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ECOLOGICAL LIFE SYSTEMS INSTITUTE for The George Washington University's Research Program in Social and GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY WASHINGTON , D.C. APRIL 12, 2000
Technology, Knowledge, and Power: Mapping a Course Towards a Sustainable Future
for more information, view the videos or contact Stuart H. Rodman
ABSTRACT The Y2k technology problem has been wreaking havoc on business systems worldwide since the beginning of the New Year. According to the U.S. Senate Special Committee on the Year 2000 Technology Problem, mainframe computer operations have been affected in nearly every sector of our business life and economy. Many of these "glitches" have been reported by the public media but the Senate Report notes that "there is little incentive" for industry and business to be forthcoming about their experience with susceptible control systems or other technical issues related to their preparations for the Year 2000. The likelihood of failures in world wide infrastructure due to the malfunction of improperly prepared control systems was widely anticipated by most observers, including members of Congress, industry trade associations, embedded system experts, and others. Thus far however, the "rollover" into the Year 2000 has been seemingly unblemished by confirmed embedded system failures. Although the estimated expenditures within the U.S. to prepare technology for the Year 2000 has been placed by most observers to have exceeded $100 billion, the exact nature of the preparations, as well as the performance of the renovated systems, remains largely unknown. In their final report, The U.S. Senate Special Committee on the Year 2000 Technology Problem noted that despite the apparent successful transition to the Year 2000, many remediated systems are believed to have been subject to temporary fixes and "patches". The Senators caution that much work remains in completing the transition process to ensure the future reliability of such systems in both governments and industry worldwide. At the same time however, evidence abounds suggesting that control system failures are already occurring creating disruptions in our nation's refinery industry and throughout the attendant infrastructure. What is the true status of our nation's technological preparedness? Unfortunately, many issues related to that question must now be addressed inferentially. Direct answers and hard data has proven themselves to be hard to come by. Largely to blame for this problem is the special Year 2000 legislation enacted during the last two Congressional sessions which have greatly impaired the public's ability to question their government on this topic and remove most incentives for industry to be forthcoming with their customers. These laws place restrictions on government's ability to disclose information obtained from industry about their Y2K readiness status and preparedness planning, even under the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act. In the case of at least one such law, Public Law 106-40 Chemical Safety Information, Site Security and Fuels Regulatory Relief Act, the public's access to potentially life saving information is restricted as are the rights of "covered researchers", journalists, and others. While these laws were enacted in a climate of corporate apprehension and fear of liability, the anticipated crisis of year 2000 litigation does not appear to have materialized. The Y2K bug has since been officially pronounced "Squashed" and many government organizations created specifically to deal with potential problems have been disbanded. Despite these developments however, the laws remain in place and the public, including scholars, researchers, journalists, planners, and historians are still prevented from obtaining free access to files both in government and in taxpayer subsidized infrastructure, documenting the true reliability status of the most critical of industries. The Ecological Life Systems Institute proposes that a process be implemented to address the taxpaying public's right and need to know the true details about the dependability of critical infrastructure. Towards this end, the Institute suggests that representatives of selected industries, government agencies, academia, and the public at large, organize a work group to meet within 90 days from this date. At that time, a process can be formalized in which specific engineering questions can be posed to industry and complete and accurate responses can then be made available to the public within a reasonable period of time there after. Many challenges are known to be confronting domestic industry. Recent warnings have been publicly sounded both by the Department of Energy and the electric power industry's leading advocacy groups concerning the effects of deregulation and the resultant changes expected in the usage patterns of the power grids. The latest oil shock has produced skyrocketing gas prices and has served at the same time to highlight the problems in our nation's refineries and the hazards of our continuing reliance on imported fuels. It has been said, "If you don't care where you are going, any road will do." In truth, it is critically important that we take stock of our technological resources and map a course to a cleaner, safer, and more reliable future. Just any road won't get us to where we want to be and it is vital that we know where we are and where we have been in order to better chart the path to where we want to go.
Technology, Knowledge, and Power: Mapping a Course Towards a Sustainable Future
Remember that old expression? If it looks like a duck and it quacks like a duck it's...well, you know. Recent revelations about the oil and gas industry may be making that old expression especially meaningful for many. Since January 1, 2000 accidents or glitches in the industry may have suddenly nearly tripled in number when compared to the entire year of 1998! Based on a new analysis, unplanned plant shutdowns, fires, and explosions may be occurring now on an exponential curve. No formal explanations have been offered yet for this sudden epidemic of mishaps but many observers had expected to see such problems in an industry widely believed to have been unprepared to face the Y2K computer bug officially declared "squished".
And hey, brace for impact! What's suddenly happened to the price of crude oil? Since January 1, 2000 it has skyrocketed to a near ten year high, recently threatening the $30 a barrel levels last seen during the Gulf War. So far there has been no panic at the gas pump but then again most retailers are still selling the relatively cheap gas they bought just a few weeks ago. Wait until they have to price factor in the latest news; the refinery in Venezuela which is the largest supplier of refined crude to the U.S. has broken down unexpectedly and may remain off line until March. How come? They call it an "Act of God"!
It might all just be a big ugly coincidence but trend line projections for accident occurrences might be shattering on the desktops of statisticians all around the world as you read this. Consider these numbers, though still perhaps tentative, as reported from other sources by Marcia L. Peters. The data reflects known incidents within the petroleum industry for factory, generating plant, pipeline explosions, and fires as displayed on her website (http://nckodokan.com/charts/crude.html):
1/1/2000!!!!!! Did you think they are planning to call a news conference to tell us that they have been having problems with the automated systems that control these processes because they really are not in fact Y2K compliant?
Fat chance. The sudden outbreak of unexplained equipment failures in the oil and gas industry might have nothing to do with Y2K. But even if it does, special Year 2000 laws enacted by Congress, like Public Law 105-271, all but assure that Y2K related disclosures from huge corporations will never see the light of day. Going public to admit a deficiency may defeat that same shield of liability protection that the special interests have lobbied so long and hard to obtain for themselves. With the Year 2000 finally upon us, we might instead expect to be hearing alot more about "swamp gas".
Getting to the truth will not be an easy task. The newly enacted federal Year 2000 statutes make information about corporate Y2K disclosures to government agencies "non disclosable", even under the Freedom of Information Act! Does it really matter? Some think we may find ourselves with plenty of time to ponder that question while we wait in long lines to fill our gas tanks later this summer.
Corporate America Under Siege
Suppose you found corporate documents which say that a company has a chemical plant that could send a poisonous, billowing cloud of lethal byproducts hovering over your neighborhood killing thousands of people instantly and leaving the survivors blinded, with scarred lungs, cancers, and otherwise maimed for life. And, what if you also discovered that the government already knows about this but that it is now a federal crime to tell anyone else what you discovered! Even if you survive the pending calamity, your life will be ruined by your own government, just for trying to save others. Sound like fiction? It's not. It is as real as a heart attack. Recent legislation enacted by Congress creates just such a possibility. Consider the following:
Under provisions of the recently enacted Chemical Safety Information, Site Security and Fuels Regulatory Relief Act, Public Law 106-40, you could be fined up to a million dollars a year for speaking ill about a corporate chemical plant! Last year, in a posting from "Roleigh's Lodge", Roleigh Martin's then prominent Y2k related internet site, observer Scott Secor offers this caution to "covered persons" and researchers,
It's true! The new law provides that hazardous materials produced or stored in these plants, which most Americans live within five miles of, must be reported to the Environmental Protection Agency in the form of an "Off Site Consequences Analysis" (OCA). This report details the worst case scenario for the plant in the event of a Y2k related computer failure. What we don't know could hurt us. A chemical discharge in Bhopal India killed 2,000 people within just a few miles of a Union Carbide plant in 1984. The U.S. General Accounting Office at the time said that most of the 66,000 such plants in the U.S. were susceptible to the Y2K computer problem but still were not ready for the Year 2000.
The rollover has since come and gone. Still, if you have actually seen an OCA report and divulge any of its contents to the public, you become a "covered researcher" and could be fined up to a million dollars a year per incident. These reports must be pretty scary. The good news? People without access to the facts are still free to speak at will. Only those who speak the truth are placed outside the law! There's more.
Imagine that you heard that utility companies around the country might fail and that 26 million Americans may be forced to survive without winter heating, drinking water or sanitation. Did you think that as a citizen you had the right to know details about how this information might affect you or your loved ones? Think again! According to Congress, not so if the information concerns the Y2k computer glitch.
The Year 2000 Readiness and Information Disclosure Act, Public Law 105-271, places public utility companies in a position whereby the truth about their Y2k preparations is no longer accountable to ordinary citizens. This new federal law makes Year 2000 information exempt from release even under the Freedom of Information Act! That's what a citizen action group in San Diego discovered when they attempted to use the act to resolve questions raised in the media about the readiness status of local drinking water utilities.
"Five communities within a seventy mile radius of my home were recently revealed by the U.S. Navy as being likely to experience a 'probable total failure' in essential services this winter because of Y2k.", said Mark Snyder, a local San Diego resident and then Vice President of the now defunct San Diego Y2k Citizen's Action Group.
Local concerns about the preparedness status of utilities were heightened last summer with the release of the Navy's "Master Utility List", an internal working document maintained by the Navy to keep tabs on the availability of civilian infrastructure near their installations around the country. The spreadsheets produced for this study suggested that because of Y2k, essential services in 128 cities affecting 26 million Americans were at risk for some level of failure this winter including water, gas, or electric services. Other cities also targeted for trouble in the report included New York City, Miami, Orlando, and Clearwater, Florida among dozens of others.
"We just want to know the truth about the County's essential services so we can prepare ourselves and our loved ones properly", said Snyder. "Even after the spreadsheets were made public though, our local authorities denied that there were any problems."
At that time, although acknowledging that the spreadsheets were authentic, Naval officials explained that the dire predictions were the result of missing data and not a final conclusion. It appears that the civilian authorities in 44 of the 128 cities surveyed by the Navy had refused to answer questions posed by Navy auditors even when only 6 months remained before the immovable deadline of January 1, 2000.
Snyder explained, "San Diego is a Navy town. We just can't understand why our local utility representatives would not be more forthcoming when approached by them. It makes us wonder if there is something horrible that they are holding back."
Snyder's concerns seemed well founded. Recent studies of Year 2000 preparedness by the government's General Accounting Office found that the distribution of drinking water and waste removal is highly susceptible to the Y2k computer problem and to the availability of electricity from the power grid. However, the Y2k status of water districts throughout the country is not coordinated by any outside public agencies and the status of the municipal districts was mostly unknown.
Snyder added, "making matter worse is the fact barely one third of the electric utility companies on the grid have allowed their Y2k plans to be audited by anyone outside their own industry. They tell us they're ready but many of their systems have been exempted from testing just because their vendors say the new parts are great. When independent laboratories examined the problem though, they report that many similar deliveries fail up to fifty percent of the time. We feel there is plenty to worry about."
A Siege Mentality
In an effort to find the truth, Snyder's group sought relief under provisions of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). They were soon to be stunned however. Although the Navy seemed more than eager to accommodate the group's desire for the details regarding information affecting their community, they were unable to do so because the Act had been quietly modified to make information about utility preparedness none of the group's business!
The newly enacted Year 2000 Information and Readiness Disclosure Act (Public Law 105-271), modifies the FOIA which was originally enacted to provide citizen's with a vital tool for maintaining the nation's system of checks and balances. The new law reads, in part,
"Except with the express consent or permission of the provider of information described in paragraph (1), any year 2000 statements or other such information provided by a party in response to a special year 2000 data gathering request made under this subsection- (A) shall be exempt from disclosure under subsection (b)(4) of section 552 of title 5, United States Code, commonly known as the ``Freedom of Information Act''; (B) shall not be disclosed to any third party"
Citizen's rights are rarely suspended in a time of peace. However, the corporate special interests have used their muscle in Congress to assure that secrets about their Y2k readiness plans remain well beyond the level of ordinary public scrutiny. Despite public claims to the contrary, things may be so bad for them in fact that they felt it necessary to lean upon Congress to create an undeclared, defacto state of National Emergency.
Will the new millennium bring with it the last days of civil liberties? The latest congressional actions seem to express our government's greater duty to promote the agenda of corporations then to preserve and protect citizen's rights. San Diego's Y2K Action Group may have already had a taste of the future. While most of us regard the Y2k computer problem as a technology issue, it seems the virus had suddenly mutated itself and may now become best known as the bug that ate our civil liberties.
Does Any of this Really Matter?
Happily, the dreaded rollover has come and gone. It is now spring time in the Rockies. Birds are chirping, flowers blooming, rainbows still color the heavens. But persisting doubts remain. Have we heard the last from embedded controllers and logic? In truth we know little about what actual renovations were made by industry during the proceeding years of remediation. The devil is in the details though, and absent that knowledge we can only hope and speculate.
Admittedly, Y2k has ravaged business systems around the world, slowing credit card transactions, disrupting payrolls, and blinding spy satellites. And new challenges face our national infrastructure; what to do about greenhouse emissions, our national dependence on imported fuels, the skyrocketing price of gasoline, exploding pipelines, burning refineries, leaky supertankers, and the deregulation of the power grids.
A wise man once said, "If you don't care where you are going any road will do." Y2k taught us how truly dependent we as a culture have become on an aging infrastructure controlled by unknown, unseen persons, organizations, technology, and corporations. If it is our goal to build a future where both citizens and business can look towards the safe, clean, and reliable delivery of our most vital of services, then we must prepare a map to traverse from where we are today to where we must be tomorrow. Were we building a new home, we must first determine the strength and durability of the foundation before constructing a dwelling. Before we decide for sure though where we are going, perhaps we should be sure that we know where we have been. Unless armed with the power of knowledge, we can only go as far as the best available information will carry us.
Building a Map to the Future
The hastily enacted federal Year 2000 laws discussed within this paper have erected barriers between industry, journalists, scholars and the public at large. Under the provisions reviewed, Year 2000 renovations to infrastructure, manufacturing and business as a whole can remain secret from those who depend the most on the most vital of products and services, many actually subsidized at taxpayer expense. How much confidence should the public continue to invest in the future dependability of these institutions?
What lessons have been learned by these organizations about communicating both within their own business entities and with the consuming public? How can this knowledge be of benefit to others in averting or mitigating future crisis? How can ordinary people prepare themselves from future supply disruptions?
Towards the goal of answering these critical questions in the face of the known barriers, ELSI proposes the following voluntary plan of action:
Here are some Y2K failures reported by online news services from January 1 to February 22, 2000
Reprinted from Bugbite 2000
Commentary (& more)
The human species is endowed with unbounded cleverness. Unfortunately, this cleverness is poorly balanced with wisdom. Nowhere is this imbalance more graphically illustrated than in the contradiction between how we as individuals, nations, and as a global community, go about satisfying our needs and desires, and the negative effect these activities have on our planetary life support system. Daily, the media bombard us with information chronicling the results of our assaults on nature. But, even as our awareness and concern are increasing, we still respond to this information as though hearing reports of some distant battle in which we are not personally involved. Deep down any thinking person knows this is not the case. Yet day to day, we are carried along by the momentum of practices and attitudes that no longer correspond to the current eco-nomic situation of our planet. With all the drama we manage to create as a species, its easy to lose sight of the fact that we are, like other life forms, part of and totally dependent on our planets ecology for our survival. And still, to date, we do not know how to live on our planet in ways that are eco-nomically sustainable, even though most of the technologies needed to do so have already been developed. This we know. The unbridled exploitation of resources leads ultimately only to their exhaustion. Similarly the pursuit of policies based simply on rewarding that which appears expedient often times overlooks alternatives which are in fact more prudent. And practices which benefit only the few at the expense of the many eventually collapse in failure. Toward the ends of creating a truly sustainable life culture on Planet Earth, the underlying goals of this Institute are as follows: to learn how to make a living on our planet in ways that eco-nomically sustainable · to teach that knowledge to our children · to foster, promote, and encourage responsibility and to identify policies and practices which advance the health and well being of the eco-system upon which we all depend · to invite and encourage the participation of industry and government in developing democratic institutions, policies, and practices, which protect and sustain the health of our planet and all that live upon it These principals will guide us in determining the best policies and practices for designing our cities and the buildings and infrastructure that make them up so that they operate in ways that are eco-nomically sustainable. These same principals will guide us in our use of timber, food, and other plant materials in ways that protect genetic diversity, build soils, and eliminate pollution. We must mine and use our planet's mineral wealth in the same ways. Healing and education must also reflect these values. In sum, it is our goal to live on this planet in ways that maximize eco-nomic sustainability. By doing so we can develop land use plans that better allocate resources needed to site our cities, and to preserve and protect those which are essential for agriculture, for wildlife habitat, for industry, and for human habitation. If we have made mistakes in the past we can evolve gracefully into a more eco-nomically secure future. It is often said that few ever plan to fail, but that many instead simply fail to plan. If we fail to do so now, we can look forward only to the ultimate depletion of resources, the loss of our prosperity, and the decline of the human species. Alternatively, to challenge ourselves to envision and enact public policies which respect the interconnectedness of our eco-life systems, we invest in the renewal of our resources and the security of our culture. When we as the public succeed in demanding that industry and government abide by this principle, we will assure the sustainability for tomorrow of that which we most cherish today.
Ecological Life Systems Institute, Inc.
San Diego, CA 92167 Home: (619) 758-9020 Fax: (619) 758-9029
also contact Jim Bell, Founder jimbellob@hotmail.com
Stuart H. Rodman, Director of Communicationsinfo@elsi.orgcontact us about donations and sponsorship
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