I. DARK
NO POWER TO THE PEOPLE
JULY 13, 1977, WAS A HOT, HUMID NIGHT IN NEW YORK CITY, WHEN AT around 8:30 P.M. the lights suddenly went out—and stayed out for the better part of twenty-four hours. I vividly recall this power failure, as I was a professor at New York University living in Greenwich Village at the time. Unhappily for my wife and me, we were living on the seventeenth floor of a university building at Washington Square. Luckily for me, though, I was in California on a consulting job at the time of this power failure, leaving my wife to carry the burden of the event for our family. For the period of the outage she faced a grueling trip up the stairway lugging bottles of water for cooking, drinking, and bathing, together with food and other necessities of daily life. According to her accounts, experiencing this unelectrified Manhattan was eerily like living in a dream world, as the streets of the Village were turned into the venue for improvised street parties. People strolled out to experience and witness the city without power, and everyone was discussing the situation. But only those with battery-powered radios had access to official information about the event or any idea when the power was likely to be back on.
I learned later that other parts of the city were far less tranquil. Outbreaks of violence, looting, and arson were reported in Harlem, Brooklyn, and the South Bronx. People smashed store windows to get electronics, jewelry, clothing, furniture, and other consumer items, not to mention food. More than a thousand fires burned, at least six times the normal rate for that time of the year, and seventeen hundred false alarms were reported. Though these more troubling and threatening aspects of the power failure were not seen in the Village, it seems likely that just one more day of the outage would have been enough to bring them to the southern part of Manhattan, as well.
It’s worth noting that this power failure was strictly a New York City affair, in contrast to the failure twelve years earlier that blacked out the entire Northeast and parts of Canada. In 1977, all five New York boroughs were dark within an hour, along with parts of Westchester County immediately north of the city. As it turned out, the surface cause of the failure was what the power company ConEd called an “act of God.” Four lightning strikes, the first at 8:37 P.M., knocked out power lines feeding the city’s grid. With each successive strike, neighboring power companies in New Jersey, New England, and Long Island disconnected their grids from New York City, to protect their own systems from damage and to serve their own customers. It’s interesting to compare this localized, relatively minor failure with the Great Northeast Blackout of 1965 and the far more recent New York power-grid collapse in 2003, the two biggest blackouts in recorded history.
THE 1965 BLACKOUT
November 9, 1965, was not a day when air conditioners were running full out. Nor was it a time of especially heavy electricity demand, in general. Nevertheless, it was the moment for what became known as the Great Northeast Power Blackout, by all measures the largest electricity failure ever experienced up to that time, extending from north of the Canadian border in Ontario to as far south as New York City and eastward to western New Hampshire and Cape Cod. Thirty million people in eight states and the province of Ontario were affected for differing periods of time. So what happened?
The blackout started in Canada at Ontario Hydro’s Beck Power Station near Niagara Falls. At 5:16 P.M., a relay on one of the Toronto-bound transmission lines failed, tripping a circuit breaker and removing the line from service. When it occurred, another station supplying Toronto was also down, and as the demand was high in Toronto for winter lighting and heating, the grids were already operating at close to full capacity. The two failures combined to trip circuit breakers on four other lines, thus shifting the load southward to lines leading to the United States.
The power surge southward tripped connections with the PASNY utility lines, destabilizing the principal transmission paths in New York State. Within seconds, the Canadian grid was decoupled from the New York grid. Seconds later, the destabilized systems caused a cascade of further line failures: New England, downstate New York, and other areas quickly shut down. This cascade of disconnections quickly broke the entire power supply network into disconnected islands within a few seconds of the initial failure. Each island then had either a deficiency to try to make up or an oversupply that had nowhere to go. The imbalance led to further failures, and within a few minutes more than thirty million people were without power. For a variety of reasons, New York City was the area without power for the longest period. But on this occasion New Yorkers proved themselves to be a pretty hardy and adaptable lot, and they suffered the discomfort in a fairly good-natured way—without major outbreaks of street violence, looting, or other lawless activity.
In the wake of the blackout, much more effective computer controls were instituted on the entire grid, and the North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC) was established to bring together the various independent operators composing the power-supply network in order to establish operating standards for moving electricity from one region to another.
By the standards of the 1965 blackout, what happened in New York City in 1977 was pretty small potatoes. As already noted, lightning strikes were the proximate cause of the blackout rather than a mechanical failure in the system itself, and the geographic area affected was mostly restricted to New York City and its immediate environs. But the social impact was dramatically different. In the twelve years since the 1965 blackout, the social climate had changed substantially—and not for the better. So by the time the lights went out in New York in 1977, it was not a time for gaiety and block parties but rather an opportunity for looters and other lowlifes to crawl out from under their rocks. The lawlessness damaged the image of New York for many years thereafter. The contrast between the reaction of the populace in New York City to the 1965 and 1977 power blackouts illustrates better than any academic theory could possibly show how much the prevailing “mood” of the population at the time of such an incident determines how the social behavior will be during the period in which the crisis unfolds. Now let’s fast-forward to yet one more major power disruption, the biggest blackout of them all.
THE 2003 EAST-MIDWEST BLACKOUT
Just after four o’clock in the afternoon of August 14, 2003, the failure of a power station at FirstEnergy’s generating plant in east-central Ohio set off a cascade of failures that spread like a wildfire from the US Midwest up into Ontario and onward to the Northeast of the United States, ultimately taking out electrical power to more than fifty million people. The cascade of rolling failures unfolded over a period of just eight minutes.
A task force investigating the failure identified a number of causes, mostly pointing the finger at FirstEnergy’s violations of different NERC standards: operating its system at inappropriate voltage levels, not recognizing or understanding the deteriorating condition of its system, failing to properly manage tree growth next to its transmission lines, and on and on. In short, basic human error on the part of the management of FirstEnergy was the immediate cause of the blackout.
In the aftermath of the blackout, many called for a complete makeover of the power grid. Everyone recognized that the current system was old and deteriorating at a time when power needs were increasing rapidly each year. Restructuring was desperately needed, and a new grid with built-in reliability long overdue. Here we see a classic complexity overload situation at work. One system was an old, deteriorating, low-complexity power grid infrastructure, saddled with low-tech hardware ranging from coal-fired power generation stations to failing transmission lines and on to out-of-date software trying to manage control systems designed decades ago. This system is pitted against the increasingly complex needs of household consumers powering up a bewildering array of equipment, not to mention firms and institutions calling for satisfaction of their own electrical power requirements. This growing gap is an X-event just waiting to happen—and inevitably it does as the examples just cited illustrate.
As of this writing no substantive actions have yet been taken to address these matters. This is not just a North American problem, either. For the sake of a more global perspective, let’s have a quick look at similar situations that have taken place in recent years in other parts of the world.
THE YEAR 2008 GOT OFF TO AN OMINOUSLY POOR START IN SOUTH Africa as rolling blackouts struck the largest cities two or three times a day from early January onward. Initially, these blackouts seemed little more than a nuisance, and radio announcers joked that listeners should make their morning toast by rapidly rubbing two pieces of bread together. But it soon became no laughing matter as silent computers, dark traffic lights, and cold stoves gave rise to an outraged citizenry. This is not to mention the far more serious damage to the South African economy from the shutdown of mines crippled by the failures, shopping malls turned into ghost towns, and other assaults that experts estimated would cap growth at 4 ½ percent, far less than the level the government deemed necessary to reduce the country’s 25 percent unemployment rate.
The crisis stemmed from a very unhappy combination of government/industry lack of communication and follow-through on a 1998 White Paper, which argued that at the rate the economy was growing South Africa faced a serious power shortage by 2007 unless actions were taken to expand energy-supply capacity.
The Mbeki government took office the following year and was unsuccessful in its attempt to get private investors to finance construction of new power plants. Only later did the government give Eskom, the state power monopoly, permission to begin expanding capacity. But by then it was too late, much too late, since power plants don’t magically appear overnight. Generally speaking, it takes at least five years or more to put up a plant and get it online. As the respected South African analyst William Mervin Gumede put it, “The warnings were well known, but the government was too aloof and arrogant to act. This is simply disastrous for the economy.”
Complexity mismatch shows a different face in this situation, as the predecessor to the Mbeki government recognized that the economic system was growing (becoming more complex) at a rate far exceeding the complexity of the country’s power grid. The only outcome of such an increasing gap would inevitably be a massive power shortage. And, of course, that’s what it took to close the gap in the form of the Mbeki administration finally caving in and allowing the state-controlled electrical utility to take action to beef up its power-generation capacity. But it took an X-event in the form of the wave of power outages in 2008 to bring that complexity gap back to a level at which the country could function again.
Meanwhile, South Africans fumed and fretted at the daily disruptions to their lives, as elevators stalled between floors, shops closed down, petrol stations were unable to pump gasoline, traffic lights were disabled, and restaurants left food half cooked in their ovens. What’s the solution? Well, as one engineering consultant put it, “Because of this situation, economic growth just stops. In that way, the problem solves itself.”
While the appalling situation in South Africa was unusual in the combination of its systemic nature and basic human failings, the loss of electrical power for varying periods of time is commonplace all over the world. Here is a telegraphic account of a few more incidents of this type over the past few years
And so it goes. The point is that power grid failures happen all the time—everywhere. And they will continue to happen all the time everywhere, for reasons great and small. What’s important is to understand how the grid can be made more reliable and resilient to the type of failures that shut off power to tens of millions of people for days at a time. No system is going to be proof against human stupidity or wandering cats. But we can and must do a lot better than in the past. With the foregoing examples in mind, let’s look at just what role the electrical power grid plays in everyday human affairs.
To get a feel for what’s at stake when the lights go out, we can do no better than to look at the specifics of how the loss of power impacted people in the San Diego area after the X-event I described a moment ago:
Many would say that this list is hardly catastrophic. And they would be right. The real catastrophe sets in when the services listed here are out for days, maybe even weeks, with no one being able to say when the power will be restored—or even if it will be restored. That’s when the rioting, looting, and other primitive survivalist-style behavior sets in. The San Diego story is simply a dress rehearsal for an ugly, probably deadly, event due to take place just about anywhere electrical power is used to underwrite people’s everyday style of life. And that means just about anywhere in the industrialized world.
THE MATRIX OF LIFE
IN THE FILM THE MATRIX EVERYONE IS PLUGGED INTO AN OMNIPERVASIVE computer program that orchestrates all aspects of their lives. But the “machine” underlying this virtual-reality reality develops a glitch, threatening the existence of the entire population. It’s of more than passing interest to ponder this cinematic world and its crisis in connection with the everyday world we all occupy. Now, though, the “machine” is “the grid”—the electrical power grid—as our daily lives are every bit as determined by the vagaries of this machine as the lives of Neo and his friends are fixed in the matrix.
Jason Makansi, executive director of the Energy Storage Council, has graphically illustrated the foundational role played by the electrical power system in his illuminating book Lights Out. When the electricity stops, traffic lights go out; cell phones cease to work; elevators stall between floors; pumps stop pumping water, gasoline, and other fluids to where they’re needed; computers shut down; and trains stop running. In short, everyday life is set back to a preindustrial level. So how did we get into such a precarious state, anyway? After all, a hundred years or so ago streets were still lit by gaslights, and local transport was by horse-drawn carriage. So the electrification of society is a relatively new phenomenon, something that came upon us just during the last century. Much like its gold-dust twin, cheap energy from oil, electricity owes its place in our lives to the genius of two well…geniuses, both plying their trade as geniuses a little over a century ago in New York City.
The first brilliant innovator is a household name everywhere: Thomas Edison, inventor of the phonograph, lightbulb, and many other commonplace items still used today. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, Edison developed a direct current (DC) linkup of lightbulbs powered by a generating station on Pearl Street in lower Manhattan. Interestingly, even though Edison’s system of electricity distribution lost out in the long run to a competing “brand,” to this very day there are still about two thousand customers in Manhattan who receive DC power from the successor to that long-ago station.
The problem with Edison’s DC system lay in transmitting the power from its source to its consumer. The voltage required to transmit DC power any appreciable distance is just too great for the system to be useful. The voltage of alternating current (AC) power, on the other hand, can be raised or lowered by transformers, making its transmission over vast distances relatively straightforward. Enter our second genius, the somewhat mystical Croatian inventor Nikola Tesla, probably the only inventor who could be put into the same class as Edison in terms of the number and significance of his inventions.
Tesla, who spoke of his insight into the mechanical principles of the motor as a kind of religious vision, once worked for Edison. But when he asked Edison for permission to do research on AC, specifically an AC motor, Edison rejected the notion. Tesla then resigned himself to research on DC. He told Edison that he thought he could improve the DC generator dramatically, whereupon Edison told him that he’d get a $50,000 bonus if he succeeded in this task. After a lot of hard work, Tesla produced a set of twenty-four designs for components that would improve the DC generator substantially, just as he’d claimed. But when he asked about the bonus, Edison told him that he’d been joking. “You don’t understand American humor” was the great man’s cheapskate excuse.
Hugely disappointed, Tesla quit working for Edison and started his own firm to develop his AC ideas. In 1888, he patented an AC motor, which opened the door to cheap and efficient long-distance transmission of electricity. The industrialist George Westinghouse immediately bought up Tesla’s patents. After a few years of false starts, feuds with Edison, and other hiccups, the Westinghouse-Tesla AC system won out over Edison’s DC system, paving the way for AC power to become the basis for what is now the entire North American power grid. The key point is that the transmissibility of AC power over great distances is what enabled the grid to become centralized, thus vulnerable to the types of disruptions seen in the examples above. I’ll return to this matter in a moment. For now, let’s have a deeper look at a number of vulnerabilities that the choice of an AC system has left us open to.
POWER AT RISK
LONG, LONG AGO IN A COUNTRY FAR, FAR AWAY (1970s USA), THERE was a power grid that provided ultrareliable electrical power service at a reasonable, if not bargain basement, price. But the profits were not enough for greedy operators and even greedier politicians, so the free marketeers engineered the fantasy that privatization and deregulation of the power-supply network was just what the doctored ordered to bring even cheaper, more reliable electricity to the masses. But a funny thing happened on the way to deregulation: the power transmission grid got lost! Makansi has identified the following vulnerabilities in the power grid that brought us to its current sad state.
Vulnerability 1: A Deteriorating Transmission Grid: Investment in the transmission system was shunted aside in favor of improving other “sexier” and more visible parts of the system. So the basic infrastructure of the system was actually allowed to deteriorate. The consequence of this lack of investment in transmission is that many of the supposed benefits of deregulation could not take place since they relied on a transmission network that could reliably transport vast amounts of electricity from where it is cheap to where it is needed. As former secretary of energy Bill Richardson described it, the United States was “A major superpower with a third-world electrical grid.”
Vulnerability 2: A Much Lengthened Supply Line for Fuel Sources: The energy source for most new power plants in the past decade has been liquefied natural gas (LNG). The next round of plants will almost surely be nuclear powered. The sources for both the LNG and nuclear fuel lie far beyond the shores of the United States. Much of the LNG comes from places like Iran, Russia, or Africa, hardly reliable partners in the current geopolitical scheme of things. Nuclear fuel is in somewhat better shape, being mostly supplied by rather more friendly nations like Canada and Australia. But these are still places many thousands of miles away from where the fuel is actually needed. So if the current trend of outsourcing energy sources continues, a significant fraction of the American electricity supply will be produced by energy sources a great distance away.
Vulnerability 3: Electricity Cannot Be Stored: Unlike oil, electricity cannot be stored in the ground as insurance against supply disruptions or other sorts of rainy days. Of course, it can be stored as chemical energy in a battery, mechanical energy in a flywheel, and the like. But not as electricity. That can be done only with a capacitor, which is fine for small quantities of electricity but nothing like what’s needed to power a town.
Vulnerability 4: A Lack of Specialized Workers to Maintain and Operate the Power Infrastructure: In today’s MTV and Facebook world, young people aspire to sexy occupations like media consultants, financial manipulators, psychotherapists, legal beagles, and the like. They certainly do not aspire to be engineers, and even those who do look to things like nanotechnology, computers, and other so-called growth industries, not electrical power. As evidence for this deplorable trend, a recent OECD study shows that the fraction of students in the United States taking engineering or science majors is just 15 percent, as compared with 37 percent in Korea and 29 percent in Finland. It’s a frightening statistic to hear that currently for every two workers set to retire from the power industry, there is less than one person set to replace them. Moreover, the above figures suggest that the pipeline of new talent from the universities seems ready to supply only a trickle when what’s going to be needed is a flood.
Vulnerability 5: The Connective Structure of the Power Grid: The North American power grid is what network theorists term a “scale-free” network. This means it has a few major hubs with lots of minor spokes. So if a random event takes out a component, the chances are overwhelmingly high that the outage will not percolate through the entire system. But if that event knocks out one of the major substations, as it did in the Great Northeast Blackout of 2003, the entire system in half the country is at risk. Given this structure and the critical role played by electricity in the lifeblood of the country, much more attention needs to be directed to the protection of the “hubs.”
Vulnerability 6: The Large Environmental Impact of the Grid: Both coal and natural gas are known generators of greenhouse gases, CO2 for coal, methane for natural gas. That’s the good news! The bad news is that methane is twenty times worse than carbon dioxide as a warming agent, and as we saw above, almost all new power plants are LNG fired, not coal. As the LNG pipelines to the plants sometimes extend for thousands of miles, leaks occur releasing methane molecules into the atmosphere. Estimates are that from 2 to 10 percent of the methane escapes as the LNG moves from the storage tanks at the port to the power plants where it’s used.
All these vulnerabilities are serious. And most (but not all) can easily lead to a massive failure of the electrical power grid if left unchecked. Currently, there is a lot of talk but little action being taken by either government or the power industry itself. It’s no exaggeration to say the system is in crisis and you can believe it’s the case when PJM, one of the largest power operators in America, calls the need for a new transmission grid an “emergency.” In short, Richardson’s “third-world grid” is in critical danger of degenerating into an “out of this world” grid.
If any infrastructure rivals electrical power in its impact on our daily lives, it is surely the system that delivers water to our homes and companies. Whether it’s water for drinking, cooking, cleaning, sewage, irrigation, cooling, or myriad other uses, fresh, clean water is truly the sine qua non of modern life. We can live without electricity; we have lived without electricity for many thousands of years. But we can’t live more than a few days without water. With this in mind, let’s see how close we are to an X-event that will turn off the faucet.
II. DRY
EVEN WORSE, A LOT WORSE
EARLY 2004 SAW AN UNHERALDED DEAL BETWEEN TURKEY AND Israel that strikes to the heart of what could turn into a problem facing humankind that may be far more immediate, severe, and life-threatening than either global warming or massive power failures. The agreement between the two countries calls for Israel to send weapons to Turkey in exchange for fresh water to be delivered by tanker to Israeli ports on the eastern Mediterranean. Almost unknown to the world, Turkey is awash in fresh water; it already delivers it by tanker loads to Cyprus and has plans to sell it to Malta, Crete, and Jordan as well.
There is a rapidly increasing need for fresh water worldwide. Every person in the world needs it. And those who don’t get it die. It’s just that simple. Black or white, life or death. No shades of gray in this story. In contrast to global warming, which some skeptics claim may or may not be happening, the water-supply problem definitely is happening. And it’s happening now. As living standards rise in developing countries and populations increase, the need for fresh water moves in lockstep with these trends. For instance, the OECD estimates that each American uses about six hundred liters of fresh water per day for drinking, bathing, washing, and other household activity. At the other end of the scale, in Mozambique the figure is about twelve liters per day—fifty times less. If the water is not available, things can get very ugly very fast, as events in the United Kingdom showed in 2007.
July is often a rainy month in the United Kingdom. And never more so than in the summer of 2007, when the worst flooding in sixty years hit the West Country and the Thames Valley, as an estimated 90,000 gallons (over 325,000 liters) of water a second was pouring down the Thames the night of July 23 on its way to Oxford, Reading, and Windsor. In the area most severely affected by the floods from the Avon and Severn rivers, homes were left without running water, leading to panic buying of bottled water and food in supermarkets. One twenty-six-year-old woman from Gloucester, a mother of two children, said she had driven more than fifteen miles to buy water after the closure of a local water treatment plant due to the flood. “We have been to three supermarkets and water had sold out in all of them,” she reported. “The queues outside the supermarket are horrendous. Everyone is desperate to get their hands on some water. We have heard stories of grown men pushing kids out of the way to get to bottles of the stuff. It is disgusting.”
An overdose of water after a few days of flooding in the United Kingdom or elsewhere in the world is indeed a disaster, sometimes even a catastrophe as in New Orleans in 2005. But what about no water at all for a few weeks or a few months as happened in the drought in 2011 in Texas, which saw the two main lake reservoirs serving Austin and other towns in the area dropping to less than 40 percent of their storage levels, a condition that is already rated “Severe” and just a stone’s throw from “Emergency”? Similar droughts brought agriculture to its knees in Russia in both 2010 and 2011.
If these situations can result in such huge disruptions in people’s lives from what amounts to a temporary shortage of water in a relatively small area of a major industrialized country, what can we expect if there is a prolonged shortage over a large area? Even a partial answer would be nothing pretty, that’s for sure. The drought in Somalia, which up to now has killed at least thirty thousand children and affected over twelve million people, is a case in point. As noted earlier, everyone needs water. And if you don’t get it, you die. So how do we stand globally? How limited is the supply of fresh water? What is the trend over the coming years and decades?
WHEN THE PIPES RUN DRY
THE UNITED NATIONS ENVIRONMENTAL PROGRAMME PROJECTS water scarcity worldwide in 2025 on a country-by-country basis. According to their study, 1.8 billion people will live in the “red zones” of the world, those areas having a physical water scarcity. This means they will not have enough water to carry on their current level of per capita food consumption using irrigated agriculture, and at the same time meet water needs for domestic, environmental, and industrial activities. To deal with such needs, water will have to be diverted out of agriculture, which in turn leads to the need to import food in these areas.
Equally frightening are the statistics showing the change in water withdrawal as a percentage of available water over the thirty-year period 1995 to 2025. In 1995, only a handful of countries in the Middle East, North Africa, and around the Caspian Sea were taking out 20 percent or more of the water available. But by 2025 not only will all these regions be in the 20 percent and up category, so will all of China, most of Western Europe, and the USA and Mexico. By that time, only South America, Russia, West Africa, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand will be in the “safe zone,” those regions withdrawing 10 percent or less of the available water.
These numbers show better than any words how acute the water problem is on a global scale. As the final nail in this particular coffin, the number of people affected by this worldwide water shortage is projected to rise from about five hundred million in 1995 to nearly seven billion by 2050.
So the story of fresh water availability in the next few decades if current assumptions about water usage, population, and economic growth are valid is a very grim tale indeed. Provided these assumptions hold up (and don’t become even worse), we’re in very deep trouble. Can we get out of it? Probably not. But certainly not if we don’t get a better understanding at the individual level of just how much water it takes to carry on our current lifestyle. One good way of forcefully bringing home this consumption issue is to examine the so-called virtual water contained in just about every food item we eat, and see how that water usage is translated into the overall water “footprint” of a country.
The concept of virtual water was introduced in 1993 by British water researcher Tony Allan to measure how water is embedded in the production and trade of food and consumer products. Allan argued that people consume water not just in what they drink directly or in what they use for showers. If this were the only usage of water by individuals, the world would certainly not have a water problem. But Allan showed, for instance, that about 140 liters of water stands behind the cup of coffee that we drink in the morning, 2,400 liters of water goes down the hatch with the Big Mac we have for lunch, while a whopping 22,000 liters hides behind the production of the one kilo slab of roast beef put on the table for Sunday dinner. To put these figures into perspective, the 140 liters of water in that morning cup of coffee is about the same amount as the water used by the average person in England per day for drinking and other daily needs.
One might think of a kind of global “trade” in virtual water, whereby countries with little water (think Saudi Arabia) import high-water-consuming products while exporting low-water-consuming products (oil), making water available for other purposes. It would seem a useful act of public awareness to label products with their virtual water content in order to increase people’s water awareness. For instance, one ton of wheat contains twelve hundred cubic meters of virtual water, while a ton of rice has twenty-seven hundred cubic meters, nearly triple that amount. Thus, you’re saving a lot of water by consuming bread instead of rice. And when it comes to meat products, beef is the real water killer, having nearly three times as much virtual water content per volume as compared with pork, and over five times more than chicken. So the notion of virtual water import via food is an alternative water “source” that acts to reduce pressure on water resources in arid regions.
But public awareness of water content in the foods we eat is certainly not going to cure the growing global water shortage problem by itself. Much, much more needs to be done—soon. Otherwise, twenty years from now the only thing coming out of the faucet when we turn it on will be a lot of hot air, a commodity that’s unfortunately never in short supply, especially in the political arena.
ADDING IT ALL UP
ELECTRICITY AND WATER ARE BOTH FLUIDS, METAPHORICALLY IN THE first case, literally in the second. And they are both critical for sustaining life as we know it. To do that, both have to flow from where they’re plentiful to where they’re not. A further similarity is that the catastrophes associated with both are primarily local, not global. So why are they treated in this book? To answer that, I have to explain what I mean by “local.”
A local failure of, say, the electrical power grid means a failure restricted to a particular geographic region. So, for example, the 1977 power failure in New York was very local, affecting only New York City and a few areas immediately north of the city. By way of contrast, the 1965 blackout impacted a geographic region encompassing much of the northeastern United States, a vastly larger geographic area but still “local” when measured against a global power failure or even one that would black out the entire United States. Thus, by the standards of a global pandemic, power failures by their very nature are localized to a given geographic area and will never be truly global.
But there is also temporal locality, an event localized in time. This is what we see with the problem of water shortage. In terms of geographic space, the water problem is definitely global; it will affect everyone, everywhere. But not all people will be affected at the same time. As we saw above, even today the water shortage problem is causing havoc for hundreds of millions of people. So in the temporal sense you might say the catastrophe has already occurred. It’s just that most of us in the developed world simply don’t see it because we are not affected—yet.
A failure of either the power grid or the supply of fresh water would be catastrophic, having a huge impact on the way of life of literally hundreds of millions, if not billions of people. That is the reason I’ve included them in this book.