For Better or For Worse Update #1—Surveillance, crumbling infrastructure & collapse—Ashes Ashes #17
Channel: Stop Fossil Fuels
Date: 17/05/2019

One of our hosts is out of town, so we take this week to explore updates to many of the subjects we've discussed so far. Guest host Moriah King helps us explore everything from the power grid to pensions, state surveillance to sea level rise, and so much more. Strap in this week: it's a few months of bad news all at once (with a little good news thrown in), but we hope you'll be as motivated by it as we are to start working towards something better. 

Podcast by Ashes Ashes, reposted under CC License. Browse episode resources & read full transcript at https://ashesashes.org/blog/episode-17-for-better-or-for-worse-1

Stop Fossil Fuels researches and disseminates effective strategies and tactics to halt fossil fuel combustion as fast as possible. Learn more at https://stopfossilfuels.org

CHAPTERS
2:33 Infrastructure
9:44 Power Grid
14:43 Preparing for Infrastructure Failure
17:08 Communites and Death Spirals
20:10 Pension Systems
28:15 What is Community?
31:33 Where Does the Retirement Burden Fall?
34:02 Government Surveillance
54:56 Corporate Tracking
1:06:09 Sea Level Rise
1:08:21 Facebook
1:09:13 Agriculture
1:09:49 Good News?
1:10:54 Close out

TRANSCRIPT EXCERPT
Daniel: We're happy to be joined in studio by Atlanta native Moriah King, who returned a few months ago from a 2 year service in Peace Corp China. We have a section today on some things going on in China, and I can't wait to hear your perspective on that.

On March 7, a 48-inch water main burst in Atlanta, flooding the road and leaving up to 700,000 residents in Dekalb County—the Eastern half of the city—without water.

Moriah: It caught me completely off-guard. I just remember waking up in the morning, I'm excited about going on with my daily routine, and I go to turn on the water and there's no water. And I think okay maybe there was scheduled maintenance that I wasn't made aware of, so I was totally surprised.

Daniel: So it caught you off-guard but when you were living in China did this type of thing ever happen?

Moriah: All the time. I lived in a very dry area, pretty much a desert, so water outages were frequent. Many people in my community would store water in their washing machines, or in their kitchen sinks. Lots of water storage ahead of time or they would just go to the local grocery market and buy a couple gallons of water.

I also started storing my water in my washing machine and I learned it from my auntie across the way. She told me “hey you know we all just store water; boil it up and you'll be okay.”

Daniel: It seems like you were more prepared for the water to go out living in China where it happened more frequently, than you were in the US. It makes me wonder if we've allowed ourselves to be spoiled in the US. We take it for granted that things will always just work, so we don't adequately prepare for when they don't. I don't know anybody who stores water in washing machines. Are there any other ways you might have prepared for the water going out?

Moriah: Besides that no, but I think one difference between my community in China and my community in here in the states is that they would just deal with it. In America we're so used to all these conveniences that we take it for granted that we have access to water and electricity 24/7, and we don't realize there may be some periods of time where we just won't have it and we'll have to make do. My students had to pay to shower; that's another way that they saved and conserved water in China.

So my students showered once or twice a week, whereas in America we shower one or two times a day.

Daniel: So definitely spoiled when it comes to showering.

Moriah: Spoiled when it comes to access to water and electricity.

Daniel: Maybe the fact that we do expect the water to be there 24/7 exacerbates risks for some of our infrastructure problems: Because we're not willing to tolerate any intentional interruptions to our services, there's no political will for shutting things down to carry out necessary repairs. That is, until there's simply no other option.

The Chairman of DC's Metro public rail stated that $25 billion dollars was needed for major repairs of the Metro, and that if they did not shut it down for months at a time to carry out those repairs, the whole system wouldn't be functioning at all in less than a decade. Over two years later, now there are plans to make some of these repairs, and it's not going to be easy on DC residents. In the summer and fall of this year 4 stations will be shut down at some point to conduct repairs, including 2 that will be out of commission for 45 days.

Moriah: The first time I traveled to China, in 2014, Beijing was trying to do transportation system maintenance and just shut the whole thing down. Again, Americans are fortunate that it’s just a couple of stations for 45 days. This shut down will encourage DC residents to think about alternative modes of transportation; it could actually be a good thing.