Civilization, The Iron Triangle, and You

This is Part I, click here for Part II.

“Get her?  That was your plan, Ray?  Get her?” – Ghostbusters (1984)

Texans have a plan for hurricanes – and they’re pretty sure they haven’t seen any little ole storm that can beat them.

This is part one of a multipart series.  The rest of them are here:  (Civilization After an EMP: TEOTWAWKI (Which is not a Hawaiian word), TEOTWAKI Part III: Get on your bikes and ride!, Internet Cats, TEOTWAWKI Part IV and The Golden Horde, TEOTWAWKI Part V: Camaro and Camo,  TEOTWAWKI Part VI: The Rules Change, The Center Cannot Hold, TEOTWAWKI Part VII: Laws of Survival, Mad Dogs, The Most Interesting Man in the World and TEOTWAWKI Part VIII: Barricades, Tough Decisions, and Tony Montana),  TEOTWAWKI Part IX: Home at Last, and the Battle of the Silo and TEOTWAWKI Part X: Gump, Wheat, and Chill: Now With 100% Less Netflix,and Last TEOTWAWKI – The Battle for Yona, Final Thoughts on EMP, How To Power Your Car With Smoke

I was at the hotel when it happened.  There wasn’t any noise, really.

It was night, in February.  Although a near-record blizzard was hitting the Northeast (it was called “SNOWPOCALYPSE II” in the New York Post), where I was in the Midwest was unusually warm – the night temperatures were forecast to be above 40F for the next week, not bad when the usual low for this time of year was 20F.

What woke me wasn’t a sound – it was, rather the opposite of a sound – a sudden silence.  The radio I had on in the hotel room (it helps me sleep) was off.  And I mean it was off – no power at all to the LED display.

The pale pinkish-yellow sodium vapor light from the parking lot poles was never really stopped by the blackout curtains of the hotel – it always crept around the corners and through the cracks.

It was gone, too.

The heater to the room was silent.

I looked at my wristwatch.  It had a button to illuminate the display.  I pressed it.

Nothing.

A blackout would explain losing the radio, losing the parking lot lights.  It wouldn’t explain the watch.

I picked up my cell phone, and pressed the button on the side to wake it up.

Nothing.

A blackout wouldn’t kill the batteries.

I wasn’t groggy anymore.  I guessed looking at the moon that it was about 4AM.  At this time of year, it would be about four hours before full sunrise.

I had been travelling for business and was a 252 miles from home.  I got dressed and opened up the window.  The interstate was dark – no lights.  The town that I was staying at – big enough for a Marriott™ because it was on the interstate – was dark.

It wouldn’t be long before dozens of people woke up.  And it wouldn’t be long until a few people came to the same conclusion that I had come to:  the electronics were gone – all of them.  Power wouldn’t be back on soon, if ever.

I had to get home before it started to get bad.  And that would be soon.  But how?  Well, the beginning of a plan was already starting to form in my head.

### (for now)

Honestly, I think that greatest probability collapse of America will come by degrees – more of an erosion than an earthquake.  I think of this slow collapse like Hemingway described how bankruptcy happens in The Sun Also Rises: “Two ways – gradually and then suddenly.”

“Gradually” is the world falling slowly into some sort of Blade Runner®-esque existence.  The decay is evident even now as “poop in the streets” has become a new normal in big cities, which occurs here in flyover country only during the Fourth of July parade as the horses (who are last in the parade for a reason) come through.  Then the streets are cleaned.  And then we don’t have poop in them.  I could keep going – lowered life expectancy, lowering IQ, but I’ll stop for now.

This post isn’t about gradually, this post is about “Suddenly.”

There exists, for the first time in history, the ability and civilizational structure to destroy civilization all at once.  Sure, we’ve had nuclear bombs since 1945 hanging over our heads, but we’ve upped the ante – we’ve created a civilization that is more prone to catastrophic failure than any in the past.  Gary North (you can find his free articles here LINK), a prominent warning voice about the Year 2000 (Y2K) problem wrote many articles in which he pointed out the vulnerabilities associated with modern society.  He called the three prerequisites for maintaining our current civilization the Iron Triangle.  North defined the three legs of the triangle as electricity, telecommunications, and power:

Electricity

Electricity is first because it’s the most important.  Lose it?  It’s over.

Without electricity modern society is impossible.  From traffic lights to grocery stores, everything would just . . . stop.  No refrigeration.  No gasoline.  No air conditioning.  No cash registers.  No cell recharging.  No blinking inflatable Snoopy® in your yard at Christmas.

And as we saw in Japan after the earthquake, a nuclear power station needs power constantly to keep the nuclear-radiation stuff on the inside, and not on the outside.  And I’ve heard rumors that even starting a power generating station requires . . . power.  Hopefully the wind is blowing the electric windmills that day we lose power.

There are numerous countries on the planet that could lose power for weeks or months at a time with little to no change in lifestyle – these countries lose power for days at a time now, and have learned to cope.  Most developed countries would see anarchy within three days if the system went down.  In Chicago?  Even power isn’t enough to stop anarchy now.

But one requirement is that this power outage is not just a local phenomenon – if Switzerland lost power, well, who would notice?  But if people decided that they wanted the Swiss chocolates and the Swiss army knives and the Swiss hot cocoa, well, they’d pitch in and help Switzerland.  There exists a reserve capacity outside of Switzerland that’s big enough and well supplied enough that they could help the Swiss.

Likewise, when a hurricane hits Texas, well, I guess that’s a bad example because the Texans don’t need any of our damn help.

Loss of power to the entire continental United States?  Who could help us?  Most resources that could help would be an ocean away, assuming that they’re unaffected.  The happy projection if electricity was lost in the United States?  Half the population dead in a year.  The less-than-rosy projection (from a United States Congressional study) has 90% of the US population gone in a year.  And not “moved to Cleveland” gone.

What could possibly take the power down all over the United States?  Really, there’s just one candidate: an electromagnetic pulse (EMP).

What is an EMP?  It’s like the Sun was rubbing its feet on the carpet, and then put its finger near you and gave you such a shock.  Except instead of a shock, it shoots charged particles at the Earth making pretty auroras.  And charges up the electrical infrastructure so much that the tiny electrical circuits in your smart watch, or car, or computer, or electrical power plant short out and become as useful as Play-Doh® after you left the lid off for three days.

Has this happened before?  Certainly.  The solar storm of 1859 was significant enough that it charged up the atmosphere enough that communication via telegraph wasn’t possible for a few hours – some telegraph operators reported being shocked by their telegraph lines.

Not a big deal, right?  No, not in 1859.  But a much smaller solar flare in 1989 took out all of the power in Quebec (part of America’s hat, Canada).  And if a solar flare similar in size to the 1859 flare happened today, it’s estimated that it would cost at least $2 trillion dollars (more than Johnny Depp spends on wine in an average month) to fix the damage in the United States alone.  Oh, and if you’re on satellite television, well, those would be gone due to the solar flare, too.

Another way to get a similar amount of damage is to explode a nuclear bomb above the United States.  This bomb wouldn’t cause any explosive damage – it would unleash x-rays, but rather than just bathing in the healthful x-ray light, the x-rays would smash into atoms in the atmosphere and cause a cascade of electrical energy.

You and I might not even notice this cascading energy, but, again, the tiny circuits in your local power plant (depending upon the size of the pulse) might be fried.

Oops.

No power.

Telecommunications

Every transaction you do depends upon some form of communication – often via satellite, but also through the internet.  In a small example of how this communication is important, I witnessed a series of gasoline pumps going offline.  Across the nation.  These gas pumps were primarily located at small Mom and Pop convenience stores.  The stores were open, but if you showed up at the pump?  The pump just didn’t work.  The reason was fairly simple – the home base in the transaction, the company that provided the interface between the fuel pump and the payment systems, had gone bankrupt.  Shut the doors down.  The gas was there.  The credit card company was there.  The electricity was there.  But the last leg of the transaction – the communication link to bring it all together, pay the taxes, and order more gasoline – had ceased to exist.

And it’s not just convenience store fuel transactions.

The inventory management of stores like Wal-Mart® is highly efficient, as in it is highly mechanized.  If Wal-Mart® lost their ability to computer-manage their inventory?  They’d have no way to figure out how to move products to their warehouse, let alone deliver them to a Wal-Mart™.

In a real-life example, Maersk® shipping, which accounts for about 20% of the volume of containers shipped worldwide, had their computer system infiltrated.  Essentially their entire shipping information system became encrypted on their servers.  This resulted in them losing over $300,000,000 in a ten day period, as chaos occurred at computer-managed dock after computer-managed dock.  They were saved because a backup of the system wasn’t updated since the Internet was down in Africa when they normally synced the systems.  Folks from Europe flew down to Africa, took the computer back to Europe, and used its information as the seed to reboot 4,000 servers and 45,000 PCs in a 10 day period.

Costly?  Sure.  But this was likely just collateral fallout of stuff going on between Ukraine and Russia.  This points out that the systems that we have created for inventory management and logistics required to run civilization have the potential to fail.  Something actually targeted at telecommunications for these systems . . . could have been devastating.

What would it cost to lose the Internet for a day?

What if it went down for a year?

Banking

When I was a kid, it was still possible to go to a store while the register was broken and get a clerk to do the math on what was owed and take your check or cash.  Now?  I’m not sure that most retail employees are up to the math (who even does math anymore?) let alone trying to figure out how to do a transaction without the Internet.  And who, besides me, even carries cash anymore?

Banking is a system that exists only so long as we believe in it.  Banks are allowed (by law) to lend out all of the money in the bank except for 11% or so.  Thus they have a “fractional” reserve of cash, and they’re a fractional reserve bank.

If you have $100 that you put in the bank, chances are very good that they loaned out all but $11 of your money.  The other $89 is out earning them interest.  If you want your money, you can go back and get it, since the bank has the $11 from everybody else.  If everybody wants their money back at the same time?  Problem!  In actuality people will get paid, because each bank lends a bit of money to the Federal Reserve bank that they can draw on in emergencies such as a bank run.  That’s really the big idea behind the Fed, to stop a systematic failure of all of the banks like happened in the 1930’s during the Great Depression.

But in 2008-09, it nearly happened again.  Banking systems were shutting down.  The Federal Reserve and the Treasury pumped the system so full of cash to prevent a complete shutdown of the financial system as we know it.  Did it work?  Sure.  But Interest rates are at near record lows a decade after this intervention.

Are there other risks to the banking system?  Certainly.  And if it doesn’t work?  The bright side (such that it is) is a dictator could and would seize control and force the system to work for a while without banking, but the loss would be our freedom and the civilization that we now know, along with millions dead from the sudden inefficiencies in the system.

Why?

Why have we put ourselves at risk to the Iron Triangle?  Because the efficiency that it brings has made society freer and wealthier that it could be without the Iron Triangle.  The Iron Triangle squeezes efficiency out of the system, but an efficient system is a fragile one; one prone to failure.  If you think of all of the systems that you have double of (like lungs) it’s not a bad design, it’s that having a spare lung or kidney increases your chances of living longer.  Or, failing that, you could trade your kidney to your bank to pay off your loan . . .

So, next Monday I’ll pick up where we were back at the Hotel.

I really do have a plan.