Major Power Outage in Europe

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome Rory O'Neil, the program twenty four to seven News
National correspondent and a couple of stories. Here are the
more breaking news Type one, Rory, is this enormous power
outage in parts of Europe. I guess most of Spain
and Portugal and part of France, right exactly.

Speaker 2 (00:18):
And it happened right around lunchtime their time, and it
took all day all night actually for most of the
Iberian Peninsula to get power back. That's Spain, Portugal, as
you said, parts of southern France as well. Still not
exactly sure why this happened, so we heard from the
Prime Minister saying that they're going to form a special
commission to try to figure it out. There seemed to

(00:40):
be ruling out a cyber attack, although a Spanish court
has not ruled up that possibility. They want to open
up their own investigation. But this was so widespread it's
still causing major disruptions. Imagine the flights that were grounded,
the trains that were stuck on the tracks between stations.
People that had taken the subway into work in the

(01:01):
morning suddenly had no way to get home, and then
if they were to bum a ride from a coworker
in their car while the traffic lights were out, so
there was gridlocks about the streets too.

Speaker 1 (01:11):
Coco Goff was in the middle of a post match
interview a big tournament over there, and all of a
sudden right, no audiop no audio. So I guess one
of the questions that occurs to me is as a
preview of things to come, not only in Europe, but
we've got issues here too.

Speaker 2 (01:29):
Absolutely, and they pop up from time to time. Remember
that great big outage in Texas a couple of years
back during the wintertime, and you know, about a decade ago,
maybe fifteen years ago, there was the grid failure that
affected the northeast, So this can happen. And you know
this also follows an announcement that they had gone to
all renewable energy, So there's some question about whether or

(01:51):
not it's that change to renewables that affected the power
grid in Spain and in Portugal. So that's going to
be part of this ongoing in best litigation. But look,
this is serious. I think there was in Madrid's Spain
a woman was lighting candles and then sadly her apartment
caught fire. She was killed. In thirteen others, Oh, my goodness, horrible.

Speaker 1 (02:15):
Well I like that the power company suit released a
statement and said plans to restore the electricity supply have
been activated. Won't see that's good. I could have been
to do that all right. Now, this other story has
more long term implications, and that is the demographic earthquake
about to hit the workplace. Rory that we're going to

(02:36):
be running out of eighteen year olds very soon.

Speaker 2 (02:39):
Yeah, and if you do a little bit of math,
you'll realize twenty twenty five minus eighteen. Oh, that puts
us right at the Great Recession. So it was at
the Great recession, especially when the housing market collapsed. A
lot of couple said, oh, this may not be the
best time to have a baby. And now that's those

(02:59):
chickens are coming home to roost, or the lack of chickens,
I suppose. But yeah, we're now feeling the impact of that.
And there's a much smaller class of eighteen year olds
who are becoming seniors in high school. So we're going
to see a scarcity of college applications. You know, in
twenty twenty four the first half of the year, more
than a college a week announced that it was closing

(03:20):
because of this dwindling number of students. And look, there
are other pressures about you don't need a four year degree, right,
you know, you don't need to go into all that debt.
So that's a separate discussion. In this case, it's just
that the bodies don't exist.

Speaker 3 (03:34):
Yeah, Well, and tack on this problem, guess who's going
to be paying Social Security out of paychecks? If we
don't have people working an eighteen year old's typically under
the full time workforce, if they're not going to college,
who's going to pay for all of the Medicare and
who's going to pay for all the Medicaid? And who's
going to pay for Social Security? Anybody got an answer
to that question?

Speaker 2 (03:54):
Well, no, And I don't know if you've got sixty minutes.
Over the weekend, they did this story about Japan is
already going through this now and how they're trying to
get birth to boo boost the birth rate, get more
and more couples married, and it's almost a warning about
what things are going to be like here.

Speaker 1 (04:12):
Well, it's true, our birth rate declining for years now
is a big deal.

Speaker 2 (04:17):
Is a whole big health By the way, that year
of COVID actually helped.

Speaker 1 (04:21):
A little bit. Yeah, now you can't go make people
have babies. Trump's trying to incentivize mothers well with a
five thousand dollars check. If you haven't have a baby,
I wonder if that's going to instance. Let me see,
let me do it to math. That'll be like two
months of daycare.

Speaker 3 (04:39):
Okay, I mean well, and you know this just once
again puts the spotlight on legal immigration. We had three
three encounters at the border yesterday. So Donald Trump has
accomplished goal one. He has shut down that friggin border.
But we have to have an influx of capable workers.

Speaker 1 (05:00):
We don't have a hair.

Speaker 3 (05:02):
And if we don't find an immigration system that brings
in capable, qualified workers to do low level, low wage jobs,
we got a problem.

Speaker 1 (05:11):
Those people pay taxes. Yeah, but that's different from yes,
of course, from a multitude across the border. Rory, thanks
always good to have you on. Rory O'Neil