Brittle Power- PARTS 1-3 (+Notes) - Natural Capitalism Solutions

Chapter Seven: War and Terrorism 71oil from Durban to the industrial heartland of the Witwatersrand, and otherhighly centralized energy and industrial facilities in South Africa, remain underthreat. 19 And South Africa is not averse to making or supporting such attacks onits neighbors: it is believed to be implicated in the destruction of oil facilities inthe Angolan port of Lobito in 1980, 20 in the unsuccessful 1981 mining of a keyAngolan oil pipeline, 21 and in the 1981 burning of Angola’s oil refinery. 22Similar attacks have become more common in guerrilla wars sinceEgyptian saboteurs burned British oilfields in Libya in 1956. 23 At this writing,guerrillas are said to be closing in on dams and power plants in such countriesas Chile and Angola. Ecuadorean troops foiled a 1976 attack on a major oilpipeline, 24 but recent reports suggest a continued threat there and in theGuatemalan oilfields. In 1969, Israeli commandos cut power lines from theAswan High Dam to Cairo. 25 Guerrillas claimed to have blacked out theSoviet-controlled airport at Jalalabad, Afghanistan, by sabotaging a power station.26 The bombing of three pylons carrying a power line from Jinja toKampala sharply curtailed power and water supplies to the Uganda capital in1979. 27 Iran announced in July 1981 that it had blacked out large areas of Iraqby bombing a hydroelectric station in Kurdistan. 28 Guerrillas sabotaged“power relay facilities in Kaohsiung,” Taiwan, in January 1976. 29On 14 June 1978, Red Brigades terrorists caused six hundred thousanddollars’ damage and blacked out part of Rome for several hours with a seriesof bombs in a power station. 30 Accident or sabotage in a San Juan power plantblacked out Puerto Rico on 10 April 1980, shortly after the plant’s chief engineerwas kidnapped. 31 Much of San Juan was blacked out again when twopower stations were bombed seven months later. 32 San Salvador was blackedout on 6 February 1981 by the bombing of a power plant—the fourth attackon power installations in four days. 33 A few months later, guerrillas werereportedly a few miles from a dam providing half of El Salvador’s electricity. 34A third of the country was blacked out in early November 1981, 35 and overChristmas, seven bombings of transmission lines blacked out three moreSalvadoran cities. 36 In just four months in 1982, Salvadoran guerrillas madeone hundred fifty attacks on the electric grid, blacking out some cities in thetransmission-dependent eastern third of the country for as long as sevenweeks; and in January 1982 they blew up another million-dollar San Salvadorpower plant. 37Later chapters document significant recent sabotage to energy facilities inmany of the sixteen above-mentioned countries and in twenty-four more;Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Cyprus, the Federal Republic of Germany, France,India, Iran, Ireland, Japan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Mozambique, The Netherlands,Nicaragua, Portugal, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, the