What’s difficult to comprehend about Covid-19 is that up until the moment its status as a pandemic became inevitable, it didn’t feel to those of us in the imperial center like a scenario worth worrying about. For the people in my coastal California community, a pandemic was no more of a cause for daily anxiety than an extreme West Coast U.S. earthquake, or a powerful solar storm, or a nuclear war. But now that it’s come true, all of these other events have been revealed as more worthy of anticipation than they used to appear. And factoring them into the late-stage capitalist crises of climate destabilization, economic collapse, and rising fascism, it becomes clear just how unstable civilization is.
A study from last year found that in any given year, the probability of a pandemic similar to Covid-19 is 2%, which as the Global Health Institute puts it means that “someone born in the year 2000 would have about a 38% chance of experiencing one by [2021].” Compare that to the odds of a megaquake occurring along the U.S. West Coast within the next 50 years, which are roughly 1 in 10. As described by Kathryn Schulz in her famous 2015 article on this coming quake, “fema projects that nearly thirteen thousand people will die in the Cascadia earthquake and tsunami. Another twenty-seven thousand will be injured, and the agency expects that it will need to provide shelter for a million displaced people, and food and water for another two and a half million.”
Then there’s the potential for a solar storm that causes catastrophic damage to the electrical grid, which is estimated to be 1.6 to 12 percent during the next decade. In both scenarios, the area that I live in will be rendered without electricity for an indefinite but undoubtedly long period. When the Cascadia quake happens, communities like Oregon’s Willamette Valley will be left without power for around 100 days. When the solar storm happens, the time frame for getting the lights back on will be similar. When we experience these things, we must remember that the duration and severity of the crises won’t simply be from the natural disasters themselves. It will be from a socioeconomic system that’s made us profoundly unequipped for such events.
Unlike pandemics (which are growing more likely due to environmental degradation and global warming) or nuclear war (which is tied to factors like the conflict in Ukraine), the probability of these disasters isn’t within humanity’s control. But what is in our control is how well our society is prepared to absorb such shocks. And the last three years have shown that in the imperial center, as well as in the countries that it’s rendered poor by imposing its neoliberal model onto, society is not prepared. In late 2019, a Pentagon report assessed that “Climate change is introducing an increased risk of infectious disease to the US population. It is increasingly not a matter of ‘if’ but of when there will be a large outbreak.” Our “national security” strategists knew this was coming, but the capitalists they serve don’t have the incentive to protect us from disease, so now nearly a million people have died in the U.S. alone. And because these strategists were functioning within the capitalist model, their “solution” to pandemics and other climate-related crises was to further militarize American life. So will be the case when these other disasters strike.
As the Pentagon report observed, the U.S. electrical grid is severely vulnerable to natural disasters. Its decades-long neglect under the neoliberal model has made it so that even without a solar storm, simply the intensifying climatic catastrophes makes a national power grid collapse within the next 20 years probable. There are nuances to this, of course. There will be sections within the capitalist countries that fare far better than others during these vast blackouts, namely the wealthy ones. And places like Willamette Valley at least aren’t part of the Global South, which is already subject to enforced inequality within the neo-colonies and deadly sanctions within the liberated countries. But everywhere that the bourgeoisie have power over the state, the poor and working class are going to be made to suffer vastly more than they will in the socialist countries. Westerners are currently lamenting the lockdowns within China, but China has kept its Covid death count under five thousand at the same time that the highly neoliberalized major powers the U.S., Brazil, and India have had hundreds of thousands of pandemic deaths. Orienting one’s society around profit means sacrificing lives in times of crisis, in addition to the needless deaths that occur under capitalism every single day due to social murder.
Examining how unprepared U.S. electrical infrastructure is for the variables that will appear in the coming decades—with a solar storm being just one among a growing number of threats to it—reveals how true this is. According to Brian Donovan of McVan Aerospace, who has an education at MIT, the best option for safeguarding against a solar storm is “a big capacitor in series with the long grid lines. This completely protects the transformer from dangerous DC current, while allowing the AC grid power to flow normally. You wouldn’t even notice the solar flare. Even unprotected grids could disconnect when warned, but in practice the grid operators don’t want to shut down the grid and transformers have been destroyed in recent CMEs. NASA has a warning system….Our regulators should require utilities to protect these transformers. I ran across a paper [cited by Donovan elsewhere] that claims the protections installed are completely inadequate in many nations, the USA included. A ten day Carrington level CME could shut down large parts of the grid and may put many nuclear reactors in an emergency situation. I may have overestimated the wisdom of US regulators.” The technology exists to stop industrial civilization from descending into disarray as soon as it runs up against historically routine space weather phenomena. But capitalism has made most of humanity far more vulnerable to these kinds of factors than they would be otherwise.
What will come from this is a humanitarian catastrophe on a scale comparable to those within Libya, Ethiopia, and the other countries that U.S. imperialism has turned into failed states. The essential services holding society together will break down, leaving the right-wing militias with an opening to fill the power vacuums. By the time power gets restored to the places outside of the wealthy’s enclaves—which could take as much as a year given how long Puerto Rico’s 2017 post-hurricane electricity outage lasted—our society will be more unequal than ever. Our communities will be treated as enormous sacrifice zones, which the rich will have escaped by retreating to their luxury survival compounds overseas or in the continent’s heartlands. The only thing that will be able to rebuild society is the victory of proletarian revolution, facilitated by cadres that have been sufficiently trained to survive these hardships, and then seize territory from the state and its fascist paramilitaries.
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