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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.
I guess he heard how many people were going to vote for Giant Meteor 2016....
Then you don't seem to understand what an "Executive Order" is. The constitution gives the President of the United States (POTUS for short) the right to act as the head of the executive branch. This means that the POTUS is allowed to determine how best to implement laws that are passed if they ambiguous when it comes to specific implementation details (Almost EVERY law out there).
The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) has already ruled that executive orders are just the means by which the executive branch outlines the rules and procedures by which they want the executive branch to implement the laws as they were written.
If you don't like the fact that Executive Actions have a lot of potential differences in them, then you should argue that Congress should pass less ambiguous laws. (I agree with this too). But making blanket statements like this does nothing for the betterment of society other than you thinking you know better than the founding fathers/constitution/scotus... and that in and of itself might be the biggest problem facing our nation... People who don't actually understand how government works saying that what it does is bad/wrong.... but not being able to say 'how'. (At least make a coherent argument as to why the "Imperial Presidency" idea of the Nixon Whitehouse (Chaney, Rumsfeld, Wolfawitz (sp?), et. al. ) is harming our nation by giving the Executive Branch too much bilateral power.... Which -is- the point of what you said... but being stupid about it doesn't help things)
Yes.
http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/
http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/produ...
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled"
No it does not require legislation, and it is not circumventing the constitution. Some aspects of this order may require appealing to Congress for funding. But to order the various branches of the Executive branch to plan for and prepare for such an event is fully within his purview. The agencies in turn will look at what needs to be done to make needed changes and will then prepare budget requests to fund such actions. Said requests then go to congress for consideration and will either be funded or not.
President Obama has overstepped his authority many times but this is not one of them.
I guess you didn't know that it's already happened.
Should have been done years ago. Better late than never.
Greed is the root of all evil.
So back in the early-mid 1990s when the Internet was a new thing to most people/organizations and US Government agencies started using their discretionary funds to build websites to provide information to Citizens, that was impermissible because there was no law authorizing it? Interesting. In fact, I'd be surprised if even today there is a specific law authorizing Executive Branch agencies to "build websites" or "use the Internet".
sPh
A lot of sick, sick burns from the ACs today. Try reading up on the Carrington Event and consider what a geomagnetic storm that generated visible aurora in southern Florida would do to a modern electric grid and telecommunication system. Not quote so funny.
sPh
Actually, in its response to the FERC's requirement to develop plans for geomagnetic events the US provision-of-electricity industry explicitly said that preparations for ordinary geomagnetic storms (say up to G5-) were its responsibility, but preparation for catastrophic events such as G5+ Carringon Events was not within its capability and should be undertaken by government.
sPh
. . .or the even more powerful Carrington Event of 1859. If that event occurred today, estimates of damage range from US$600 billion to US$2.3 trillion in North America alone. . . .
Already with the denial?
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.
Do you really think that DHS is supposed to ignore a threat to the US? Space weather is not a new thing: See: https://www.dhs.gov/publicatio... . The Department of Commerce (i.e. NOAA) has been working on space weather for a long time. The Air Force has a whole group devoted to it. All these things have gone through the funding cycles and been part of the budget for a while. The executive order tells the different departments to coordinate and who does what to respond; this is all in implementation to a National Space Weather Strategy document which went through the normal cycle of drafting, public comments, and approval.
The idea that this came out of nowhere, is not funded, or is not part of the legally directed activities of the executive branch is just insane.
The more people I meet, the better I like my dog.
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.
They did. Last year they passed this:https://www.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/house-bill/3410 which was an extension of the original 2013 CIPA and included language about 'space weather'.
And as directed the WH released in October of 2015 their directive to DHS and other departments to develop a plan for studying the impact of such an event.
This year the amended 2016 bill https://www.congress.gov/bill/... stalled (from what I can tell) and the WH issued an executive order to develop a plan for responding to such an event as directed by congress.
I know, particularly on sites like /. that it's cool to throw stones at the government and cast the rest of the world as incompetent but this is an example of government working, not government failing.
Right. So leaving the country completely helpless in the wake of Carrington event has no defense implications.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I don't know about "not been planning". The Bill Clinton administration proposed and initiated NASA's "Living with a Star" program, which GWB continued to fund throughout his administration, so if this is some kind of Democratic conspiracy, the Bush administration was in on it Obama's administration has been working on space weather for years, to their credit, although to be fair that's after this issue has been discussed by scientifically literate people ever since the '89 event.
The reason that conspiracy theorists come swarming out of the woodwork when something like this makes the news is that they get their news from lunatic fringe news sources. Ironically the mainstream media pays more attention to what is being said by crackpots than it does to articles in science and policy journals. For better or worse ignorant conspiracy theorists drive public discourse. If they haven't noticed the government has been working on this, then it must be new -- an therefore sinister.
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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.