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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.
Given the increasing "it was the russians" rhetoric for everything, and the escalation in sword rattling (eg. military drills), this seems to me more like a preparation for the result of a nuclear exchange than obama actually caring about space weather (or space anything).
http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/news/uk_news/Defence/article1618135.ece
http://uk.businessinsider.com/photos-russias-military-exercise-crimea-2016-9
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/08/22/east-asia-war-games-a-tour-of-the-hotspots-as-temperatures-rise-between-china-and-the-u-s/
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/clinton-us-should-use-military-response-fight-cyberattacks-russia-china-1579187
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-37605992
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/09/08/russian-stages-major-military-drills/
http://metro.co.uk/2016/10/11/gorbachev-warns-of-nuclear-war-risk-as-russia-america-tension-rises-6185847/
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-ukraine-crisis-russia-idUSKCN0WL0EV
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/nato-risks-nuclear-war-with-russia-within-a-year-senior-general-warns-a7035141.html
You may have noticed, there are a lot of stories like the above. And aside from the hypocrisy of the US/West accusing the Russians/Chinese for hacking their infrastructure/banks/elections/whatever, whether true or not, the war drums are increasing in intensity.
So, we're meant to think Obama's concerned about space weather? Oh please.
The Department of Homeland Securty is supposed to help protect the US, as funded by Congress. The Department of Commence, of which NOAA is a part, covers space weather, as funded by Congress. There is an office of science and technology policy (funded by Congress) that has the job of advising the government regarding science. They are have been working together to make strategy (see this NATIONAL SPACE WEATHER STRATEGY document.
The executive (i.e. Obama) is telling the different parts of government to implement the strategy. It coordinates the different parts of the government on which parts should do which things. They already have the budget and legal authority to do the things, but it requires coordination. Which is exactly what a chief executive should be doing.
The more people I meet, the better I like my dog.
I'd mod this up if I could.
It's absolutely in the interests of US national security to keep the power grid keep working.
It's a perfect example of a situation where private industry cannot be counted on to prepare, as there is no motivation: There's no competitive advantage in taking any precautions - there's literally nothing to sell until after a Carrington event, and the odds of that happening during any company's lifetime is nearly zero.
Best case scenario: Your company did prepare, but everybody else didn't. So now the people in your service area can still buy power -- nothing has changed at all for you. But you can't grow into areas your competitors didn't service, because everybody that was in your competitor's area is fraking dead of dehydration, starvation, and diseases prevented by sanitation.
It's shocking how few people truly appreciate the way the refrigerator and pumped water changed our lives. It's what made our population growth possible.
The electrical grid is not a convenience. It's a life-critical necessity, without which most of us will die in weeks.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.