In recent years, attacks on the United State’s power grid have increased in both frequency and efficacy. The North Carolina attack in December left around 45,000 people without electricity and the criminals still haven’t been found. A few weeks later, two men attacked substations in Washington state, leaving thousands without power and causing millions in damage. The PG&E substation bombing left around 1,000 without power, and got lots of media attention for how it was carried out and the man’s supposed racist motives.
Alarmed by the recent trend of grid attacks, it would make sense for legislators to use policy to bolster the defense of critical power infrastructure. Lawmakers in Utah, Georgia and Tennessee have passed legislation giving police the authority to arrest and charge anyone who disrupts the operations of such infrastructure. Some of the penalties for such infractions carry years in federal prison.
Instead of celebrating these policy achievements, however, some commentators are criticizing them as cleverly veiled attempts to stymie environmentalist protests. This view is clearly summarized in a recent Huffington Post article on the issue. Here are some pertinent excerpts:
“Early on, proponents were explicit about targeting environmentalists and community activists, pushing measures that threatened to bankrupt small-town Ohio churches whose parishioners took part in demonstrations with legal fines or throw a Louisiana grandmother in prison for three years for stepping on a petrochemical company’s land to visit the mass grave containing her enslaved ancestors. It obviously proved controversial: The Buckeye State passed its law, but the governor vetoed the Bayou State bill.
This time, however, state lawmakers are pitching the harsh new penalties in their bills as the key to going after a different kind of political target: far-right extremists.
It’s a rhetorical shift playing off a recent resurgence of neo-Nazi plots against the power grid, but free-speech advocates and extremism experts told HuffPost that prosecutors remain far more likely to use the statutes to charge left-wing and environmental activists.”
Who’s to say if the Huffington Post writer is right. Although I usually think intentions are deserving of investigation and consideration, in this case I’m really more interested in the consequences. As I see it, these policies will deter both right and left wing attacks on our grid, and I think that’s a good thing.
Civil disobedience has played a vital role in the improvement of our democracy. However, some of the events the Huffington Post article alludes to are not examples of civil disobedience, they are violent attacks. The “Valve Turner” activist who shut off infrastructure supporting 15% of the country’s oil consumption could have killed people, and almost certainly cost unknowable amounts of economic damage.
Both right and left wing grid attacks are harmful and should not be tolerated. Luckily, policy makers are moving to mitigate both.