Demagogues are people who make gains – of whatever kind – by
scaring people. The larger the group of people they scare and the deeper the
fright they inflict on them, the bigger the gain they make.
The biggest scary prank to hit the North American Continent
since the 1938 Orson Welles's radio adaptation of HG Wells's 1898 novel, War of
the Worlds, was the Year 2000 scare(Y2K) about the computers of the world
failing to process all the zeros of the upcoming millennium, and crashing.
Self-certified experts came out the various zombie graves to collect the checks
that deep-pocket media conglomerates were handing out to anyone that would come
up with a new idea to scare their audiences.
And so, the Y2K zombies came up with all sorts of scenarios
about planes falling from the sky at midnight on December 31, 1999 at the
moment when the on-board computers will click the number 2000. All sorts of
other scenarios were also told about people getting stranded in the elevators
of high-rises and dying before they could be rescued. And many more such horror
scenarios were imagined and thrown at a public that had no way to verify the
soundness of these predictions.
Well, scaring the public and getting paid for it is
happening again. This can be verified by reading the article that came under
the title: “The threat of an electromagnetic attack” and the subtitle: “Why the
Electric Power Research Institute is wrong about the peril in an attack on the
electric grid.” It was written by William Graham and Peter Vincent Pry, and
published on December 28, 2017 in The Washington Times.
The two authors express their outrage at what they call the
media campaign launched by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI)
“promoting bogus studies grossly underestimating threats from electromagnetic
pulse (EMP).” In fact, Graham and Pry want the public to believe that EPRI
“churns-out junk science,” and that the EMP threat is real and serious enough
to rank at the existential level.
To buttress their argument, William Graham and Peter Vincent
Pry stack their own credentials against those of the EPRI experts. They say
that the latter “have no expertise in electromagnetic pulse phenomenology or
effects; and never worked professionally on electromagnetic pulse.” They go on
to say that: “Strangely, the EPRI experts never asked the EMP Commission to
review their work”.
As it happens, William Graham was (but is no more) chairman
of the congressional EMP Commission, and Peter Vincent Pry was (but is no more)
EMP Commission chief of staff. Thus, Graham and Pry whose professional
association with EMP was on the political side of the equation rather than the
scientific side, are questioning the competence of the EPRI experts whose
professional life was (and remains) vested in the research of all branches of
science relating to EMP. And yet, despite those realities, Graham and Pry
accuse EPRI of being “not only technically unsound, but intellectually
dishonest.” Go figure.
But let's give the two characters the benefit of the doubt
and go along with their thesis, if only to see what other evidence they have
that might suggest their political background dowers them with qualifications
able to raise them above the scientific research of the EPRI experts.
Well, William Graham and Peter Vincent Pry happen to have
produced what they believe is valid evidence. These are 9 blackouts that
occurred in 5 countries around the globe. They list 4 of them in the United States , 2 in India ,
and 1 each in Indonesia , Brazil and Italy . As to the reason why the
blackouts occurred, they list 3 as being caused by voltage overload, 3 by
equipment failure, 2 by lightening and 1 by contact with a tree branch. But
they listed not a single blackout as being caused by EMP.
It seems that political training and political experience
are telling these people they can go from a blackout caused by tree branches
and the like, to the conclusion that EMP will kill the national power grid. If
that's what they really believe, they need to be told that science does not
work this way. A scientific approach would have discussed phenomena that come
close to simulating the effect of EMP on a power grid. In fact, one such
occurrence took place not too far from where they stand.
It happened that a geomagnetic storm hit the Earth in 1989.
More than any other utility, Hydro Quebec absorbed its full force, causing some
damage but no fatalities or injuries. The utility responded by taking measures
to protect the grid against such occurrences, and the result has been that the
system withstood all geomagnetic hits that occurred thereafter.
What needs to be said is that no utility operating a local
or national grid anywhere in the world is left without the measures that Hydro
Quebec has implemented.