LESSONS FROM THE ELECTRICITY BLACKOUT

Humankind remains just another species on the planet Earth, but also all-powerful in self-destruction.

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On May 1, 2025, I saw the usual front-page news in our media: the well-known war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu has declared a “national emergency” in Israel and deployed IDF troops to intervene… but where? Against whom? Was there a new large-scale “terrorist” attack on Israel? Here comes the surprise: it was something totally different. Israel is battling the worst fires in a decade; firefighters have rushed to control wildfires that have injured several people and threaten to engulf even the suburbs of Jerusalem.¹

What makes this news so special is that the territory controlled by Israel-associated with the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank-was now affected by a catastrophe that is continuously occurring all around the world: ecological crises. Just recall the latest case: on Monday, April 28, a massive blackout hit the entire Iberian Peninsula (all of Spain and Portugal), plus a small part of southern France. Passengers were stranded in trains and elevators, millions lost phone and internet coverage, traffic lights stopped working, causing immense jams, and so on. After most of the electricity was restored on Tuesday, questions were raised: how do you so easily get a blackout affecting some 60 million people? What caused it?

At first, there were opinions circulating about unexpectedly strong fluctuations in temperature, but soon Spain's grid operator, Red Eléctrica, as well as the Portuguese government spokesperson, dismissed the possibility of a cyberattack, human error, or a meteorological phenomenon, assuming instead that the outage was caused by a sudden disconnection between two electricity generation plants in the southwest of the Iberian Peninsula.² Now, three days later, there is still no clear answer, and it may take months to arrive at one. One should be especially attentive to the reaction of the populist new Right to this blackout: they blame it on the “green madness” itself. The idea is that the “green” insistence on electricity instead of oil for cars caused the overload of our electricity network.

The crucial question here is: can such a blackout be prevented from happening at this-or a larger-scale ever again? The response is clear and unambiguous: no. The reason is not only external threats beyond human control (a big asteroid hitting the Earth) or the unforeseen products of our own activity, but our very growing interconnectedness.

In response to concerns that volcanic ash ejected during the 2010 eruptions of Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland would damage aircraft engines, the controlled airspace of most European countries was closed in what at the time was the largest air-traffic shutdown since World War II. The closures caused millions of passengers to be stranded not only in Europe, but across the world. With large parts of European airspace closed to air traffic, many more countries were affected as flights to, from, and over Europe were cancelled. The fact that a cloud from a minor volcanic eruption in Iceland-a small disturbance in the complex mechanism of life on Earth-can bring to a standstill the aerial traffic over an entire continent is a reminder of how, with all its power to transform nature, humankind remains just another species on the planet Earth, but also all-powerful in self-destruction.

This complex interconnectedness opens up the space not only for local accidents with global consequences but also for subtle forms of sabotage. It is well known that all the big powers have detailed plans for how to perturb the daily life of the enemy’s state: cutting off water and electricity supply, suspending digital networks, etc. Global interconnectedness means that any of these systems can be suspended with a small intervention at numerous entry points. My dream of global catastrophe is not the earth’s surface scorched by nuclear explosions but a new reality in which everything that we see remains exactly the same as it usually is, just with no electricity, no fresh water, no air conditioning, no digital or phone links, no weather forecasts, and chaos in stores because of the lack of cash…