Y2K: Year 2000
a dress rehearsal for Homeland Security and Peak Everything
The 21st century began on September 11, 2001!
Official Story
Publicly, the US government and corporate America claimed
the problems were minor and easily coped with.
The most accurate predictions were that the impacts would be like a rising
flood that peaked and then ebbed. Most of the problems that did happen
were kept out of public scrutiny and dealt with quietly.
Limited Hang Out
The official story in some ways is a limited hang out, especially fixing the Y2K problem ignored the many ways that our civilization has overshot carrying capacity. Climate change, Peak Oil, toxic and nuclear wastes, declining food production per capita, desertification, deforestation, and many other indicators suggest that industrial civilization is in danger of global collapse.
Best Evidence
A quarter trillion
dollars were spent to fix the problems -- some of this money was not needed
(since some problems were exaggerated) but a lot of it was used to mitigate
the crisis. Some nuclear reactors, chemical factories and other industrial
facilities were found to have major glitches that would have disrupted
operation and threatened public safety, if not repaired before the "rollover."
Y2K was used by the US government as an excuse
to test martial law plans in cities from Oakland, Ca to Chester, Pa. It
was a dress rehearsal for "Homeland Security" and the
federal plan to deal with Peak Oil.
Disinformation
Some deliberately exaggerated the impact of the problem, either to ridicule the idea that there was any problem, or for their own political agendas (some were far-right fundamentalists). Their prophecies were used by the media to ridicule any sense of the problem, even though privately high ranking military, political and corporate figures were freaked out in 1998 that they might not fix the problems in time (a June 12, 1998 Senate hearing on "Utilities and the National Power Grid" suggested the potential for major energy disruptions). The fact major damage was averted is used to discredit related discussions of overshoot and the urgent need to reduce consumption.
www.adelaide.edu.au/biogas/peak_oil/scenario.html
Perry Arnett's Scenario
On Oil Accounting and Life After Peak Oil
Y2K: Y2k was the perfect reverse analog to the future. Why? because all the stuff that might have happened didn't, which is the reverse of what lies ahead. Why is that? Y2k didn't happen, largely, because things were fixed, or remediated. But there is no remediation for a dry oil well. There is no remediation for a dry natural gas well. There is no remediation for the loss of the cheap, readily available, high content energy sources the world has been living off for the past 150 years. When they are gone, they're gone. And most of our lifestyles with them.
www.worldchanging.com/archives/008483.html
Is Peak Oil the New Y2K?
WORLDCHANGING TEAM
SEPTEMBER 5, 2008 11:08 AM
With todays oil situation and predictions of a peak just around the corner, is peak oil the next Y2K? Jamais Cascio reminds us in Peak Oil and the Curse of Cassandra of the lessons learned from Y2K; Disasters were avoided by listening to warnings and acting upon them.
Y2K is a lesson in what can happen when sufficiently-motivated people around the world work hard to avert disaster. The key here is "sufficiently-motivated" -- without the Cassandra-like voices of Y2K doomsayers, fewer companies and government agencies would have given priority to the problem. Ironically, it was the very success of the Y2K disaster crowd that kept the disaster from happening.
When I compare Y2K with peak oil, then, my goal isn't to underplay the potential seriousness of the problem or insult the peak oil specialists. Quite the opposite, in fact; the peak oil Cassandras -- Kunstler included -- are perfectly positioned to trigger the kind of anxiety-induced focus needed to accelerate a move away from petroleum dependence. What I hope to suggest to them, therefore, is that they need to keep in mind that there's another scenario besides global doom and blind optimism -- a scenario in which their warnings work.These warnings, argues Cascio, aren't meant to terrorize us, but to instigate lifestyle changes that will prepare and prevent disasters.
www.drydipstick.com/y2kdipstick.html
Peak Oil? Include Me Out
Thoughts from a Once-Burned Y2K Activist
by Mick Winter
July 10, 2006
Readers all around the the blogosphere have been twanging on me this week on two counts: one, that seven years ago I took the Y2K computer scare seriously, and two, that I have so far failed to correctly predict the end of the world.
For those of you too young to remember, the Y2K scare was about an esoteric little programming glitch that existed almost universally in older "legacy" computer systems around the world. The glitch in essence would have prevented older systems from recognizing the date beyond 12/31/99, and this, it was widely believed, would have pranged the interdependent complex institutions and public services that ran on these computers. There was fear that everything from municipal sewage treatment plants, to international banks, to big electric grids, to government agencies would stumble, that equipment for running these things would be badly damaged in the process, and that financial records would be lost on a broad basis.
As it turned out, very little happened on New Years Day, 2000. Scoffers exulted in their righteous rightness. The truth, though, was that immense sums of money had been spent -- hundreds of billions worldwide -- and countless work hours put in by programmers to avert the problem. It was a problem with a very definite deadline, and they made the deadline.
The Y2K event would have been a harsh lesson in the diminishing returns of technology and especially over-investments in complexity. Ironically, the work done, and the new equipment purchased by companies, institutions, and agencies may have played a major role in the tech boom of the late 1990s -- which, of course, eventuated in the tech bust that immediately followed.
My own involvement in Y2K in the early days of blogging derived from my observation that a lot of knowledgeable tech people were taking the Y2K problem seriously, and yakking about it on the Net, and so I concluded the issue deserved attention. In retrospect, I also suppose that the one thing nobody really knew was how the programmers working on their own individual projects around the world were coming along, because a lot of that work and expenditure was going on in secret -- big government agencies, big companies, and big utilities did not want to scare the public, queer their stock values, or let on about the difficulties involved in fixing the problem. And of course, the inter-connectivity of many of these complex systems -- banks especially -- was precisely the scariest part of the problem, meaning that it would not be okay for some of them to fix their problems and some of them to fail. As it happened, enough of them fixed their problems -- at great cost -- and their were no cascading failures. Score one for advanced civilization.
Now that I have written a book titled The Long Emergency, there is a new wave of disappointment gathering that life as we know it has not come to an immediate end, and I am being reproached for suggesting that we have some problems. Of course, that was never the point, as a reflection on the book's title ought to suggest. One funny element of this is that the reproach reached a crescendo the very week that crude oil prices reached record levels above $75 a barrel.
www.inthewake.org/glendinning1.html
I think we all had a chance to think about collapse in the year 2000. It was acceptable to think about it. Which is interesting. Because before that you would really be viewed as a wacko if you talked about such a thing.
"What if you don't have any electricity? And you don't have any gas in your car? And neither does anybody else?" That's really about all you have to think about to imagine it. And then you have to think about what you're going to do about that. Each one of us has a different situation.
My well is electric, so one of the things that I had to explore as 2000 was arriving was if I could get a handpump for my well. And it turned out it would have been a really stupid thing to do because it's seventy feet down. The other thing was the river was about an eighth of a mile away. And so I was thinking, how was I going to haul water from the river? Or go to the river to use the water?
But somebody who lives in an urban apartment has another challenge. And so collapse is going to be different in different places. ...
I think that the act of thinking about what you need to do could help. Get practical about it. Put thought into creating a system for yourself. And that system might have to do with the other people in your apartment building. Or it might have to do with wheelbarrows. Or it might have to do with walking somewhere and meeting people. Or it might have to do with fish in the bay. Think it through. Where are you going to be? What are you going to do? Be practical. My sense is that people can prepare, but that a lot of the rest is going to be invented on the spot.
The system, as dysfunctional as it is, is keeping us alive, you know? It is what we know. The human psyche is, I believe, built to mirror the environment. We were built to mirror the sky, and the wind, and the seasons, and then to relate to them in their language. ....
Back in the seventies and eighties, I was involved in the creation of a psychological process whose purpose was to get us out of denial and numbing about the nuclear arms race. It was called Despair and Empowerment, and it was a process for coming to terms with feelings so that people could face death. And therefore become active to stop the arms race. Maybe that same process could be applied to the current situation. But I'm feeling much more down-to-earth and practical about it. Today's challenge doesn't feel like a big psychological process. It feels like re-thinking how you are going to deal with water, food, and waste. And how your relationships are going to be arranged around those tasks.
-- Chellis Glendening
www.cipherwar.com/news/01/nsa_brain_dead.htm
Directing the National Security Agency ....July.30.2001
Test of Strength
By Vernon Loeb
Sunday, July 29, 2001; Page W08
Washington Post article on NSA's January 2000 computer crash ...
www.prorev.com/mil2.htm
war games in US cities
www.geocities.com/Pentagon/6453/
Military Operations on Urban Terrain
www.city-net.com/~davekle/mout.htm
www.sfbayview.com/042804/urbanwarfare042804.shtml
4/21/04 San Francisco Bay View
Urban warfare: Is Iraq a rehearsal for US hoods?
by Mike Davis
A U.S. soldier takes cover during clashes in the Iraqi town of Falluja
Wednesday.
Photo: Pool/Reuters
The young American Marine is exultant. “It’s a sniper’s dream,’ he tells a Los Angeles Times reporter on the outskirts of Fallujah. “You can go anywhere, and there so many ways to fire at the enemy without him knowing where you are.” “Sometimes a guy will go down, and I’ll let him scream a bit to destroy the morale of his buddies. Then I’ll use a second shot.”
“To take a bad guy out,” he explains, “is an incomparable adrenaline rush.” He brags of having “24 confirmed kills” in the initial phase of the brutal U.S. onslaught against the rebel city of 300,000 people.
Faced with intransigent popular resistance that recalls the heroic Vietcong defense of Hue in 1968, the Marines have again unleashed indiscriminate terror. According to independent journalists and local medical workers, they have slaughtered at least 200 women and children in the first two weeks of fighting.
The battle of Fallujah, together with the conflicts unfolding in Shiia cities and Baghdad slums, are high-stakes tests, not just of U.S. policy in Iraq, but of Washington’s ability to dominate what Pentagon planners consider the “key battlespace of the future” - the Third World city.
The Mogadishu debacle of 1993, when neighborhood militias inflicted 60 percent casualties on elite Army Rangers, forced U.S. strategists to rethink what is known in Pentagonese as MOUT: “Militarized Operations on Urbanized Terrain.” Ultimately, a National Defense Panel review in December 1997 castigated the Army as unprepared for protracted combat in the near impassable, maze-like streets of the poverty-stricken cities of the Third World.
As a result, the four armed services, coordinated by the Joint Staff Urban Working Group, launched crash programs to master street-fighting under realistic third-world conditions. “The future of warfare,” the journal of the Army War College declared, “lies in the streets, sewers, high-rise buildings, and sprawl of houses that form the broken cities of the world.”
Israeli advisors were quietly brought in to teach Marines, Rangers and Navy Seals the state-of-the-art tactics - especially the sophisticated coordination of sniper and demolition teams with heavy armor and overwhelming airpower - so ruthlessly used by Israeli Defense Forces in Gaza and the West Bank.
Artificial cityscapes - complete with “smoke and sound systems” - were built to simulate combat conditions in densely populated neighborhoods of cities like Baghdad or Port-au-Prince. The Marine Corps Urban Warfighting Laboratory also staged realistic war games (“Urban Warrior”) in Oakland and Chicago, while the Army’s Special Operations Command “invaded” Pittsburgh.
Today, many of the Marines inside Fallujah are graduates of these Urban Warrior exercises as well as mock combat at “Yodaville.” the Urban Training Facility in Yuma, Arizona, while some of the Army units encircling Najaf and the Baghdad slum neighborhood of Sadr City are alumni of the new $34 million MOUT simulator at Fort Polk, Louisiana.
This tactical “Israelization” of U.S. combat doctrine has been accompanied by what might be called a “Sharonization” of the Pentagon’s worldview. Military theorists are now deeply involved in imagining how the evolving capacity of high-tech warfare can contain, if not destroy, chronic “terrorist” insurgencies rooted in the desperation of growing mega-slums.
To help develop a geopolitical framework for urban war-fighting, military planners turned in the 1990s to the RAND Corp.: Dr. Strangelove’s old alma mater. RAND, a nonprofit think tank established by the Air Force in 1948, was notorious for war-gaming nuclear Armageddon in the 1950s and for helping plan the Vietnam War in the 1960s.
These days RAND does cities - big time. Its researchers ponder urban crime statistics, inner-city public health and the privatization of public education. They also run the Army’s Arroyo Center, which has published a small library of recent studies on the context and mechanics of urban warfare.
One of the most important RAND projects, initiated in the early 1990s, has been a major study of “how demographic changes will affect future conflict.” The bottom line, RAND finds, is that the urbanization of world poverty has produced “the urbanization of insurgency” - the title, in fact, of their report.
“Insurgents are following their followers into the cities,” RAND warns, “setting up ‘liberated zones’ in urban shantytowns. Neither U.S. doctrine, nor training, nor equipment is designed for urban counterinsurgency.” As a result, the slum has become the weakest link in the American empire.
The RAND researchers reflect on the example of El Salvador, where the local military, despite massive U.S. support, was unable to stop FMLN guerrillas from opening an urban front. Indeed, “had the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front rebels effectively operated within the cities earlier in the insurgency, it is questionable how much the United States could have done to help maintain even the stalemate between the government and the insurgents.”
More recently, a leading Air Force theorist has made similar points in the Aerospace Power Journal. “Rapid urbanization in developing countries,” writes Capt. Troy Thomas in the spring 2002 issue, “results in a battlespace environment that is decreasingly knowable since it is increasingly unplanned.”
Thomas contrasts modern, “hierarchical” urban cores, whose centralized infrastructures are easily crippled by either air strikes (Belgrade) or terrorist attacks (Manhattan), with the sprawling slum peripheries of the Third World, organized by “informal, decentralized subsystems, where no blueprints exist, and points of leverage in the system are not readily discernable.”
Using the “sea of urban squalor” that surrounds Pakistan’s Karachi as an example, Thomas portrays the staggering challenge of “asymmetric combat” within “non-nodal, non-hierarchical” urban terrains against “clan-based” militias propelled by “desperation and anger.” He cites the sprawling slums of Lagos, Nigeria, and Kinshasa in the Congo as other potential nightmare battlefields.
However, Capt. Thomas - whose article is provocatively entitled “Slumlords: Aerospace Power in Urban Fights” - like RAND, is brazenly confident that the Pentagon’s massive new investments in MOUT technology and training will surmount all the fractal complexities of slum warfare.
One of the RAND cookbooks, “Aerospace Operations in Urban Environments,” even provides a helpful table to calculate the acceptable threshold of “collateral damage” - aka dead babies - under different operational and political constraints.
The occupation of Iraq has, of course, been portrayed by Bush ideologues as a “laboratory for democracy” in the Middle East. To MOUT geeks, on the other hand, it is a laboratory of a different kind, where Marine snipers and Air Force pilots test out new killing techniques in an emergent world war against the urban poor.
Historian and social critic Mike Davis, a former meat cutter and long distance truck driver, is the author of the acclaimed “City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles,” among many other books and essays, and a 1998 MacArthur Foundation Fellow
Military on Year 2000 alert
By Fred Kaplan, Globe Staff, 06/21/98
NEW YORK - Sometime in 1993 - memories are hazy and nothing was written down for the public - the North American Air Defense Command in Cheyenne Mountain, Colo., conducted a test to see what would happen to all their computers - the ones that warn of a nuclear attack - on New Year's Day of the Year 2000.
As with nearly all computers, years were designated only by their last two digits - ''98'' for 1998, ''99'' for 1999, and so on. A few engineers were starting to speculate: When 2000 comes along, the computers would read it as ''00'' and think it was 1900. What would happen?
What happened was, everything froze - the screens that monitored the early-warning satellites and radars and other communications systems that would detect a flock of missiles or bombers coming our way. ''It all locked up at the stroke of midnight,'' recalled Robert Martin, a top computer specialist. ....
When the Chrysler Corp. conducted a test of its Y2K solutions at an assembly plant last year, the time clocks malfunctioned, causing the security system to shut down, making it impossible for anyone to leave the building.
When the Phillips Petroleum Co. ran a simulation onboard an oil vessel in the North Sea, a safety system designed to detect a deadly gas, hydrogen sulfide, shut down.
www.earthisland.org/eijournal/fall98/fe_fall98-y2k.html
Earth Island Journal Fall 1998
The Year 2000 Problem: An Environmental Impact Report
by Chris ClarkeWith any luck, the turn of the millennium will happen without serious incident. The stroke of midnight will approach on December 31, 1999 and then it will pass, and life will go on as normal.
Banks will open on Monday, January 3 and customers will be able to access their accounts (and be charged the usual spiraling set of service fees). The power will stay on, oil refineries won’t explode, and life, for better or worse, will go on as usual. If all goes well.
All is unlikely to go well, however. All is already not going well. Though Year 2000 (Y2K) problems have to date been relatively minor, they are happening. As we approach the end of the century, they are expected to increase in frequency and severity. And given the interconnected systems with which we run our industrial societies, it is possible that the millennium will be marked by a cascade of catastrophic failures in automated systems that safeguard our environment, public health and safety.
At issue is a decades-old programming shortcut that has persisted to the present day. In the years before the personal computer, when a room-sized mainframe would have maybe four kilobytes of memory, programmers used only two digits to denote a particular year. Hence the problem: unless they’re specifically programmed to do so, computers may not understand that the year “00” follows the year “99.”
Using two-digit date fields made sense at the time. Memory was expensive, and computers were relatively slow. Less memory was required if the two digits marking the century were omitted. The date rollover was a generation away; programmers assumed that their code wouldn’t be in use 30 years hence.
For years, however, the Y2K bug was not considered to be of sufficient importance to justify the expense of rewriting code: rather, code was patched and amended to meet the needs of new machines. Code written in the 1950s and ‘60s – written in dead languages such as COBOL – forms the nucleus of layers of subsequent code, some of it now unfamiliar to any living programmer.
To date, the Y2K bug has caused only minor problems, more in the realm of inconveniences than disasters. Computers are already interpreting year 2000 in expiration dates for credit cards and future mortgage payments as the year 1900 resulting in delays in billing and the like. But programmers fear that as the current date closes in on 1/1/2000, those inconveniences will become more and more major.
Most businesses and government agencies using date-sensitive computer applications are now engaged in a global game of beat-the-clock, trying to bring themselves up to Y2K compliance. In some arenas, notably mainframe applications such as the large centralized databases used by banks and insurance companies, there is every reason to expect that industry will be mostly Y2K compliant by December 31, 1999. (Most personal computers’ operating systems are already Y2K-compliant, though not all software on those computers necessarily is.)Bad Date = Bad Data
What will happen when a computer misreads the date on 1/1/2000? In the best case, nothing. Some computers are used for tasks to which the date is irrelevant. A computer that changes a stoplight from green to red and back every three minutes may function perfectly even if it thinks it’s changing the stoplight in 1902.
The second-best-case scenario is that the machine will read the date wrongly and then crash. Whatever service the computer provides will be interrupted – certainly an inconvenience, perhaps even a serious problem. But crashes are, usually, noticed immediately, meaning that the problem will likely be noticed and fixed relatively quickly.
There is a third, more insidious kind of error that can result though, and this is the one programmers fear most. If a computer misreads the date yet does not crash, whatever data the computer generates from that point on become suspect. Garbage In, Garbage Out is a long-standing maxim in the computer world, and for good reason. Any calculation made using a false date should be assumed to come out false. Computers rarely function in a cybernetic vacuum. Bad data stemming from a single Y2K-KO’ed computer can propagate across networks, corrupting data wherever the network leads. And if the computer generating the bad data isn’t crashing, no one may notice the problem until the walls fall in.Embed with the Devil
There are two kinds of computers that are vulnerable to the Y2K bug. One of them is the kind most people would readily recognize as computers: PCs, mainframes, palmtops and laptops. Many analysts believe that the Y2K bug is likely to be nearly eradicated by January 1, 2000 in these machines. The bad news is that if even a-half percent of them fail, the results could be traumatic.
The other kind of computer, referred to as an “embedded system,” is hidden away in other machinery. Such diverse items as coffee pots, sport utility vehicles, oil refineries and elevators operate with the assistance of microprocessors put in place to automate mechanical functions. Embedded chips that are Y2K-compliant, or that don’t use years in their calculations, are expected to sail through the date rollover with no problem. Your dashboard clock may show the wrong date, but your car will probably still run. You may have problems programming your VCR, but most people already do. Elevators may shut down if they think their last maintenance occurred 99 years ago. You might even get stuck in one.
But there is more to the embedded-systems aspect of Y2K than annoyance and inconvenience. By the end of 1999, there will be about 50 billion embedded chips used throughout the world. While some of them can be fixed by rewriting code, others have the non-compliant code hardwired in and must be replaced. A thorough accounting of them is impossible by 1/1/00. About three to five percent of them are expected to fail. And even if just one-tenth-of-one-percent of them fail in ways that threaten human life or the environment, that’s 50 million failures to deal with on New Year’s Day. Most experts consider embedded systems to be the real Y2K threat.Dr. Strange-launch
A serious Y2K threat involves computer systems that control toxic or dangerous substances. Chief among those substances is the global arsenal of nuclear weapons. In 1980, a chip costing less than a dollar failed in a NORAD computer in Colorado. The failure produced a phantom attack: it appeared as if the Soviet Union had launched an all- out nuclear blitz over the North Pole. Only the fortuitous discovery of the computer error saved the Northern Hemisphere from becoming a radioactive hell. Two decades later, the US and Russia still have thousands of warheads targeted at each other, and then there’s France, Britain, and China. All depending on date-sensitive microprocessors.
The Pentagon is largely silent on its drive to achieve Y2K compliance. Aside from establishing a Y2K office to coordinate compliance efforts across the military branches, and issuing a series of boilerplate pronouncements about progress in fixing its payroll and accounting systems, the only real news to come out of the Pentagon’s Y2K compliance effort has been the recent early retirement of Y2K-related staff in the Office of the Secretary of Defense.
Anthony Valetta, acting assistant Secretary of Defense for C3I (Command, Control, Communications, and Intelligence), took an early retirement in 1998. So did five high- ranking members of his staff. The retirements came at the same time a number of resignations of top Y2K staff rippled through major corporations. It is widely understood that these retirements were propelled by an unwillingness to be associated with a feared potential disaster come the millennium.
One hopes any Distant Early Warning radar reports of Russian missile launches in January 2000 will be treated with a grain of salt by the Pentagon. One can only hope that the same caution will be applied by other nuclear armies.Nuclear Powerplants
At the other end of the nuclear cycle, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission expects that Y2K problems may impede the ability of nuclear powerplant operators to monitor unusual bursts of radiation in a reactor’s vented air or water, potentially depriving plant operators of an early warning of a serious problem in the reactor core (to say nothing of the radiation risk to the environment). Dosimetry instruments designed to protect workers from radiation may also fail. Embedded chips (which may or may not be compliant) could be in anything from emergency core-cooling systems to the plant’s wet-dry vacuum cleaner. Failures in record-keeping software could result in lapses in scheduled maintenance.
The NRC says it will shut down any plant whose mission-critical systems are non-Y2K compliant by December ‘99. Eric Trapp, head of the Y2K program for Southern California Edison, told the Los Angeles Times that 40 engineers worked for four months to pare down a list of 190,000 devices at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station to 450 items that had some date sensitivity. It will take the company another year to analyze those devices and fix the ones that will fail in the year 2000.
Sweden intends to shut down all its nukes before rollover if there’s any doubt about their safety. British regulators have found Y2K faults in four of that country’s nuclear reactors. Cash-stropped Russia, however, has officially adopted a risky “fix-on-failure” policy, raising the specter of multiple Chernobyls.Railroads, Factories & Satellites
Most industrial facilities use hundreds of embedded microprocessors, most of which are not date-sensitive. But if a fraction of those that are date-sensitive either fail or spew bad data, the results could be catastrophic. Valves on offshore oil drilling platforms may fail, causing spills. Refineries may fail to detect toxic leaks, or may open valves at the wrong time, spurring Bhopal-scale disasters. Railroad switch boxes could send trains onto the wrong tracks, triggering collisions, derailments, fires and toxic spills. Municipal incinerators could burn waste at temperatures too low to destroy dioxins and other carcinogens. Smelters and chemical processors would also be vulnerable. Supertankers’ navigational systems may fail, leading to collisions or groundings.
The world may see collisions and groundings sooner than 1/1/2000. A problem similar to Y2K will hit the worldwide satellite Global Positioning System on August 22, 1999. GPS uses a different calendar, which will roll over at that time. If this reads a bit like idle speculation, that’s because it is. No one knows what will happen to the world’s industrial infrastructure at the end of next year. But a couple of anecdotal events suggest that extraordinary luck will be required for nothing to happen at all.
In late December, 1996, an aluminum smelter in New Zealand suffered catastrophic failure when the plant’s computer system, made up of 660 computers, shut down without warning at midnight. The computers regulated temperatures in the smelter’s pot cells. With the computers down, five of the pot cells overheated and destroyed themselves. An identical problem occurred two hours later at an aluminum smelter in Tasmania. The problem: 1996 was a leap year, but the computer software used by both plants failed to recognize this, and crashed when confronted with a 366th day of the year.
An executive at a volatile gas manufacturing company in the US told Y2K consultant Peter de Jager that a test at his company’s manufacturing plant exposed a chilling danger. When the date in the company’s computers was experimentally moved forward, an embedded chip failed, shutting down the plant’s cooling system. Without the cooling system, the official shuddered, the plant would have exploded. De Jager, in an interview in the St. Louis Post Dispatch, said that the company – which he did not identify – is now replacing its chips. He worries about the companies that aren’t checking their factories.The Grid
Though the prospect of a cold shutdown of the US’ 110 licensed nuke plants may bring a smile to the lips of clean-energy advocates, the sobering reality is that 22 percent of the electricity used in the US comes from nuclear powerplants.
Many of us would likely be willing to deal with that 22 percent shortfall in exchange for safer energy. We may, however, be facing quite a bit more than a 22 percent shortfall if Y2K brings severe electrical grid problems, leading to brownouts or blackouts over much of the country.
Most large power-generating stations rely on date-sensitive microprocessors in transformers, cooling systems and communications networks. Most of these will have to be either reprogrammed or replaced. The electrical utility industry has mobilized a huge effort to try and track down offending chips. But even if 1 percent of the suspect processors aren’t found and replaced, failures and crashes could force generating plants to shut down, or interfere with the transmission of electrical power to consumers.
North America’s electric powerplants are linked in a massive grid that runs from the southern tier of Canadian provinces across the 48 contiguous US states into a small part of northern Mexico. The grid is divided into four regions known as interconnections. Each interconnection is a tightly-woven network of generating stations, users and transmission lines. With the exception of Quebec, which sells many megawatts of hydropower to the Eastern Interconnection, not much power crosses interconnection boundaries. A failure in one interconnection may leave another unscathed.
But within an interconnection, the transmission and generating systems are so tightly meshed that a problem in one area can result in a cascade of failures that leaves a whole region without electricity. In August 1996, high temperatures caused four powerlines in eastern Oregon to sag until they hit tree branches and shorted out. This outage, combined with high demand for electricity for air conditioning, resulted in much of the Western Interconnection going down. [See “Climate Change Melts US Power Grid,” Fall ‘96 EIJ] Wildly fluctuating grid voltage levels forced a number of powerplants offline and as many as three million people from Portland to San Diego, and eastward to El Paso, went without power for up to three days.
The Eastern Interconnection gets as much as a third of its power from nukes. If that interconnection is already stressed due to an NRC shutdown of non-compliant nuke plants, even the smallest problem with other generators could trigger massive, cascading power outages during the coldest weeks of winter.
Other utilities could also be affected: Gas and oil companies rely on electric power to distribute their fuels to consumers. Lack of electricity and fuel would severely hinder emergency response crews. If the disruption proves long-term, delivery of food and water could grind to a halt.
Senator Bob Bennett (R-Utah), Chairman of the US Senate Special Committee on the Year 2000 Computer Problem, told the National Press Club in July that while he did not foresee a total failure in the North American power grid, “I expect we will have brownouts and regional blackouts, and in some areas of the country there will be power failures.” Other analysts aren’t as optimistic.Y2K Yahoos
The potential for Y2K-related accidents has prompted a new survivalist trend, with ties to the far right and millenial Christian movements. Based largely on fear of the poor — “when the welfare checks get cut off, the cities will erupt” — these new survivalists are heading for the hills, stocking up on guns, gasoline and generators.
This movement, if it gains steam, could pose a significant threat to the environment, since the exodus will be largely composed of people with little experience in rural living. Many of them are advocating squatting on public lands, diverting natural watercourses for drinking and wastewater use, and hunting wild game that is often already severely stressed by habitat loss. The use of fossil-fuel powered generators for electrical generation would add significantly to air and noise pollution in formerly remote areas.
But those indulging in millenial panic are missing the point. The Y2K bug is a serious problem, but it is only a symptom of an increasingly brittle technological-social structure that has come to control more and more of the planet. The problem is not just one category of bad code: it is a fundamental, systemic hubris in engineering and management. The living planet is not a machine; it is a complex and interconnected system, affected dramatically by subtle forces and almost impossible to reliably predict. We must begin to recognize that human society shares these qualities with the natural world.
It would be a great mistake to fail to constructively address the Y2K problem while we have time. It would be an even worse mistake, if rollover comes without major incident, to assume the problem has gone away.
It’s not the date, it’s the data. We’ve built a society that is so vulnerable to glitches that two digits can bring it down. That society is no doubt vulnerable to other bugs, bugs that may not give us several decades’ warning. We can take Y2K as a wakeup call, and begin to remake our society so that it’s more resilient. A quick fix and quick amnesia would be the worst disaster of all.
www.earthisland.org/eijournal/winter99/ov_winter99equity.html
Winter/Spring 1998-1999
Vol. 14, No. 1
Y2K and "Survival Equity"
by Gar Smith
When the Year 2000 rolls around, the lives of the world's indigenous jungle- and desert-dwellers may continue without the slightest disruption. But for anyone living within ten feet of an electric socket, Y2K has the potential to really "level the playing field." If electric systems fail and fossil fuel falters, the United States of America could experience an instant and prolonged decentralization.
San Francisco got a taste of Y2kollapse on December 8, 1998 when a "simple human error" blotted out power to as many as a million people. The outage only lasted seven hours but the outrage - and the six-figure lawsuits - continue to simmer.
On February 20, 1998, the lights when out in Auckland, New Zealand - and stayed out for 17 days. Radio broadcasts (powered by gasoline) urged inner city residents to flee the city and find lodging in nearby cities. Entire businesses abandoned Auckland for good. High-rise buildings became unusable for most (and a prison for some). The noise and fumes of thousands of gas- and diesel-electric generators overpowered Auckland's darkened central business district.
In Auckland, the wealthiest survived in relative comfort. It was the poor who sweated it out in dark rooms and stench-filled streets - through more than two weeks of sweltering heat. Any Y2K-related problems are likely to hurt the poor more than the rich - at least in the short run.
In the US, the richest one percent of the population (which controls 28 percent of the country's wealth) will be safely ensconced in their guarded retreats in the Poconos or offshore in Barbados. Their underground fuel tanks are already topped off: Their larders are stocked. (For the super-rich, hoarding is a matter of habit.)Civil Society or Civil Strife?
If civil society breaks down, the battle will not be between these super-rich Haves and the Have-Nots but between the Have-Littles and the Have-Mores.
In the widening debate about Y2k, the urban poor have been ignored - except by the right-wing survivalists who are buying land in the deserts, woods and prairies in fear that rioting will break out in the cities "when the welfare checks stop coming."
While it's nice to envision every middle-class family on Earth planting survival gardens and producing their own "off-the-grid" solar- and wind-generated-power, also picture this: You are desperately cold and hungry in a dark and threatening world - wouldn't you be drawn toward the one home that stands apart, aglow in the light of electric bulbs?
What has been missing in most Y2K discussions is the issue of "survival equity." People with more money have more opportunities to prepare for disruptions of power, fuel, food and cash. If, when the lights go out, some people are hungrier, colder and more desperate than others, the results will not be pretty.
Even if welfare checks (and paychecks) do arrive on time, it won't matter if there is no food in the markets. Every US city should begin to stockpile emergency supplies of food and water in convenient community centers so that urban residents will not be forced to chose between becoming refugees or contestants in a war for daily survival. This kind of contingency planning would also prepare communities to survive disruptions caused by earthquakes, floods, fire and tornadoes.
The Federal Government should organize this effort. In fact, it already has. During the Cold War, the US created a nationwide system of Civil Defense Shelters filled with drums of drinking water and barrels of survival biscuits. These shelters were, of course, incapable of protecting our parents from nuclear attack. But they could help to protect our children from Y2K or climate-change disruptions.
It's not enough to "get to know your neighbors." For years, an American underclass has been forced to survive through acts of petty crime, illicit commerce and violence. If the lights go out, civil society must finally solve the problem of massive unemployment or face the consequences.
If the power grid fails, there will be much useful work to do - hauling goods, moving the disabled, caring for the ill and elderly, creating post-Y2K technologies. You don't just call on the National Guard: When an emergency crosses normal political borders, everyone becomes a member of the National Guard.
Come the millennium, the currently unemployed may have lots of company. As one Y2K commentator put it: "If you aren't doing some kind of work that was being done in 1945, you're going to be out of a job." Can you repair shoes? Fix a manual typewriter? Build a house? Operate a mimeograph machine?
Like the threat of being hung in the morning, contemplating Y2k scenarios certainly serves to "focus the mind." One realization is that electricity is not an essential commodity. What would a post-Y2K solar-panel power? Light bulbs? (Why not go to sleep when it gets dark and rise with the sun?) Televisions? CD players? Power tools? Forget electric heat and self-defrosting refrigerators. Electric bikes and wheelchairs, however, do make sense.
Critical physical needs include food, water, clothing and shelter - electricity isn't critical.
Electricity will be essential, however, for the functioning of civil society. Electricity (from renewables, one would hope) could maintain regional - and possibly national and international - communications. We will need reliable sources of information. We will need to experience any disruption as a community as well as individuals. Radio broadcasts would most likely fulfill this need. But remember: Once the batteries are dead, boomboxes may as well be footstools. (During the San Francisco blackout, Earth Island was able to follow the emergency using a hand-cranked radio that also was powered by a photovoltaic cell.)The Rich-Poor Gap
For thousands of years, closing the gap between rich and poor has been a fundamental goal of enlightened government. Y2K could provide a sobering reality check on our progress.
In the US, the typical US executive earns 85 times more than the average worker. Globally, the machinery for transcending poverty - the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund - has also failed to deliver. In the last 25 years, the debt of the developing world has surged from $100 billion to $1.4 trillion - a 14-fold increase.
On the 50th anniversary of the United Nations, it is worth remembering that the UN Charter contained a plan to close the rich-poor gap. The Economic and Social Council was created "to employ international machinery for the promotion of the economic and social advancement of all people."
Today, more than one billion people live on less than a dollar a day. Thirty years ago, the richest 20 percent of the world controlled 70 percent of the world's income. Today, they hold 83 percent.
In his classic text, Ecology and Our Endangered Life-Support Systems, Eugene P. Odum, of the University of Georgia's Institute of Ecology, places the rich-poor disparity at the top of his short list on "worrisome gaps that must be narrowed if humans and the environment, as well as nations, are to be brought into more harmonious relationships."
A sustainable society will require more than alternative sources of energy and community organizing. It will also demand social justice. Lacking social justice - and "survival equity" - the most efficient solar panels might simply wind up being torn from suburban roof tops to build shelters for the homeless.
The growing concentration of natural resources, wealth and political power in fewer and fewer hands is both ecologically unsustainable and fundamentally anti-democratic. If the Y2k glitch pulls the plug on the 21st century, it will add a troubling new dimension to the power struggle of the next 100 years.
Something similar to this strategy was actually used for the "rollover" - lots of factories were turned off, and then slowly "rebooted" to make sure that they were working properly.
www.earthisland.org/eijournal/fall98/ov_fall98y2k2.html
Earth Island Journal Fall 1998
Y2K and Environmentalism
by Jim Lord
Because of its embedded processor aspect, the Year 2000 Computer Crisis poses what is likely the greatest environmental threat in history. Embedded processors control countless industrial processes that produce or use pollutants, poisons, or toxic substances.
The April 1998 issue of World Oil Magazine estimates that “the average oil and gas firm, starting today, can expect to remediate fewer than 30 percent of the overall potential failure points in the production environment. This reality shifts the focus of the solution away from trying to fix the problem, to planning strategies that would minimize potential damage and mitigate potential safety hazards.”
The cold, clammy realization that we’re not going to fix the embedded processor problem is sinking in. No matter how well we do in the United States, much of the world has little chance of fixing the embedded processor component of Y2K. The environmental implications are nothing short of staggering.
Awareness of the Year 2000 Crisis is growing dramatically. Before long, the environmentalists will realize what’s happening and when they do, they’re going to go stark, raving nuts.
They’re going to want to shut down everything and here’s the great irony – they’re probably right. We probably can’t take the chance of massive, simultaneous, global failures in environmentally sensitive systems. At a minimum, we need to start testing these facilities by turning the computers ahead to the Year 2000 in a carefully controlled and isolated fashion.
Political leaders all over the world will be trapped in a fascinating corner: Save the world by shutting it down and ruining the global economy. Meanwhile, all those tens of billions of clock chips keep ticking, ticking, ticking.
Jim Lord is the author of A Survival Guide for the Year 2000 Problem
Substitute "Peak Oil and climate change" for "Y2K" and you have a good series of recommendations for community cohesion to cope with crisis.
www.earthisland.org/eijournal/fall98/ov_fall98y2k.html
Surviving Y2K Will Mean Reinventing Society
by Cynthia Beal
Just as we should be preparing ourselves for physical interruptions in goods and services with respect to the Year 2000 Problem, we must also prepare ourselves for the fanning of social and psychological flames that now simmer like coals throughout much of our society.
As Margaret Wheatley, et. al, writes in “The Year 2000 Problem - Social Chaos or Social Transformation?”:
“Systems issues cannot be resolved by hiding behind traditional boundaries or by clinging to competitive strategies.... Our only hope for healthy responses to Y2K-induced failures is to participate together in new collaborative relationships.”
The temptation to exploit this issue for anything other than the broadest social good can easily spell disaster for preparedness and can utterly doom self-reliance and community harmony.
If the Y2K glitch is globally rough, the current competition for resources will intensify, driving communities, corporations and nations into riskier behavior in the name of corporate or civic survival (rarely the same thing).
One place where that painful discourse will soon begin rearing its head is along the battlelines already drawn between environmentalists and corporations that engage in potentially lethal technologically-run resource extraction, production or storage.
Will the industrialists and workers who have been loyal to potentially dangerous technologies find the will to join the environmentalists and insist on pulling-the-plug in the last few months of 1999 to prevent soiling their communities and the world around them? Or will they miss the opportunity by saying, “I don’t care what happens to Those People?”
Will the environmentalists who have been single-mindedly devoted to pulling-the-plug on risky technologies (no matter what the cost to their neighbors or their families) find the will to admit their own dependence upon technical and economic infrastructures? Or will they miss the opportunity by saying, “I don’t care what happens to Those People?”
Will we be able to drop the term “Those People” from our vocabulary?
Real community preparedness must, in a very short time, make the jump from physical and short-term survival to longer-term participatory community process and the mending of conflict arising from differences. This can be done temporarily in a crisis when the common ground of all sides is uncovered. But we have an opportunity to make it deep and lasting.
I’d like to suggest we each take a few infrastructures we value and are preparing for interruptions in - water, power, food - and look around our communities to see how those failures also could impact the natural infrastructures we depend on for survival.
A quick scan up and down your community’s waterways may reveal a factory upstream that has the potential to contaminate your water supply if its embedded systems or emissions monitoring systems fail. No matter what the value of the factory to your economy, if you lose your water supply, all your community and family preparedness is worthless, and you may find yourself a refugee, forced to leave your garden and your careful preparations behind.
The same is true of those who live near any of a number of chemical- intensive manufacturing operations. Look upland and upwind, as well as upstream. Class I soil, the best for agriculture, is already rare enough. The land shed is just as precious as the water shed. If a chemical or waste spill contaminates the farm land you’re counting on for a local food supply, all your preparations may be for naught.
Environmentalists know how to look upstream, upland and upwind. Think of them as Contamination Trackers. Technologists know how to look at the machinery and find the things that might pop and must be shut off and re- started mindfully – if at all.
And so, as this issue heats up (and it will), please try to hold that voice of reason that says we all need to work together: The folk we have the biggest rubs with may turn out to be our best partners.
www.earthisland.org/eijournal/win2000/wr_win2000y2k.html
Winter '99/2000
Vol. 14, No. 4
Y2K Could Hit Nuclear Plants
A global call for a Y2K World Atomic Safety Holiday
No one knows what will happen on January 1, 2000 because of the Y2K computer bug," Yumi Kiku-chi observes, but "the prevention of nuclear hazards must be our top priority worldwide. We are calling for a temporary moratorium on all nuclear activities including reactors, fuel processing and atomic weapons. We named this the World Atomic Safety Holiday" (WASH).
The main goals of the WASH campaign:
• Reactor and nuclear processing facilities holiday from December 1, 1999 until after New Year's Day. Each facility must show it meets Y2K compliance criteria with testing and verification before restart.
• Installation of added reliable back-up power systems, (turbines, fuel cells, or renewable sources) and certification that diesel generators are in good working order with a minimum three-month supply of fuel.
• De-alerting of all nuclear weapons no later than December 1, 1999. Mary Olsen of the Nuclear Resources Information Service (NIRS) warns that unless all of the world's 433 nuclear plants operate flawlessly during the millennial leap, reactor accidents could "make the Y2K 'time bomb' a nuclear disaster."
Every one of these plants must be ready for January 1, 2000 and testing must be subject to third-party validation. Olsen warns that simply "turning the reactor off will not remove the hazard completely."
Y2K failures could affect a nuclear reactor in multiple ways. First, a digital component failure might trigger a reactor failure directly. (This is a big problem for Japan - the only country that no longer has manual back-up control for its reactor systems.)
More indirectly, bad data might cause a reactor operator to take inappropriate actions, which could cause an accident.
The third type could happen if the electricity fails. Reactors depend on off-site electric power to run cooling systems and control rooms, with emergency diesel generators for automatic backup. Unfortunately, according to Olsen, even in the US these generators are "not even 90 percent reliable."
In the US, most local emergency officials are planning for three weeks without power. But diesel generators often overheat and usually are not operated for weeks at a time. Many generators also have digital components that may be subject to Y2K failure.
"It takes only two hours without the cooling system functioning for reactor fuel to melt," Olsen says. Power failures also could cause "a meltdown of nuclear fuel storage pools .... These pools must be cooled for at least five years."
Loss of off-site electrical power poses the most prominent risk to nuclear powerplant safety. Reliable back-up power is needed immediately at each nuclear site. Fuel cells and gas turbines are more reliable than diesel generators.
There are well over 1,000 private utilities, non-utility generators, public utilities, and rural electric cooperatives in the US and Canada operating more than 15,000 generating units. Many will reach the millennium with Y2K issues unresolved.
The US electric power grid is fragile. In 1996, two disruptions in one five-week period caused 190 generating stations (including several nuclear reactors) to shut down. On August 10, 1996, a sagging tree limb in Oregon caused a short that caused a blackout in California, Arizona and New Mexico. Millions of people were left without power. In some regions, the blackout lasted several weeks.
NIRS notes that increasingly severe winter storms have caused power outages in the eastern US in recent years. Such wintertime power failures "could lead to extended blackouts and resultant nuclear catastrophes." The NIRS has petitioned the NRC to require all nuclear power stations to stockpile a 20-day supply of fuel for diesel generators. Batteries charged by solar cells, windmills, hydroelectric or geothermal energy would give the greatest assurance of long-term stability.
In September, the NRC ruled that it would not comply with the NIRS request and declared that US nuclear plants would only need to have seven days worth of emergency fuel available on-site.
The Pentagon has been exploring ways to prevent Y2K failures from causing the accidental launch of nuclear missiles. A more likely scenario is that missiles could explode at their launch sites. Last March, a Government Accounting Office report revealed that when the North American Aerospace Defense Command ran a test for Y2K readiness, "testing problems occurred." Fortunately, NORAD was able to "recover and continue the mission."
"Computer errors are, by their very nature, idiosyncratic," notes the British American Security Information Council. Because of this, "The real cure is to take the weapons off alert." Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) and other members of Congress have called for a global "nuclear stand-down" before December 31, 1999.
"De-alerting of nuclear warheads would ensure that Y2K would not start an accidental nuclear war," Kikuchi says. "US and Russian nuclear weapons are on hair-trigger alert even though the Cold War is over. De-alerting means to disable the weapons delivery systems in such a way that human action is required for a launch to succeed. Currently, all other nuclear weapons states are in de-alert status."
In June 1998, the New Agenda Coalition (Brazil, Egypt, Ireland, Mexico, New Zealand, South Africa and Sweden) challenged the nuclear weapons states to de-alert all nuclear forces. A campaign has been launched to negotiate the rapid conclusion of a convention to abolish nuclear weapons - as mandated by Article VI of the Non-Proliferation Treaty and by the International Court of Justice. - GS
What You Can Do: Contact the White House and your representatives to insist that all non-compliant nuclear powerplants be shut down prior to December 31. Insist that nuclear weapons be deactivated before December 31. For more information, contact: Yumi Kikuchi, Y2K WASH [Harmonics Life Center, 1047 Naka, Kamogawa, Chiba, Japan 296-0111, fax: 81-470-97-1215, yumik@awa.or.jp] or the Nuclear Information & Resource Service [1424 16th St. NW Suite 404, Washington, DC 20036, (202) 328-0003, http://www.nirs.org].Nuclear Weapons and Y2K
Although the Cold War is over, the US and Russia still maintain 5,000 nuclear warheads on missiles that can be launched within minutes.
As John Hallan of Friends of the Earth Sydney [17 Lord St., Newton, NSW, Australia] reports, "there is a small but unacceptable risk of accidental nuclear war as a result of Y2K-induced computer glitches in the vast and old computer systems that control nuclear weapons."
While the US and Russia both have "de-targeted" their nuclear missiles, these rockets can be quickly re-targeted as long as they remain on alert. Both countries rely on a dangerous "launch-on-warning" system that requires firing missiles on the suspicion of a foreign attack. In the past, computer and technician errors have, on several occasions, brought the world within minutes of a nuclear holocaust.
In 1991, President George Bush and President Mikhail Gorbachev de-alerted hundreds of nuclear missiles in a mutual good-faith gesture. With Y2K looming, it is time to finish the work.
The Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons and the UN General Assembly both have called on the nuclear powers to take their weapons off "high-alert" status.
Great Britain already has changed its "notice to fire" from mere minutes to several days. De-alerting nuclear missiles won't cost the US a dime: It can be achieved with a single Executive Order.
A global letter-writing campaign, which has been under way since September 1, has asked Presidents Clinton and Yeltsin to announce a nuclear "stand-down." This issue has been called "the most important environmental campaign in history."
Please take a moment to contact President Bill Clinton [fax: (202) 456-24261] and President Boris Yeltsin, [fax +7 (095) 205-4330]. In August 1999, Russia offered to cut its stockpile of strategic nuclear wea-pons from 5,000 to 1,500 and provide for early de-alerting. US arms negotiators have, so far, ignored the Russian offer. Please ask the President and your representatives to accept - and match - Russia's historic offer to reduce the threat of nuclear war.