Description
(Commentary by G. Edward Griffin.) The topic of this documentary is about as serious as it gets: We are talking about the probability ‒astronomers call it the inevitability ‒ of the Earth being slammed by a mega solar flare. This is not the kind we read about in our newspapers every few months that merely interrupts communications and creates light shows in the Northern skies.
Imagine the chaos that would ensue ‒ no light, no water from pipes, no appliances, communications, gas pumps, transportation, food in grocery stores, fire-fighting, banking services, medical services, police protection ‒ you get the idea. It has been estimated that eighty to ninety percent of the population, especially in cities and towns, would perish. Fortunately, these high-end X-Class solar storms don’t hit the Earth very often, only about every 150 years, on average. But unfortunately, the last one arrived 159 years ago, which means that, statistically, we are overdue. THE CARRINGTON EVENT When the last one occurred ‒ it was called the Carrington Event ‒power grids did not exist. However, the telegraph was coming into use then. The energy from the Carrington Event was picked up by telegraph cables, fried the wires, burned some of the poles, and set fire to equipment. Since then, astronomers have seen solar flares 10,000 times stronger than the Carrington Event. The electronics in modern power systems are much more delicate than in telegraph systems, and the multi-million-mile expanse of wires in power grids constitutes a much more efficient antenna system to capture electromagnetic energy. It is the understatement of the century to say that we have been warned.
“It would literally paralyze all the United States, not just for a day or an hour, but for months to years.” ~~ Michio Kaku, Professor of Theoretical Physics, City College of New York “Severe geomagnetic storms have the potential to cause long-duration outages to widespread areas of the North American grid.” ~~ North American Electric Reliability Corporation and the US Department of Energy, High Impact, Low Frequency Event Risks to the North American Bulk Power System (June, 2010) Summary: Eventually, possibly within the next decade, Earth will be hit by a solar burst that will knock out the world’s power grids for months or years. ~~ Severe Space Weather Events: Understanding Societal & Economic Impacts, December 2008, National Academy of Sciences in collaboration with NASA
HOW NAIVE WE WERE When we began research for this documentary we naively thought it was our mission to inform government and industry leaders about the need to protect the grid, but we were in for a shock. After further research, we discovered that everything we were hoping to bring to the attention of these people already was known to them. The public may have been in the dark (pun intended), but government and industry officials have known about this for nearly two decades. In fact, we learned that some of them have taken steps to insure that they will survive what they consider to be an inevitable apocalypse, but they are doing nothing to protect the rest of us. PRETENDED PREPAREDNESS The second shock was to learn that the same damage could be caused by the detonation of an EMP weapon in space and that many of the people who are responsible for protecting the grid from solar storms and EMPs publicly pretend that there is nothing to worry about. This documentary shows that such assurances are not even close to the truth, and that pretended preparedness has become the most serious aspect of the problem. If those we trust to protect us are trying to cover up their failure or even if they are just trying to avert public panic, either way we are woefully unprotected ‒while our rendezvous with the sun (or an EMP) is inexorably approaching. There have been numerous documentaries and books on the vulnerability of the power grid, but all of them have uncritically accepted the assumption that government and industry are doing everything possible to protect us. No one has had the courage to challenge that assumption ‒ until now.
To view the trailer, click here. |