5,000 Miles Away, a Fire Exposed the Fragility of Global Travel

A few weeks ago, my niece and her boyfriend came to visit us here in Las Vegas. Because of work, they flew here from different airports. She arrived on time just fine, but he was severely delayed. Why? Because there was a fire at the North Hyde substation near Heathrow Airport in London England.

Seriously.

You see, his plane landed on time, but had to wait on the tarmac because their gate was occupied by a plane that was slated to fly to Heathrow but couldn’t because that airport was shut down due to the power outage.

I have all kinds of questions about why on earth passengers should be treated this way, but my bigger concern is that one relatively minor fire over 5,000 miles away and on a different continent can screw things up like this.

This incident demonstrates three things to me:

• Airports are run like crap — no surprise, as they are monopolized by municipal governments.

• Our world is massively interconnected.

• Something is seriously wrong with the way Heathrow is managing it’s power situation. It’s obviously far too fragile and vulnerable.

The fire at the North Hyde substation shut down the busiest airport in Europe for a day, resulting in thousands of stranded and delayed passengers across the world, causing chaos that took days to straighten out.

How on earth could so seemingly minor an event cause so much damage?

A glance at Heathrow’s website raises a possibility: perhaps it’s because Heathrow is far too concerned with “green energy” and “climate change” and “lowering their carbon footprint” than being a functional airport.

Go on and click around that website for a while, I dare you. Read about their “carbon strategy” if you can stomach it. It’s all a bunch of woke, corporate-speak gobbledygook designed to confuse and mollify citizens, politicians, and regulators. It’s closer to gibberish and nonsense than it is to honest communication.

Worse, it betrays a profound misunderstanding of the importance to humanity of clean, plentiful energy. All politicians everywhere should be required to read and address the arguments in Alex Epstein’s great book Fossil Future.

Rather than focusing on finding the cheapest and most reliable and most robust source of energy (and backup energy) possible, the people who run Heathrow Airport are apparently trying to do the exact opposite.

For example, Heathrow is very proud of their “biomass backup power system”. I have no clue what that even means, but it is clearly insufficient. And thousands of people suffered because of it, at the cost of who knows how much money, time, and resources.

We need to wake up and focus on what matters. Cheap, abundant power is critical to the health, wealth, and long-term prosperity of our species. For the foreseeable future, that means relying heavily on fossil fuels while we build up our nuclear power capacity. Even the weirdos at the WEF (who get a whole lot wrong) understand how critically important nuclear power is for the future of humanity.

Solar power (and electric vehicles) have a place as well, once solar panel, battery, and power transmission tech have improved. In time, the sun will power much of what we do.

But for right now, this maniacal obsession with “green energy” is idiotic. It hurts people. It’s wasteful. It lowers the quality of human life. We need to snap out of it.

And if you’re objection to me is something like, “But, climate change!”, I refer you to here, here, here, and here.

Let’s get wiser fast, people. A little fire near Heathrow shouldn’t be impacting me and my family here in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Naturally,

Adam