You might have heard about this big blackout in Berlin. Or not, unless you happen to live there or nearby, because there’s been something of North American media blackout over it. Including the fact that it seems to have been caused by the radical left “Volcano Group” (“Vulkangruppe”) as a protest against hydrocarbon energy. The attack apparently required some skill, though not necessarily foresight since the resulting chaos, misery and danger has reminded people how crucial that energy is rather than turning them against it. Or it would have, if the media had not decided to sit on the story lest it make the radical greens look foolish and dangerous, along with their fellow travellers.

Our online search for material related to the blackout turned up no stories in major Canadian or American newspapers, at least until the Washington Post finally fessed up on January 10, a week into the disaster. Though to be fair, Reuters eventually got to it, two days after it happened:

“Berlin’s mayor said on Monday the German capital’s core infrastructure needed better protection two days after an arson attack on a power station left tens of thousands of people without power. The far-left Volcano activist group claimed responsibility for the attack which also shut down mobile phone connections, cut heating during freezing weather, stopped trains and forced hospitals to switch to back-up generators.”

To its credit the BBC not only mentioned it on Jan. 4, it also labeled the perpetrators “far-left”, a term that rarely appears in the press. But the clarity ground to a halt around that point. Or before getting there in the case of the Washington Post, which could only manage:

“By Wednesday, when power was fully restored, the blackout had become the longest in the German capital since the end of World War II, and authorities say it was caused deliberately — by an arson attack on a small bridge carrying bundled power cables across the city’s Teltow Canal. On Sunday, a group calling itself the Vulkangruppe, or Volcano Group, which is described by authorities as a left-wing extremist organization, claimed responsibility.”

Is described by authorities. Boo authorities.

Meanwhile, and absurdly, in reporting the event Deutsche Welle, “Germany’s international broadcaster”, wrote that in a letter “Cutting Off the Rulers’ Power” these maniacs:

“maintain that widespread blackouts were not the intended outcome; rather, their aim was to strike at the fossil‑fuel industry.”

And now perhaps they understand that striking a blow against the industry by cutting off its customers is, um, going to hurt the customers, a point that until now seems to have eluded a great many policymakers and commentators as well as activists. Indeed the DW piece went on:

“Experts, however, warn that the attack created a serious risk for uninvolved civilians – including the possibility of fatalities in hospitals where medical equipment lost power.”

Whatever would we do without experts? But we mustn’t quibble because something obvious to us here at CDN might still be a novel idea to others, namely that the “Rulers’ Power” is also the people’s power and that without it death, quick or slow, is inevitable. And in this mental deficiency at least they are not alone.

Vast swaths of the Western intelligentsia, political class and cultural elite have no idea that shutting down “fossil fuels” would mean shutting down our economies, our societies and yes our hospitals and farms as well as our factories and, for that matter, our universities, theatres and legislatures.

It’s been their preferred economic policy for decades to get rid of them as quickly as possible because what did they ever do for us? And their underlying failure to grasp how the world works is also underlined by their energy security policies, by which we don’t just mean Europe making itself dependent on Russian natural gas so it could falsely claim to be striding gloriously toward Net Zero. We mean that if you look at practical measures taken in Western countries to harden the energy infrastructure against everything from sabotage to EMP to acts of God, or the scary lack of same, it is clear that politicians, bureaucrats and voters all take the blithe view that nothing can go wrong so our policy choices don’t matter. And neither does the energy that has made our way of life possible.

CNBC eventually limped in with the headline “Protest over AI, climate crisis leaves tens of thousands without power in Berlin”. Protest. Meh. But in mentioning the event Bloomberg wrote words that ought to resonate but may well not:

“The disruption has also affected mobile phone service and heating in some areas, according to Berlin’s fire department. The outage forced shops to close and hospitals and retirement homes to relocate patients and residents. It came as temperatures in the German capital fell below freezing, with snowfall blanketing the city.”

Defenders of hydrocarbons often try to point out to critics that it’s just food and shelter that depend on them, as if these things were not enough. Both the manufacture and networking of the devices without which modern people would be curled up and whimpering on a good day, and unable to contact emergency services or look up crucial information on a bad one, depend on the power grid we don’t just take for granted, we sneer at until one day it goes off. Especially if that day is not the much-despised hot but cold.

We note that there were items circulating on social media regarding the Berlin situation about the dangers of heat pumps exploding when restarted or some such. But they do not appear to be legitimate. (Beware images of supposed news stories without links.) However, although we are not “preppers” we do think it is common sense for everyone, and especially everyone with children, to be prepared to cope for a week without essential services. Which means stockpiling non-perishable foods and crucially enough water, which is more than you might think, around a gallon/four litres per person per day. (And rotating the stockpiles.) But also, if you live somewhere even somewhat cold, having a way to keep warm. Which does include the wood fireplaces now in the firing line of left-wing activists (but what isn’t) but not heat pumps. As for furnaces that don’t depend on a steady stream of high voltage electricity, from oil to gas, modern ones are not easy to run off a generator so consult an expert ahead of time. But what is tricky at an individual level is, curiously, a different matter on a large scale.

As Fritz Vahrenholt observed of this sabotage, one of the great weaknesses of the German “Energiewende” and all such schemes is that the “narrowing of the energy supply down to a single energy carrier”, soothingly dubbed “sector coupling”, makes the whole economy and society more brittle, since an attack on the transmission of electricity, or oil, or gasoline, or natural gas, would once only have knocked out some appliances and facilities. But in the Green New World an attack on the wires can take it all down.

P.S. Vahrenholt also warns that much of the text of the Volcano Group’s first letter on the attack could be taken verbatim from the rhetoric of mainstream left-wing parties or, indeed, the UN, one sentence of its letter actually being verbatim from a 2022 UN report.