JOURNAL: Climate Man

The superempowered references are flowing for the man in the UK that shut down an electric power plant single handedly (without a boom):

The £12m defences of the most heavily guarded power station in Britain have been breached by a single person who, under the eyes of CCTV cameras, climbed two three-metre (10ft) razor-wired, electrified security fences, walked into the station and crashed a giant 500MW turbine before leaving a calling card reading "no new coal". He walked out the same way and hopped back over the fence. All power from the coal and oil-powered Kingsnorth station in Kent was halted for four hours...

Mystified Greenpeace activists (ego and legacy protest thinking play a big part in their choice of strategy):

Should "climate man" ever show up, he will be feted for what activists say was the most daring individual action of the year. "We have no idea who he is - but we really want to know. Everybody's asking 'where were you on Friday November 28'," said Ben Stewart of Greenpeace, one of six people arrested for climbing the 76 metre (250ft) chimney of the Kingsnorth station early last year but found not guilty of criminal damage in November. "We would never act anonymously," he added.

More quotes:

"He left a banner but it was a real DIY job. It was really scrappy." "This is a different league to protesters chaining themselves to equipment. It's someone treating a power station as an adventure playground."

Comments

[Duncan Kinder]

Sounds like a later day Zorro.

[Duncan Kinder]

Better yet: "The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDYId2Ab1o8

[James Bowery]

The Scarecrow communicated with others about his actions. The Power Plant Man did not communicate with others about his actions.

Where does this lead us in the Internet age when communication is the key?

"Act at noon Central Time on April 15 and April 19. If you spread this message, do not act."

[For Want Of A Shoe (In The Loom)]

people doing this sort of thing should remember what happened to the Luddites, and how the most civilized, politically advanced, and liberal country of the time in Europe (get out of here with your guillotine and funny calendar, Revolutionary/Napoleonic France) ended up adding a mandatory death penalty for millworkers who "accidentally" dropped their shoes in the power loom.

the Brits of the present aren't as tough or bloody minded as their predecessors, but if people start dying (hospitals losing life support power with generator failure, people losing electric heat in winter during big storms) because someone wanted to make a really big "environmental statement", they might decide to take a page from history's playbook.

[James Bowery]

Correct, For Want Of A Shoe (In The Loom), and that's exactly what Guerrillas want:

Government crackdown on the population.

It's interesting to observe the other side of the fence here: Many of the alienated/dispossessed are contemplating the use of force but are being admonished that it would be a mistake to do so since it would result in a government crackdown. They don't see the positive side of tyrannical response -- itself -- provoking popular uprising. I must confess the trade-off isn't obvious to me either.

[basic banalities]

Appreciate 'adventure playground'. When will you start blogging about GGs motivated mainly by boredom?

"I was too young to drink at the bar and my parents don't have cable or internet access, so I started destroying power plants. . . Bristol by candlelight, the next big thing in the youth subculture"

[TM Lutas]

Remote controlled tranquilizer guns on helicopters take care of this sort of thing reasonably well. Change the munitions load when saboteurs start to armor up. The technical fix is reasonably cheap and getting cheaper. Somebody out there's already successfully mounted a shotgun on an autocopter so a light recoil tranq should be child's play.

The biggest problem will be the authorities clearing the legal thicket around remote controlled arms. I suspect that it will be viewed as a much better alternative than a 1984 style government crackdown.

[Dumbass]

This isn't anything new or special, a few weeks ago, some idiots walked into Pelindaba nuclear plant in South Africa to steal a laptop. This fellow probably saw it, realized that security was somewhere between 'low' and 'lulz i can has uranium?', and went in himself.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/15/world/africa/15joburg.html

Hilariously, they jumped a fence too.

Wait until you see Haiti--team builds power plant, team activates plant, entire community shows up to dismantle plant and sell it for scrap.

[istewart]

And these helicopters of yours are somehow immune to anti-aircraft weaponry, Mr. Lutas?

[gmoke]

Bill McKibben and Wendell Berry are calling for civil disobedience at the coal-fired plant that powers the Capitol Building in Washington DC for March 2, 2009. More information at http://ran.org/get_involved/powershift_and_mass_civil_disobedience_updates/

I wonder if Al Gore will participate.

[adam]

Ah, Kingsnorth, in Kent, a hellhole with some of the worst police in the UK.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/dec/15/kingsnorth-climate-change-environment-police

The local plods have admitted that their last multi-million pound days out in the countryside, in which they heroically confiscated toilet paper (doubtless to confirm if it contained the drug aloe vera), was a bit of a farce. Imagine.

They originally said that 70 police were injured (on the order of the number of police injured during the recent Paris riots). Sadly the number appears to be 12, which weren't due to savage fighting against climate protesters. Savage injuries such as a (possible) wasp sting. And being hurt sitting in car.

Kent police are the proto-typical thick plod. Recently they attempted to arrest people creating naughty drawings if the figures appeared (to the plod) to be underaged; quite how stick figures manage this I have no idea.

[rick]

Hence, we really need to develop a distributed energy program. One, where if every building in a community was creating energy of one type or another, there would be no central schwerpunkt to disrupt.

This is what the T Boone Pickens of the world understand, and don't want you to understand. They want to set up huge wind farms so that you will purchase your energy from them. The correct answer is to put solar panels, wind turbines, hydro-micro generation (from rain water flowing through gutters, run off, etc) as appropriate on buildings in community. Not only does it prevent successful intentional attacks, the people in the north-east today would likely have at least some energy available in their neighborhood. Possibly a community center where they could cook food, bath and stay warm. The last time something similar happened in my neighborhood and I was without power, I threw a drop cord over the fence to my neighbor who still had power (they are on a separate transformer). Then, when the situation reversed itself, we just reversed the drop cord.

Anyway, you can't extract energy from the environment, without denying that energy flow to the local ecology. Every solar panel on an open field, denies light to the earth below it. Wind farms, when large enough, will effect ground level air currents. Hydro will...We are better off adapting, utilizing and maximizing the energy potential of our existing infrastructure.

[Duncan Kinder]

the Brits of the present aren't as tough or bloody minded as their predecessors, but if people start dying (hospitals losing life support power with generator failure, people losing electric heat in winter during big storms) because someone wanted to make a really big "environmental statement", they might decide to take a page from history's playbook.

This is why "out with the old; in with the new" is an incorrect strategy. All hell breaks loose at the semicolon in the above expression.

The correct strategy is "In with the new; out with the old."

[adam]

Duncan,

Its not often I question you but... what?

"the Brits of the present aren't as tough or bloody minded as their predecessors,"

We're not? How do we know? As a group we're certainly pretty similar to our forefathers.

I'd like to point out that the protesters are British. They've been there for 3 years so far. That sounds reasonably bloody minded (bloody minded means, in British slang, stubborn and obstructive, not murderous).

"but if people start dying (hospitals losing life support power with generator failure, people losing electric heat in winter during big storms) because someone wanted to make a really big "environmental statement", they might decide to take a page from history's playbook."

Go on. A page from history's playbook... What does that mean? A power cut causes riots? Mass executions of all the middle-class teenagers? Paramilitary police sweeping university professors into camps? None of those things are, well, really English.

Before you scare-monger too much, hospitals in the UK have absolute priority on electrical power - assuming that their own emergency generators don't kick in. Back in my childhood the economic collapse of the 1970s and early 1980s you could spot the houses on the power lines to the hospital - they were the only ones with any lights on - everything else was dark. And that was in London thirty years ago.

"This is why "out with the old; in with the new" is an incorrect strategy. All hell breaks loose at the semicolon in the above expression.

The correct strategy is "In with the new; out with the old.""

I think I see what you mean, but that really isn't the British way of doing things - especially in engineering, we're really bad at contingency planning or dual running. I can say that with professional qualifications in engineering (took me around 9 months, part time, no significant problems. And that's the problem of UK engineering. Engineering isn't a protected profession in the UK, unlike Insurance Broker, which is. My Brokerage exams took 2 years of post-graduate work and required me to sweat blood. Don't ask me to wire a plug).

To really understand the British, or at least the English, you have to remember one key point - old things are better than newer ones. Take houses: my dear old mum lives in a house that was made in the 1700s. Its clearly a better house than mine is, which is a lot more modern and cost a lot less. Hers is larger, and better designed, with proper storage areas including an attic so large that Narnia can be sighted.

This is a funny sharp read about the English:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Watching-English-Hidden-Rules-Behaviour/dp/0340818867

Some people hated it, but as a piece of observation its unfortunately brilliant.

[Marcello]

I am not surprised. Where I work at there is a large (nearly 200.000 barrels per day capacity give or take) oil refinery, a far more critical installation (it feeds directly a nearby large power plant with its byproducts, it is a focal node for a network of pipelines for crude and refined, provides gas for heating to the nearby town and so on). Sometimes I have to go there to make some corporate guy sign some government paperwork.
I can get to the plant manager office
simply by assuming a "I am supposed to be there" look and walking straight throught the main entrance; nobody has ever questioned me. The access the technical areas seems only slighty better guarded, certainly I had to pester the guards there for directions before they paid some attention to me. Sure, there is an electrified/alarmed fence around the perimeter but it is just a superficial deterrent.

That being said things like these may not be necessarily somehing to get in a "the sky is falling" mode over. People here have sporadically attacked power lines for thirty years. Despite the evident low risk/high payoff of such attacks they have been seldom carried out, even when conventional terrorism was going strong.
Short of a civil war or civil war like environment have ever guerrillas resorted to systemic sabotage on a scale large enough to threaten such systems?
I suspect there are hardwired psychological/ideological reasons that channel towards conventional terrorism and similar measures, despite the advantage of such sabotages.

[Matt]

Marcello,

I believe the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Pathe) a Communist Guerilla movement in Peru succesfully attacked power distribution in that country. I believe it was to make the people in the cities feel the pain, without bombing and killing a lot of them. A side effect might of been to draw troops out to remote areas to engage them during repairs.

In modern societies such as the U.S. and U.K. there are advantages to taking down the power grid, at least regionally for short periods of time. It causes confusion, delays response of law enforcement, makes everyone feel the pain and in some cases could make it difficult on military/police responding to attacks since most of their communications and coordination equipment requires a lot of electricity.

[Marcello]

"In modern societies such as the U.S. and U.K. there are advantages to taking down the power grid, at least regionally for short periods of time."

I do see the advantages. But the point is: do the people who actually go out to blow up stuff see them as well?
Because such tactics seem quite underused.
Yes when the shit hits the fan in industrial quantities GGs use such tactics but seemingly almost as an afterthought.
Otherwise people still prefer to carry out attacks like Mumbai, as if blowing up a power line was beneath them.

[Duncan Kinder]

Adam:

I was quoting For Want Of A Shoe (In The Loom) above, but unfortunately omitted the quotation marks.

That is one unfortunate result of HTML not being enabled for comments in this site.

[Jean Commons]

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