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President Obama Orders Government To Plan For 'Space Weather' (nbcnews.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Network World: President Barack Obama today issued an Executive Order that defines what the nation's response should be to a catastrophic space weather event that takes out large portions of the electrical power grid, resulting in cascading failures that would affect key services such as water supply, healthcare, and transportation. The Executive Order ideally will coordinate the responses across government agencies such as NASA, the Departments of Homeland Security, Energy and others to help minimize economic loss and save lives by enhancing national security, identifying successful mitigation technologies, and ordering the creation of nationwide response and recovery plans and procedures, the White House stated. Further, the Executive Order will enhance the scientific and technical capabilities of the United States, including improved prediction of space-weather events and their effects on infrastructure systems and services. By this action, the Federal Government will lead by example and help motivate State and local governments, and other nations, to create communities that are more resilient to the hazards of space weather. The Executive Order reinforces the formal National Space Weather Strategy and accompanying Action Plan which were announced last year. It also bolsters other work such as the replacement of aging satellites that monitor and help forecast space weather, proposing space-weather standards for both the national and international air space, development of regulations to ensure the continued operation of the electric grid during an extreme space weather event, proposing a new option for replacing crucial Extra High Voltage (EHV) transformers damaged by space weather, and developing domestic production sources for EHV transformers, the White House wrote.
No, he might be old.
Ten years ago most of the comments on this story would have been about how finally a government was taking the problem seriously. Twenty years ago many of the comments would have been from auroral physicists.
Today it's mostly political bullshit.
Actually, the President is supposed to do this kind of thing - direct the executive branch to have plans and prepare for things that can negatively affect the well being of the country. It only oversteps constitutional authority if the Constitution (or other laws passed by Congress) say they can't; or if they want a single penny to enact these plans that hasn't already been appropriated by Congress.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Right. So leaving the country completely helpless in the wake of Carrington event has no defense implications.
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Sick AC here - you know, the question we want to know is: WHY NOW?
You're begging the question. As in actually asking a "have you stopped beating your wife" question.
Just because you haven't been paying attention doesn't mean this is something new. Obama's space weather initiatives go all the way back to 2010.
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