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What We Can Do About Massive Solar Flares
Reader resistant sends in an update to our discussion a month back on the possibility of violent space weather destroying power grids worldwide during the upcoming solar cycle. Wired is running an interview with Lawrence Joseph, author of "Apocalypse 2012: A Scientific Investigation into Civilization's End," and John Kappenman, CEO of electromagnetic damage consulting company MetaTech. The piece brings two new threads to the discussion: the recently discovered presence of an unusually large hole in Earth's geomagnetic shield, magnifying our vulnerability, and possible steps we can take over the next few years to make the power grid more robust against solar flares and coronal mass ejections. There's also that whole Mayan 2012 thing. Quoting John Kapperman: "What we're proposing is to add some fairly small and inexpensive resistors in the transformers' ground connections. The addition of that little bit of resistance would significantly reduce the amount of the geomagnetically induced currents that flow into the grid. In its simplest form, it's something that might be made out of cast iron or stainless steel, about the size of a washing machine. ...we think it's do-able for $40,000 or less per resistor. That's less than what you pay for insurance for a transformer. [In the US] there are about 5,000 transformers to consider this for. ... We're talking about $150 million or so. It's pretty small in the grand scheme of things."
You guys are paying so much more for electricity than we are, that's what I'd call the EU doomsday scenario. You Europeans are just insane.
Canada is a good example of the government doing it partly right.
I don't have any examples related to the power grid, but I do have some others.
1) Our banks are slightly more regulated than in the US - and so, they didn't all collapse.
2) Our judges are appointed rather than elected, so they don't have to throw lots of people in jail to win votes. We haven't had any problems with huge numbers of innocent people getting tossed in the slammer, yet, but I recall there was one state where this was happening in the US.
3) Our airlines/airplanes have government inspectors rather than bribe-able private inspectors. We haven't had a lot of airplanes go down from defective parts, but it seems like US airplanes go down every week or month.
4) Most of our bridges are maintained well enough that they don't suddenly collapse. There have been a few, but they all had less deaths than bridges collapsing unexpectedly in the US.
Don't get me wrong - your government sucks and would probably do a worse job than private corporations - but those private corporations suck too when they try to save money.
The only solution is a completely new mindset for your society - everyone has to change their beliefs on what works and what doesn't, and then the system has to be overhauled.
But whatever system you had, and whatever system you move to, both will be flawed in some way.