Here is the full transcript of Samuel Feinburg’s talk titled “A Catastrophic Blackout is Coming – Here’s How We Can Stop It” at TEDxBaylorSchool conference.
In his compelling TEDx talk, “A Catastrophic Blackout is Coming – Here’s How We Can Stop It,” Samuel Feinburg highlights the severe but overlooked threat of a massive blackout that could cripple the United States. He outlines four main vulnerabilities: cyber attacks, solar weather, electromagnetic pulses, and physical attacks on the electrical grid. Feinburg points out the difficulty and expense in replacing critical components of the grid, such as transformers, which are essential yet vulnerable to these threats.
He emphasizes the nation’s poor track record of preparing for predictable disasters, drawing parallels with historical events where warnings were ignored. Feinburg advocates for proactive measures, citing the Congressional EMP Commission’s estimate that protecting the grid could cost a fraction of the national economy and is thus feasible. He calls for public awareness and action to pressure policymakers into securing the grid against these potential catastrophes.
Feinburg concludes by urging the audience to take personal responsibility in advocating for grid security, making a collective effort to prevent a catastrophic blackout before it occurs.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
The Titanic Tragedy
We are terrible at listening to warnings about disaster. Back in April, a man named Jack Phillips was in the communications room of a ship motoring across the Atlantic. Jack had his headphones on, listening for radio communications. I don’t know if any of you have ever plugged your headphones into a computer or a phone when you’ve left the volume all the way up at 100%. I’ve done it a lot, and it blares, and you’re like, “Ah!” That happened to Jack because he received a message transmitted at maximum volume from a guy only a few miles away in another ship.
So, you know, this thing comes through, it almost blasts the headphones off Jack’s head, and he goes, “Ah!” And gets really, really pissed off. He yells back at this guy, “What are you doing, you bozo, transmitting at maximum volume?” The guy was saying something about an ice field, and Jack’s like, “Look, my ship is big enough not to have to worry about an ice field. We’re going to be fine.” He turns off the radio and gets back to work.
Later that night, Jack goes down into his bedchamber, goes to bed, and never wakes up. Because in April 1912, Jack fell asleep aboard the RMS Titanic. We are terrible at listening to warnings about disaster.
Ignored Financial Forewarnings
In the mid-to-late 1990s, a woman, since famous, named Brooksley Born, was the head of one of the government regulatory commissions responsible for preventing awful financial crises. She was kicking up a huge fuss about the deregulation of derivatives. She was making so much noise that the big banks got pissed, pulled some strings, and forced her out of her chairwomanship. About ten years later, the world entered the Great Recession. We are terrible at listening to warnings about disaster.
The Unheeded Terrorist Threat
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, a man named John O’Neill was a great agent at the FBI, but his colleagues weren’t too happy with him. Instead of doing his work, he kept yelling about some ragtag group of fighters called Al-Qaeda that were supposedly trying to attack the United States. John was forced to resign, and on September 11, 2001, he died at the World Trade Center where he’d taken on the position of head of security. We are terrible at listening to warnings about disaster.
The Imminent Blackout Threat
Right now, just a few hundred miles away from here in Florida, thousands of people sit without electricity. Imagine what that’s like. You walk outside, you turn on your phone, and there’s no signal. You go back inside, turn on the TV, and there’s no signal. You turn on the radio, but there’s no power. You turn on the faucet, and there’s no water. You turn on the fridge, but there’s no refrigeration. Your food starts to spoil.
You walk outside, cars pile up, and there are no street lights. In big cities like New York, LA, San Francisco, Chicago, and D.C., within three to five days, the food is gone from the grocery stores, and the trucks that the city counts on to resupply that food aren’t coming. Within a week or two, the sewage system starts to overflow and contaminates what remains of the water supply, and people start getting cholera.
Societal order starts to break down. There are mass evacuations. The emergency responders, who during the first few days were desperately trying to evacuate people trapped in elevators, have now left their positions, like many did during Katrina, to protect themselves and their own families. But why get depressed and worry about something like that if there’s no way it could ever happen?
There’s no way we could ever experience a large blackout affecting the entire or a large portion of the United States of America. The unfortunate news is that the threat of such a blackout is very real.
Now, there are a few things that we all know could disrupt life as we know it and make it very bad: nuclear war, asteroid collision, aliens invading, a horrific disease pandemic, a giant plague. And when we think about those things, we get scared because they’d be very bad. But then we get comforted because there’s a really small percentage chance they happen and they’re almost definitely not going to.
And then we figure, “You know what, it’s not worth even thinking about this stuff because there’s no solution to it.” Well, the threat of a blackout, the threat of a prolonged loss of electric power is similar in one way and different in two to those other threats.
It’s similar because it’s that scale of magnitude as far as how much damage it would do to our society and to the rest of the world, to the human race.
But it is a nontrivial probability of occurring. And there’s a lot we can do but aren’t to prevent it. So, the news anchor, a really famous guy, Ted Koppel, wrote a book about this issue, about grid security. And in that book, he compares the electrical grid to a big hot air balloon with a lot of vents, a lot of vents. Some bring air in, some bring air out. And obviously, you need the right balance of air in and air out.
If there’s too much air in, it pops and the basket crashes. If there’s too much air out, it deflates and the basket crashes. So Ted uses this to draw an analogy to the electrical grid. You’ve got to balance supply and demand. You’ve got to have the right amount of electricity in and the right amount of electricity out, or the whole thing stops working, potentially for a very long time.
The Four Threats to the Grid
There are four ways that could happen. The first won’t surprise you: it’s a cyber attack. Anyone who reads the news will know that Russia and China likely already have that capability, that it’s not too difficult for terrorist groups to acquire that capability, and that if North Korea can hack Sony Pictures and if JP Morgan, which spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year on protecting its systems, can be breached, and Target can be breached, and Equifax can be breached, then the much smaller companies that run independent parts of the grid that control maybe just one or two or three of those flaps on our hot air balloon can be breached far more easily.
And if you’re a terrorist group, there’s no threat of retaliation because where the hell are you? And there’s no objective other than death and destruction. That kind of threat is why people like Janet Napolitano, who was head of Homeland Security under Barack Obama, put the threat of a cyber attack on the grid at a 70, 80, 90 percent likelihood over the next few decades.
Two, solar weather. Every 100 to 200 years, the sun strikes the earth with a big burst of energy known as a coronal mass ejection, a CME. The last big one was in 1859, known as the Carrington Storm, and it exploded a bunch of telegraphs. That was the large stuff that relied on electricity. But society didn’t care—who needs telegraphs? Unfortunately, we really do need our national grid a whole lot more than the people of 1859 needed telegraphs.
One of these, a CME, a small one, hit Quebec in 1989. Within 90 seconds, 6 million people lost power. Scientists predict there’s about a 10 percent chance, a 1 in 10 chance of a large CME striking earth within the next decade and taking out all or a portion of our national grid. Terrifying.
Three, an electromagnetic pulse attack like the kind North Korea threatened us with just a week or two ago. The way that works is very simple: a big bomb, usually nuclear, goes up into the atmosphere about 30 kilometers of height or greater, explodes, and emits a burst of electromagnetic energy that fries anything with electricity larger than about a foot and a half. Computers down, cars down, motorcycles down, anything built after 1984—disaster.
Four, a physical attack. Our grid is a little like a hot air balloon, but it’s also a little like the Death Star. Because if you hit it in the right spot, the whole thing explodes. Not really, but functionally, it stops working. If you take out just a handful, about nine, of the critical electric transformers—step up, step down, power transformers, high voltage transformers—across the country, of which we have a few thousand, you can take out the entire grid.
In late spring, early summer of 2013, an unknown group of individuals attacked the San Jose Metcalf transformer substation, and in under 18 minutes took out 17 transformers with expertly placed shots from AK-47 rifles. No fingerprints on the shell casings.
The Immediate Threat to Our Grid
They cut the communication line, and they disappeared in less than 60 seconds before police arrived on the scene. We don’t know who they are. Now, that substation wasn’t a critical one. But if someone were to attack one or, God forbid, nine of the critical ones, we’d be in a lot of trouble. Because it’s not easy to replace these things. They’re huge. They weigh tons. They cost, you know, millions, tens of millions of dollars.
We have to buy them from Germany and South Korea. The lead time on these is a year. It’s almost impossible to transport them. They’re so heavy, you need special permits from the government to transport them, because they might take out bridges due to their weight. Most of the railway lines that were used to put them in originally were decommissioned 30, 40 years ago. It’s really hard to respond to this.
You could also attack those transformers using radio frequency weapons, the size of a suitcase, materials you could buy at Radio Shack, back when it existed, and destroy the greatest civilization, the greatest country, the greatest military power that the world has ever seen. Individually, any one of these four things is terrifying.
The Cumulative Threat and Solutions
Together, cumulatively, they are far more so. So the question then becomes, what do we do about it? And this is where it starts to get really interesting. Nuclear war, how do you solve that? Giant plague comes from nowhere, how do you solve that? Asteroid collision. Things we can do, but if a big one comes, alien invasion. But all those things are low probability, so we can forget about them, or at least be safer forgetting about them than we can with the threat of a loss of electric power.
How do you solve this problem? It’s really easy. The Congressional EMP Commission, the same body that predicted that within one year of one of these attacks, you could lose two-thirds of the American population. The same body tasked by Congress with studying this problem over a decade ago estimated it would cost two to four billion dollars max to protect the grid. On an 18.8 trillion dollar national economy, even if they’re out by a factor of ten, it’s still a rounding error. So why haven’t we done anything? We are really bad at listening to warnings about disaster.
Ignoring Warnings: A Human Tendency
Why didn’t New Orleans, New England, Houston, or Florida protect their infrastructure from the effects of storms and flooding before the hurricanes, not after? Because we are really bad at listening to warnings about disaster. Why do people buy life insurance in dramatically higher rates after their spouse dies, not before? Because we are reactive, not proactive. Why did we start screening for firearms at airports after 9-11, not before? Because we respond to things after they happen, rather than inflicting a little bit of pain on ourselves now to prevent a lot later.
No CME, no EMP, no cyber attack has ever hit this country yet. And so it is terribly challenging to muster the political will, the financial and the political capital, the media attention to change the law and fix ourselves and appropriate funds and expand regulation to solve this problem, especially when there are so many other problems in the here and now that remain unresolved. Now, at this point in the movie, Superman flies in with the rest of the Justice League and saves the day. And at this point in the presentation, I’m supposed to tell you the real world doesn’t work like that. But what if it did?
A Call to Action
I worked for Helena, a global think tank of extraordinary individuals focused on executing projects that improve the world, focused on solving big problems that matter, like this one. Alongside our members, extraordinary people, Nobel laureates, four-star generals, finance billionaires, former foreign secretaries, Academy Award winners, human rights activists, we have been holding over the past six weeks meetings with experts on this topic, people from NOAA, from NASA, from USGS, from NATO, from the CIA, from the U.S. Congress, from that very same congressional EMP commission, to talk about how to implement their solution to this problem. But unlike Superman, we cannot do it alone. Our success will depend upon whether the people in this audience, watching online, and all around the world, decide to put up a fight.
Just by knowing, all of you are now part of the solution. But knowing is not enough. Our success will depend on whether you leave this auditorium and tell your friends, tell your families, tell your classmates, tell your coworkers, tell your dog about this problem, whether you tell your senators and your congresspeople how much you care, whether you donate to an organization that campaigns on this issue, whether you organize in your communities, in your homes, in your schools, in your places of work.
Your success will depend on whether all of you remember the story of Jack Phillips and decide to get up out of bed and pull the brakes on the Titanic like he never did.