Major Blackout Plunges Brazil into Darkness

Another Warning Shot by Nature

Power failure in Brazil plunges its two largest cities into darkness

Tens of millions of people sat at home by candlelight as police urged then not to venture outside to prevent an upsurge in street crime.

A major power failure brought chaos to Brazil’s two largest cities,  Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, for several hours starting at 22:00local time (22:00 UTC).

Street lighting, stop lights, elevators, metro system and everything else that depended on electricity stopped functioning, exposing human vulnerability to electrical power loss.

A map of Brazil. Source: US govt.

Thousands of passengers were stranded as the metro railway systems in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo shut down.  Sao Paulo is home to nearly 20 million people, and Rio to another 15 million.

Tens of thousands of passengers had to walk along the underground tracks to reach stations, where buses provided an emergency service.

To prevent an upsurge in street crime, extra police were put on the streets, and residents in Sao Paulo and Rio were urged not to venture outside their homes.

The power failure was most likely caused by a major fault at the giant Itaipu hydroelectric dam, where a loss of up to 20,000 megawatts was reported after the distribution system was shut down by a storm.

Itaipu hydroelectric dam, Paraguay/Brazil. The world’s largest hydroelectric facility. Credit: Itaipu Binacional.

The hydroelectric generator at Itaipu dam, which supplies up to 22 percent of Brazil’s electricity, simply lost its entire output for several hours,  affecting at least 9 of Brazil’s 27 states.

Paraguay [population: 6.5 million,] which also relies on the Itaipu dam for 90% of its electricity, plunged  into darkness for about 15 minutes.

[Note: Brazil has a population of about 192 million.]

Soon, the US, EU countries, China, Japan … could experience similar disruptions…

See also: Murphy’s law is void of a time vector!

Related Links:

• The First Wave of the World’s Collapsing Cities
• The Fate of Energy Dinosaurs
• State of the World

• Failing Ecosystems
• Point of NO return
• Human Impact on Nature
• Is a Future Possible?
• Can Humans Enter the Next Phase of the Future?

• Emerging Scenarios
• Giga Trends
• Nuking Earth for Lifestyle

Emerging Food Crisis

Poverty, Food Scarcity, Riots

Since February 2008, riots and violent protests concerning rising food prices or food shortages have been reported in Bangladesh, Bolivia, Cameroon, Egypt, El Salvador, Haiti, Indonesia, Ivory Coast, Mauritania, Mozambique, Philippines Senegal, Uzbekistan, and Yemen.

Related Links:

• The First Wave of World’s Collapsing Cities
• Topsoil
• Index of Human Impact on Nature
• 500 Weather-Related Disasters A Year

Main Entry: Emerging Food Crisis

.

Giga Trends

Know Exactly Where You Are Heading

Without a complete change of direction in human activities, the economy and lifestyles, and based on the elite Zeitgeist, “World Spirit,” the available data and observed trends

• History of civilization (past experience)
• Current socioeconomic developments (present trends)
• The exponential rate at which the dynamics of collapse are compounded (future events)

CASF Model, using seven “Giga Trends,” has produced the following forecast concerning the probability of incidence of each trend.

End Game Scenarios

• The Champaign Club Scenario. Water, food, shelter, sanitation, education, health and energy continue to be available at increasingly higher prices to anyone who can afford it.

• The Gaza Strip Scenario. Majority of humanity is caged like animals, and kept under permanent military curfew.

• Involuntary Mass ‘Euthanasia’ Scenario. More than 90 percent of world population is annihilated by the world elite via conventional methods such as genocide by starvation, ethnic cleansing, disease and poverty, or using biological and chemical agents including exotic depopulation weapons.

• A Sustainable Future Scenario. Humanity rapidly climbs the evolutionary ladder, reverses the exponential growth economy and opts for non-suicidal, sustainable lifestyles.

• Extraterrestrial Doom Scenario. Life on Earth becomes extinct [in the next seven years] when a large extraterrestrial object (asteroid or bolide) strikes the planet.

• Lifestyle Global War Scenario. A war fought to secure additional resources required for maintaining unsustainable lifestyles.

• Large-scale Global Catastrophes. Sudden death (major species extinction) caused by multiple ‘natural’ factors (larges-scale volcanic eruptions, mega earthquakes, deadly pandemics . . .) or by ‘accidental’ factors (military scientists destroying the atmosphere, tests of superweapons backfiring, laboratory-made superbugs escaping . . . ).

End Game Scenarios [Revised] The probability of lifestyle global war breaking out (before a major ecosystems collapse occurs) is about twice higher than the combined probabilities of all other possible scenarios that may unfold in the near future.