnitude as far as how much damage it would do to our society and to the rest of the world to the human race but it is a non-trivial probability of occurring and there's a lot we can do but aren't to prevent it so the news anchor really famous guy Ted Koppel wrote a book about this issue about grid security and in that book he compares the electrical grid - hey big hot air balloon with a lot of vents a lot of vents some bring air in some bring air out and obviously you need the right balance of air in and air out if there's too much air in it pops and the basket crashes if there's too much air out it deflates and the basket crashes so Ted uses this to draw an analogy to the electrical grid you've got a balanced supply and demand you've gotta have the right amount of electricity in and the right amount of electricity out or the whole thing stops working potentially for a very long time there are four ways that could happen the first won't surprise you it's a cyber attack anyone who reads the news will know that Russia and China already likely have that capability that it's not too difficult for terrorist groups to acquire that capability and that if North Korea can hack Sony Pictures and if JP Morgan which spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year on protecting its systems can be breached and target can be breached and Equifax can be breached that the much smaller companies that run independent parts of the grid the control maybe just one or two or three of those flaps on our hot-air balloon can be breached far more easily and if you're a terrorist group there's no threat of retaliation because where the hell are you and there's no objective other than death and destruction that kind of threat is why people like Janet Napolitano who was head of Homeland Security under Barack Obama put the threat of a cyber attack on the grid 70 80 90 percent likelihood over the next few decades to solar weather every 100 to 200 years the Sun strikes the earth with a big burst of energy known as a coronal mass ejection a CME the last big one was in 1859 it was known as the Carrington storm and it exploded a bunch of Telegraph's so that was the large stuff that relied on electricity but society didn't care who needs Telegraph's unfortunately we really do need our National Grid a whole lot more than the people of 1859 needed Telegraph's one of these a CMA a small one hit Quebec in 1989 within 90 seconds six million people lost power scientists predict there's about a 10% chance a one in ten chance of a large CMA striking earth within the next decade and taking out all or a portion of our National Grid terrifying 3 an electromagnetic pulse attack like the kind North Korea threatened us with just a week or two ago where that works is very simple a big bomb usually nuclear goes up into the atmosphere about 30 kilometers of height or greater explodes and emits a burst of electromagnetic energy that fries anything with electricity larger than about a foot and a half computers down cars down motorcycles down it's built after 1984 disaster for a physical attack our grid is a little like a hot air balloon but it's also a little like the Death Star because if you hit it in the right spot the whole thing explodes not really but functionally it stops working if you take out just a handful about nine of the critical electric transformers step up step down power transformers high voltage transformers across the country of which we have a few thousand you can take out the entire grid in late spring early summer of 2013 an unknown group of individuals attacked the San Jose Metcalf transformer substation and in under 18 minutes took out 17 transformers with expertly placed shots from ak-47 rifles no fingerprints on the shell casings they cut the communication line and they disappeared in less than 60 seconds before police arrived on the scene we don't know who they are now that substation wasn't a critical one but if someone were to attack one or god forbid nine of the critical ones we'd be in a lot of trouble because it's not easy to replace these things they're huge they weigh tons they cost you know millions tens of millions of dollars we have to buy them from Germany in South Korea the lead time on me is is a year it's almost impossible to transport them they're so heavy you need special permits from the government to transport them because they might take out the bridges because they waste so much most of the railway lines that were used to put them in originally or decommissioned 3040 years ago really hard to respond to you could also attack those transformers using radio frequency weapons size of a suitcase materials you could buy at RadioShack back when it existed and destroy the greatest civilization in the greatest country the greatest military power that the world has ever seen individually any one of these four things is terrifying together cumulatively they are far more so the question then becomes what do we do about it and this is where it starts to get really interesting nuclear war how do you solve that giant plague comes from nowhere how do you solve that asteroid collision things we can do but if a big one comes alien invasion but all those things are low probability so we can forget about them or at least be safer for getting map them than we can with the threat of a loss of electrical power how do you solve this problem it's really easy the congressional EMP Commission the same body that predicted that within one year of one of these attacks you could lose two-thirds of the American population same body tasked by Congress with studying this problem over a decade ago estimated it would cost two to four billion dollars max to protect the grid on an eighteen point eight trillion dollar national economy even if they're out by a factor of ten it's still a rounding error so why haven't we done anything we are really bad at listening to warnings about disaster why didn't knew Orleans New England Houston or Florida protect their infrastructure from the effects of storms and flooding before the hurricanes not after because we are really bad at listening to warnings about disaster why do people buy life insurance in dramatically higher rates after their spouse dies not before because we are reactive not proactive why did we start screening for firearms at airports after 9/11 not before because we respond to things after they happen rather than inflicting a little bit of pain on ourselves now to prevent a lot later no CMA no EMP no cyberattack has ever hit this country yet and so it is terribly challenging to muster the political the financial and the political capital the media attention to change the 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 now at this point in the movie Superman flies in with the rest of the Justice League and saves the day and at this point in the presentation I'm supposed to tell you the real world doesn't work like that but what if it did I worked for Helena a global think-tank of extraordinary individuals focused on executing projects that improve the world focused on solving big problems that matter like this one alongside our members extraordinary people Nobel laureates four-star generals finance billionaires former foreign secretaries Academy Award winners human rights activists we have been holding over the past six weeks meetings with experts on this topic people from NOAA from NASA from USGS from NATO from the CIA from the US Congress from that very same congressional EMP Commission to talk about how to implement their solution to this problem but unlike Superman we cannot do it alone our success will depend upon whether the people in this audience watching online and all around the world decide to put up a fight just by knowing all of you are now part of the solution but knowing is not enough our success will depend on whether you leave this auditorium and tell your friends tell your families tell your classmates tell your co-workers tell your dog about this problem whether you tell your senators and your Congress people how my you care whether you donate to an organization that campaigns on this issue whether you organize in your communities in your homes in your schools in your places of work our success will depend on whether all of you remember the story of Jack Phillips and decide to get up out of bed and pull the brakes on the Titanic like he never did thank you [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 1,838,596

Rating: 4.7118263 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Global Issues, Education, Global issues, Impact, Science

Id: ZGan5NwJ-LM

Length: 16min 16sec (976 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 10 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Orc_]

Synopsis: TEDx presentation posted 1 week ago but recorded months before: The US electricity grid is vulnerable to preventable attacks, except things we cannot control, such as asteroids, nuclear war, or a pandemic, all which are extremely unlikely, as said by the presenter here.

[u/temporvicis]

The new definition of "black swan event": Something we could see coming and do something about, but didn't because we couldn't believe it would happen.

[u/meetandgreen]

You should check out the book series "One Second After" about the USA after an EMT attack. It's the scariest book I've ever read.