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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.
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
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.