Everything Is Fine. Until It’s Not.

“I have a heavy reality to lay upon you…”

Paul Mobbs

There’s a strong metaphor in Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael which compares the early aviation pioneers to how we live today. I don’t have the exact wording to hand as I’ve given several copies away over the last couple of years including, it would seem, my own.

The gist is that an enthusiastic would-be aviator jumps off a cliff with some wing-like contraption strapped to their arms in the belief that they can fly. However, in their ignorance of what will happen without the appropriate knowledge and approach to such a task, the aviator isn’t flying at all; they’re free falling.

Yet they think they are flying because — on the face of it — everything is going so well.

Look! I’ve got this far without so much as a scratch! they might proclaim as the air whistles past their cheeks.

Yet there comes a point when they realise the ground is coming to meet them. Not only that, they can see that it’s littered with other crumpled craft (civilisations) as they race toward a similar sticky end.

In short, everything is fine. Until it’s not.

That’s the stage we’re at right now in this firework of industrial civilisation — the ground is rapidly coming to meet us. We think we’ve been flying when, in truth, we’ve been free falling.

I’ve been aware of this for a few years and there are many who’ve known it for much, much longer. Once you see it, it’s impossible to unsee. Yet through this lens it can still be difficult to hold on to so many multiple truths.

Sometimes a specific issue will meet me head on and I’ll wonder why more aren’t shouting about it, like the phenomenon of global dimming I wrote about last month for example.

But once the information has been absorbed — along with a level of acceptance that it’s already well underway — there’s a sense of mentally retreating back within the metacrisis mire of patriarchy, politics, misinformation, racism, misogyny, global warming, biosphere collapse, migration, genocide and war.

Once again, it’s a reminder that our predicament involves everything and it’s all too much to juggle at once.

With that in mind, I’ve been realising over the last year or so that my attention has been too focused on the unsolvable climate crisis rather than the more immediate ramifications of civilisation itself.

Here in the UK, I get the sense that there’s still a general feeling of peace and security. As you read these words, you may not feel that personally but when I think about the masses, I wonder how many are truly aware of the tightrope we’re walking as the mesh of late-stage capitalism draws tighter and tighter.

How many are aware that hell isn’t just for other people? In no time at all, hell can be for us too.

In this instance, I’m not thinking about the horrors of war (also a distinct possibility) but of something potentially even more immediate that can happen literally at the trip of a switch, just as it did in Spain and Portugal in April:

A major nationwide power failure.

Lack of Resilience

I’ve only recently become aware that our power grid is brittle, something that landed with me when I watched this video by Paul Mobbs (currently featured on my Link Tree page):

Last week, however, I read a blog post by Tim Watkins called The Problem Squared which covers this dimension to our predicament in greater detail; in particular the lack of inertia within the grid.

In short, Tim describes how solar and wind energy (I can’t bring myself to call them renewables) is being fed into a grid that was designed and built for fossil fuels, a grid that operates within a tight tolerance of the required 50Hz frequency of alternating current.

You can probably picture fossil fuel power stations with their huge generators comprised of really heavy spinning turbines; if something fails in the system, the inertia of these giant gubbins will keep them spinning, providing electrical current within the 0.5Hz tolerance and (hopefully) within the short time it takes to rectify the problem.

Spinning wind turbines have inertia but nowhere near enough to provide the required large-scale resilience. Solar panels don’t have any moving parts, so they have no inertia at all.

So on days like last week during Storm Floris when wind and solar provides a huge amount of our energy needs, the National Grid has very little resilience when things go wrong.

If a substation suddenly fails at such times, for example, automatic safety mechanisms are quickly activated to minimise damage to valuable hardware, so a widespread power outage can cascade within minutes or even seconds without the necessary inertia to see it through.

Not only that but starting it all up again from scratch is now pretty much impossible in the UK.

As Tim Watkins writes:

“A widespread outage over a long enough timeframe would result in the Grid operator having to “black start” the system.  In effect, re-energising the entire system from scratch.  A process which first requires energy generators to re-energise themselves and to generate sufficient excess electricity to power up the wider Grid.  Nuclear, coal and gas power stations have the ability to do this… wind and solar farms do not.”

He goes on to say:

“Given the extent to which we have electrified and digitised our way of life in the last few decades, this should terrify almost everyone, and especially those within the technocracy whose power and status depends upon a firm electricity supply.”

The full implications landed much harder for me when reading those words.

We need electrical power for just about everything from running water to food, waste disposal, healthcare, transport and entertainment.

Severed Connections

We also need power for communication.

I think one of the things we’ll feel straight away in our world of electronic connection is disconnection.

When the grid goes down in a major way, it will be a huge social shock because many people just aren’t seeing this aspect of the ground racing towards us; we’re too distracted, distressed and exhausted to lift our heads and see what’s coming our way.

Pause to think about this for a moment. Think what it would actually be like if the power went off right now and we didn’t know when it was coming back on.

Are you prepared in any way whatsoever?

I have loved ones dotted all over the country — and indeed the planet — because a fossil-fuelled world has enabled us to feel more comfortable with the notion of being physically apart from one another. However, the implications of being disconnected will be huge, not to mention all the other things that will quickly unravel.

Things became really bad real quickly in Iberia and the power was ‘only’ off for 10 hours. Cash immediately became king, but only if you had it already because the ATMs weren’t working.

Panic-buying meant that shelves were soon bare and queues quickly formed outside electrical shops for battery packs to charge phones.

Take another look at the wiki page and scroll down to the Effects section for a small slice of what happened; the full implications surely extended far beyond this list.

We can learn from what happened in the Iberian Peninsula and use it to guide our own preparedness.

To my mind, it really is time to make sure we’ve got cash and candles to hand; some extra food and water stashed; an alternative method of cooking (such as a camping stove); a full tank of fuel if you have a vehicle; some kind of portable solar power and even a solar generator if you can stretch to it.

As an aside, remember that rooftop solar panels won’t work in a power cut (unless an additional system has been installed to store the energy). I wonder how many people who have rooftop solar panels are aware of this simple yet important fact.

If you want to go a stage further, you could study for the amateur radio Foundation Licence as I did earlier this year. By sticking to cheap portable handsets, it’s a way to stay in touch with the emergency services and like-minded members of your local community when all else has failed.

These are only the bare basics to potentially provide a buffer; some thinking time in the event of a rapidly unfolding and doubtless chaotic situation. Ultimately, we don’t know what we’re preparing for but I think my suggestions are sensible in the context.

I write these things in an effort to help people understand the situation we’re actually in rather than the ridiculous mirage that’s painted slapdash before our eyes.

I’m not able to offer solutions because there aren’t any solutions; anybody who proffers them is either naive, disingenuous or both.

That said, it’s not too late for some things in order to help soften the blow and we can at least be a little more prepared for such eventualities whether practically, mentally or both.

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A note about we, us and our

I use we, us and our several times in this post. In doing so, I’m referring to people living here in the UK and, even then, I feel acutely aware of my privilege within this nation (let alone beyond) where the metaphorical ground has already come to meet many.