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It is so easy to make fun of someone for being concerned about a possible disaster down the road...because, after all, such things happen so very rarely.

Except that IF this one happens, our highly technological, highly inter-dependent society will be destroyed. For lack of a few thousand transformers.

Oh, it DIDN’T happen before - the 1859 Carrington Event did occur, of course, but what kind of electrical infrastructure did we or anyone else have then? So a few telegraph systems - steam powered, mind you - went down for a while. They produced food the old fashioned way, with horses and plows - no electricity required. They pumped water manually (or with steam engines - rather robust in comparison to ultra-miniaturized microcircuits, wouldn’t you say?), and medical care sucked anyway (but did so without electricity or medications that needed to be refrigerated). In other words, people 150 years ago knew how to live in what we consider primitive conditions. We don’t, and even if we did, such technology wouldn’t support our population.

Look, we are 300 million in this nation, 6+ billion worldwide. Those figures (or anything close to it) are ONLY possible because of mass electrification, mass use of petrochemicals, mass use of fertilizers, etc. It is an extraordinarily complex machine, but not very robust compared to either a Carrington-type event or an EMP.

All we need to do is have some equipment in reserve, and a plan, and it won’t be a megadisaster, merely a disaster on the scale of several simultaneous Katrinas (which would be bad enough, to be sure, but our nation would survive). The cost would be far, far less than 1/10 that of the so-called stimulus bill, and would actually create jobs here.

But let’s ridicule the article, let’s not take a potentially civilization-busting event and turn it into a SNL skit.

BTW, I stand to make exactly nothing from any of the steps necessary to preserve civilization from this event - I’m not in any related business, nor is anyone in my family. This is just common sense, to invest a little in true disaster insurance - kind of like looking for Earth-busting asteroids. Very low probability, but extraordinarily high loss events, to be sure...but that’s not a gamble I wish to take.