[Warning: This is not advocating violence.] [I can just say that, right?]
“I call it a ‘bloop gun’,” said Phil, handing the awkward-looking thing to me. I looked at it, taking in the huge pair of barrels, gunstock, trigger, CO2 pressure tank, and gunsight that resembled that of an M-79 grenade launcher. A closer look revealed that it was a gunsight from an M-79. But this thing looked like a double-barreled blunderbuss, not a grenade launcher. “… here’s the ammo.” He held out a handful of stuff. It looked like a pair of golf balls, because it was a pair of golf balls. But there were eyebolts screwed into them, a cord, some hose, what the heck? I enjoy building stuff, and have dabbled in weapons, but I couldn’t immediately figure the bloop gun out – the ammo looked like, or rather was, a sort of giant bola connected with a long piece of carbon fiber cord sleeved in what looked like aquarium hose.
“Ok, let’s hear the pitch,” I said, turning the bloop gun over and looking underneath at the divided pressure regulator and single trigger. The damn thing was nonsense, it appeared to be a single shot double-barreled something. What the fuck? I followed Phil over to the porch of the hunting lodge, where there was pizza and beer laid out, and the others were already tearing into the food and drink.
Midjourney AI and mjr. Crude oil falls from the air
“The first rule of fight club is, you don’t write anything down,” Phil explained. The others nodded, as Phil took the bloop gun from me and stowed it in a shoulder-sock that looked a lot like a carrier for a camping tent that had been repurposed. “The second rule is, we don’t really know eachother, and we don’t coordinate or plan.” I nodded slowly and, now that my hands were free, grabbed a slice of pizza and a hard cider. I casually waved to the others, who were a collection of nerdy-looking outdoorsy types. “The third rule is, any time you’re doing anything, you leave your smart phone with someone else, so it’s on the grid, but not here. Uh, you did do that, right?” Again, I nodded. My phone was in a ziploc bag in the back of a friend’s pickup truck, going to and from the house I’d been working on renovating. This was getting mysteriouser and mysteriouser and I’m not fond of sekrit skwirrel stuff because usually it just means someone is going to get in trouble.
“Is this a criminal conspiracy?” I asked in a mild tone.
“It could be,” Phil said. There was some laughter, and one of the women – a lanky outdoorsy type wearing hiking boots, sunglasses, an Australian hat, and some other stuff – grinned hugely and held up an affirmative thumb. “I suppose I’ve invited you all here to convince you to become terrorists.” Phil started pouring on the charm; I’ve experienced Phil trying to be convincing before and he’d actually make a pretty good charismatic terror cell leader, come to think of it.
“Since we’re not writing anything down, I’ll just run through the big picture, then we can drill into questions. OK?” Nods around the group, and a few more slices of pizza were picked up and sent to their doom. “Right, so, I know you are all ‘doomers’ like myself, who believe that climate change is inevitable, and humanity is going to screw itself. And, that our political and economic system is structured so that the likelihood of being able to rein in carbon emissions is effectively zero, because the US – which sets the tone for carbon emissions worldwide – realizes that stepping away from fossil fuels is going to have an economic effect that the people who actually run the country will never take seriously. So, the idea here is simple: we use extralegal methods to adjust the cost/benefit equation for fossil fuels. We do it openly, and try to trigger a popular movement with copycats, and we try to make it personally and financially less desirable to exploit fossil fuels than to use renewables. Some of this will be a media campaign, other parts will be personal interventions, and industrial monkeywrenching.”
“Personal interventions?” I asked.
“PETA lost a lot of public support when they started throwing blood/paint at people in furs, because their targets were non-specific. Anyone wearing a fur, including loud, vapid, Hollywood types, felt targeted. The idea here is somewhat similar, except actions would be accompanied with press releases explaining who was targeted and why: oil company executives, executives who supply security for pipelines, oil company pseudo-scientists who promote global warming skepticism, security officers who beat down protesters – that kind of thing. We start off with some press releases explaining our targeting plan and the reasoning behind it, then – we start adjusting the value proposition of holding those jobs. Make it so they feel unsafe to go outside and enjoy their lives, put them in a state of siege, deny them the comfort of their wealth, and make them dangerous to hang out with. We’ll be doing a lot of drone reconnaissance and strikes – if we catch some oil company exec going out in public, we hit them with a bag full of diesel fuel. The implications of where that could escalate will be clear enough without our having to say anything at all. But we might say ‘hey, you may get splash damage if you hang out with these people.’ We also have some people researching ways to remotely disable some of the computers in gas-guzzling sports cars and private jets. A plague of non-functioning failures that don’t hurt anyone directly will focus attention on the fact that a lot of our targets produce the emissions equivalents of a third world city, personally. Taylor Swift, Oprah Winfrey, Kim Kardashian, etc. – a lot of these people own multiple jets and consider commercial aviation to be like taking the bus. Nobody gets killed or injured but let them explain how they’re inconvenienced by having to show some climate responsibility. But, mostly, the whole program is about changing the cost/benefit equation – if some star can’t predict that they’ll be able to fly in comfort and luxury, they’ll either have to go back to living like a normal American (which is bad enough) or be constantly looking over their shoulder. That’s the ‘personal interventions’ part.”
Midjourney AI and mjr. The excitement of carbon fiber in the transformer park.
“Right, so we’d be hunted by some very angry and powerful people,” I added as drily as I could, “I see the appeal. Where does the bloop gun fit in? Are we going to bloop some people who have secret service assassins guarding them?”
“No, the bloop gun is going to be our opening move, as it were,” Phil paused and took a bit of pizza, then resumed, “I figure you were able to suss out the components pretty quickly. It’s a bola gun that shoots a carbon-fiber strung bola. The vinyl hose is the timer system. Someone just goes for a hike with a tent bag over their shoulder, to where there are elevated high voltage lines coming from a coal-fired power plant. Then, they shoot a bloop so it makes contact across the cables, and leave. We’re still calibrating the hose but it looks like it’ll take two or three months of UV from the sun, then start to crumble. Once the carbon fiber completes a circuit across the cables, it’ll short them out, heat up mighty quick and – since carbon won’t melt – it’ll saw through the wires. The press releases will basically be, ‘look we aren’t attacking your power grid, we’re just making coal-fired power a lot more expensive, as a kind of uninvited ‘externality’ – if you shut the coal down and replace it with renewables we won’t be disabling those.’ A drone carrying a drag-line of carbon fiber over a transformer field is a more dramatic option. We’ll build a few drones from scratch using Chinese components and local RF-only headsets for control, so we don’t have to worry about a smart phone or drone GPS log. We may also drop a few cans of diesel on some oil billionaires’ mansions, as a sort of premeditational warning to boost the cost of security for those people.”
“The last part is that we need to operate independently. We’re going to get hunted as terrorists and the establishment will stop at nothing to crucify us. That means that communications are, basically, out of the question. So, we get on the same page, now, and then each of us goes forth and recruits a ‘cell’, does their own planning, and executes on it, possibly creating new cells if it makes sense. Once we go operational, nobody recruits anyone, because the FBI is going to have a million plants out trying to get embedded with us. The only way to keep from being penetrated is to only recruit now, for the next year, and then that’s it: we go to battle with what we’ve got. Since there’s no central committee or plan, and if any of us get caught we have to be ideologically consistent and unapologetic. If we get caught, we go for maximum media circus and the message is ‘for every one of us you catch, a dozen more will rise up.’ The big pitch is that we’re doing all this in self-defense: the government is not doing its job, someone has to, we’re the good guys, the bad guys are the oil companies, etc. Unapologetic as hell, ‘we’re only doing this because none of you are taking effective action and the police are on the side of the fossil fuel companies.’ We’ve got a couple members who are plugged in with the media, and they’ll handle all the messaging and press releases independently.”
“How do we coordinate that? Won’t our command/control be detectable?” I couldn’t help it, this sort of problem always gets my brain churning.
“Oh, it’s easy,” Phil was a bit chuffed, “since the messaging team know the ideological angle we take on everything, they do the releases after something has gone down, in the form of a release ‘from the central planning committee’ or a public statement. They’re really plugged in with the media and watch the news-feeds, as soon as they hear that so-and-so’s jet stopped working and they had a shitfit on the runway, they’ll issue a statement that basically ‘yeah, we did that…’ Maybe they’ll get a few things wrong, but that’ll just feed some conspiracies. It appears as though the national security establishment has gotten pretty good at finding inter-communications and command/control, so we have to just not have any to find. Let them look. The fact is that eventually one or more of us will get caught, and then they switch over to media circus mode and our plants in the mainstream press can try to get them interviews and promote them as environmental visionaries or whistle-blowers or whatever. This is a war to the death.”
I jerked a thumb at the bloop gun, “I can already think of improvements on that. I’m in. I didn’t want to die in my own bed, anyway.”
:-)
I imagine just from reading this blog, I’m already on some sort of watchlist… If not, I’m sure this comment will get me on one…. I almost feel pity for whoever is assigned to go through my internet history and track my whereabouts, I am a very boring individual just a couple notches above struglling for survival. Ain’t much of interest going on in my life…
I’m under the impression carbon fiber is pretty stiff, and doesn’t bend well, so may not be ideal for bola-cordage. may be wrong, but just reminded of some stuff I’ve read about looking into bicycle belt-drives using carbon fibers. If carbon fiber doesn’t work as a suitable tangly cordage, maybe something that can be used as a chain (I got yelled at for making a set of bolas out of dogchain, expended whippet canisters, eye screws, and scavenged roadside wheel balancing weights as a teenager, seemed to work pretty well on trees at leas, and doubled as a half-assed concealable flail that could leave a considerable dent in a signpost, as well as a bloodblister or two on my hand…)
Also, latex tubing might be a better choice than aquarium hose – aquarium hose gets brittle quick, but it can easily last for years, latex tubing seems to degrade pretty quickly, IMHO. maybe even something like a simple paper wrapping might work?
Might not even need a gun, it’s been a while since I’ve played with (homemade) bolas, but it might be entirely plausible to hand chuck one up into a powerline.
Sidenote, I get super annoyed when roleplaying games (thinking of you, D&D and Pathfinder…) classify bolas as exotic weapons that need special training to use, while even the nerdy wizard is considered able to reliably sink a thrown knife/dagger point-first into a target at 30 ft or so….
Hello three-letter-agency-agent/person/bot/algorithm. My life is pretty boring, and not really a threat (I bet all the suspects say that?), however, I was just notified of a potential cost-of-living raise today, that may delay my “fuck it all, burn it all down” long enough to pay off some student loans, and at that point, I may be able to afford the post-covid rent increases. And, if my union secures a decent pay bump next year, that may delay things even further. Please try to mention to your higher-ups, that making sure the bulk of the populace can afford to exist will do far more to ward off crime and terrorism than elaborate honeypots and entrapments, and probably be cheaper as well…
This is what I don’t get about recent government actions here in the UK and elsewhere. We’ve had, for most of my life, and certainly most of my ADULT life, a generally improving standard of living, accompanied by a generally decreasing rate of crime. And deliberate actions by governments have reversed both those things, mainly in order to make already ludicrously rich people ludicrously richer. And almost NONE of the increase in crime has focussed on making those ludicrously rich people uncomfortable or dead. Conclusion: the working classes have a focus problem. An initiative like the one outline here might help, though.
fuckoff troll
lochaber@#2:
I’m under the impression carbon fiber is pretty stiff, and doesn’t bend well, so may not be ideal for bola-cordage. may be wrong, but just reminded of some stuff I’ve read about looking into bicycle belt-drives using carbon fibers
Nope, it’s stiffened with resin or whatever, when it’s added into composites. Normally, carbon fiber yard is soft, flexible, slick-smooth, completely unstretchy, and more or less unbreakable.
I tied a loop in a piece once and put it over a girder, stepping into the loop (thinking I’d test to see if it would support my weight) and it swiss-cheesed the muck boot I was wearing.
sonofrojblake@#3:
Conclusion: the working classes have a focus problem
They have been caused to have one, yes. There are a lot of distractions, including putting food on the table. That distraction is going to get worse when climate change degrades agriculture. The question will be whether they catch on and start attacking the power elites before they die.
Oooh, this is a fun creative writing exercise! I want to play too!
So I don’t think that the bloop gun is going to work. At least not the way it’s proposed here. The first problem is the assumption that carbon fibre won’t burn. In an oxygen-containing environment, white-hot carbon is absolutely going to oxidize. Ironically, that’s not going to matter much: if it shorts a high-voltage distribution line it’s not going to be carbon fibre anyhow – it’ll be a rapidly expanding cloud of plasma.
Now, this might cut the line. It will certainly damage it, and it might trip the distribution fuses (though they often have a sort of auto-resetting mechanism built in).
The other problem I foresee is the time delay. I don’t have the dielectric strength of plasticized vinyl on hand, but at the kinds of voltages running on primary transmission lines – basically everything is a conductor in sub-multiple-inch thicknesses. Look at how many ceramic insulators are required to prevent the lines arcing to the tower.
Even if you could arrange some kind of time-delayed conductor across the lines, transmission lines are regularly inspected by helicopter, drone and/or ground observers. These lines are, after the turbines, the most important single component of the powerplant. They aren’t ignored. You wouldn’t be able to put something across them and leave it for weeks, maybe not even days, before it got noticed.
Last – the powerlines are also a known and expected failure mode of the powerplant system. That’s why they’re inspected so frequently. They need periodic inspection, maintenance and replacement. If you took out a few lines, it might disable the plant for a couple days until a helicopter-based restringing crew showed up and replaced them.
No, if your fictional saboteurs want to disable a powerplant in a meaningful way, they have do do so in a fashion that *isn’t* one of the anticipated failure modes of the system. A few handfuls of sand introduced into the incoming steam to the turbine, for instance. Nobody keeps a spare turbine available. Or take out several of the towers supporting the transmission lines. Those do have a lifespan, but they aren’t expected to fail suddenly. Maybe have one of your characters be a mechanical engineer who comes up with a safe way to weaken the towers such that just one or two structural members are holding it up in tension (battery powered bandsaws would be my suggestion – cheap, quiet, safe and much faster than grinders), then some kind of time-delayed CO2 powered shear can slice that member once the crew has escaped the area. If say four or five sequential towers came down suddenly at 3am, *that* is going to take quite a long time to repair.
If you’re writing a story that can handle some darker ideas; I’d have one of the doomer eco-terrorists sneak up at night to the home of an oil executive and place a bypass hose between the intake and outlet of the house’s primary ventilation system. Almost all modern houses now use powered ventilation, usually with a heat exchanger, that takes stale household air and exchanges it for outside air – often preserving some of the energy (heat/cooling) content. By short-circuiting the input and output of such a system, it basically turns the fancy air-exchange system of the house into a powered recirculation system. Anything your characters happened to introduce into that bypass hose would be rapidly distributed throughout the residence and have almost no chance of escaping. Doing this in the winter would be best, as it’s unlikely anyone would leave a window open. Almost anything could be introduced into such a system. CO2 would be the obvious ironic choice, but I think that elevated blood CO2 levels trigger the choking reflex, so it’s possible that some of the occupants would wake up and raise an alarm or escape. H2S (happily, an oil refining byproduct) is incredibly toxic and rapidly immobilizing. If you get the concentration in air up fast enough, it also disables the ability of the olfactory system to detect it. Even an awake occupant wouldn’t percieve anything more than a brief ‘rotten-egg’ smell, and would likely be unconscious quite quickly thereafter.
For a slow-burning kind of attack, you could have your characters infiltrate the homes of multiple executives by somehow joining the endless parade of ignored servants and servicepeople who make the lives of the ultra-rich possible. Perhaps one of your main doomers has enough experience with ID and government systems to create fake identities convincing enough to allow people to get hired by cleaning companies or HVAC service or whatever. Then your characters get into the ventilation systems and place some kind of wicking container of methyl-ethyl-badstuff that very slowly and subtly increases the cancer risks for the executive and their parasite family. Benzene would work – or maybe Tetraethyllead?
There was also a real-life incident where a white-supremacist was caught with a dental x-ray machine trying to irradiate his muslim neighbours. Perhaps your characters should investigate renting office space that adjoins the boardrooms of some oil companies, security companies and the like.
Just a few thoughts for your novel :)
Nitrogen is
(a) available cheaply in relatively easily portable bottles
(b) colourless and odourless and 78% of what you’re breathing while you’re reading this
(c) when you breath a pure nitrogen (or just heavily oxygen-depleted) atmosphere, you don’t choke or splutter, you just pass out painlessly, then die. It’s historically a very common way for chemical plant workers to die, going into a confined space with an inert atmosphere and just… lying down. And distressingly commonly, when they’re observed to have gone down, their mate goes in to save them and succumbs as well.
I’d be curious to know whether/how that would manifest in a post mortem, if all the occupants of a house simply got oxygen deprived for long enough.
Side note: if they weren’t deprived for quite long enough, or by quite enough, they might survive with varying degrees of brain damage due to the oxygen deprivation.
————————-
Chemical companies transport various substances by road which, released into the atmosphere, can form very quickly lethal clouds many metres in extent. The drivers of the transports are not armed or in any way secured against hijack, certainly not in the way e.g. truck carrying cash are. Always wondered why terrorists didn’t make use of this fact – probably because the resulting atrocity would be too indiscriminate and horrible even for them.
Again… just a few thoughts for the novel.
@sonofrojblake
The problem with simple asphyxiants like N2 (or CO2, for that matter) is that you have to displace enough of the oxygen in the air to keep the available O2 quite low for a sustained period. This will require an inconveniently large amount of gas. CO2 is available as a liquid in convenient containers, but N2 is not. You would need a dewar or cryogenic pressurized liquids tank to bring any significant quantity along. The 120-180CUFT livable in a large welding tank isn’t going to do much to even an moderately sized residence.
H2S and CO are probably better gasses, as they have toxic effects from even small concentrations in air.
Again, for the novel. Realism is better, in my book, since it makes the suspension of disbelief much easier.
I have some more thoughts about coal plants, but probably for another day. Suffice to say, I think the incoming coal stream is a better attack surface than the powerlines.
snarkhuntr@9>
I’m assuming you mean CO2 is readily available as a solid? (dry ice, can buy at some grocery stores, etc.)
I was also thinking CO would likely be a better candidate, since it’s not detectable by humans, blocks O2 binding in hemoglobin (I think?), and tends to make people drowsy, so they just go to sleep, and don’t wake up…
Major problem with that is that CO detectors are pretty common.
I’ve seen those youtube videos of mercury reacting with Aluminum, and sometimes think of what sort of mischief someone could get up to that way. Or even just using bleach to rapidly corrode metals…
I’m reminded of Edward Abbey’s The Monkeywrench Gang, found and read a paperback copy as a teenager…
“There’s not enough coffee in this story to have been written by Cory Doctorow, so it must be Ranum,” observed the pimple-faced agent in the van which claimed to be from the local power company, but which eagled-eyed observers would note had out of state plates.
That eagle-eyed observer agreed silently from his vantage point by the tree-line, but had no time to find out more; he had work to do in the forge.
Bring to mind how often you have seen a pair of tennis shoes, tied by the laces, dangling from a power- or telephone-line.
The problem with simple asphyxiants like N2 (or CO2, for that matter)
The idea is not to murder people. If that was the goal, a simple bullet from a rifle would do the trick in most cases.
The idea is to scare them, to show them that they are not safe, and to scare the people around them. Dousing an oil executive in crude oil or diesel has the implication that “we might light you, next time” and does literal splash-damage. There’s also the terror (however brief) of trying to get the fuel off without something making a spark or starting a fire. Perhaps it’s my imagination (thi sis all my imagination, I suppose) but I think it’d be a hellish few minutes. I’m not sure what I’d do – other than find a swimming pool to dive into while I disrobed. Such attacks would be really newsworthy. The idea is to poison the executives’ pleasure at their wealth and power – using fossil fuels.
” The idea is to poison the executives’ pleasure at their wealth and power – using fossil fuels. ”
Well, it’s your story, you get to decide how dark it gets. The problem with having activists throw fluids, in person, on the bodies of wealthy executives is the attrition rates of the activists in that scenario. Hard to get away with it without ending up on some three letter agencies watchlists at the very least.
Something like an “airwick” or similar passive evaporation device, loaded with a litre or two of tetraethyllead hidden in a few household AC ducts would have the same ironic punch, be easier to get away with, and would likely have a more severe effect on the non-involved oil executive class.
But if you want to write a story with a lighter tone, it’s easy enough to stick to the structure hits (as Bruce Sterling would call them). Working in heavy industry a lot, the lesson I’ve taken is this: a good analogy for modern industry under capitalism is the tower crane. This is a structure that is massively strong and durable in exactly one direction – down. Because strength in any other direction costs money, but doesn’t make money, the relentless logic of capital has eliminated all unnecessary bracing and redundancy. It might as well be made of gossamer and insurance policies.
Coal fired power plants are just the same. They deliberately understock replacement parts, because holding inventory costs money that could be better used on stock buybacks and executive compensation. They minimize their coal-on-hand inventory for the same reason. Damage the plant’s ability to unload coal, move coal, grind coal, feed dust into the boilers, or spin the turbine – and the place is shut down. How long it takes to come back online is going to depend on what kinds of services are available in the local area and how busy they are. Some aspects of the plant could represent several months of downtime if damaged in the right way.
For example – sending a kamikaze drone with a small explosive device into a coal handling belt could take anywhere from several hours to several weeks to repair, depending on the local availability of replacement belting material and skilled belt splicing teams.
For example – if you planted some medium sized explosive charges between the wheel trucks and load-bearing body segments of one of the coal railcars in a coal unit-train, rigged to go off as the car is being tipped by the dumping system – you will not only completely fuck up the delivery schedule for coal, but there’s a good chance that you’ll scrag a complicated and expensive unloading system that can’t be locally repaired at all. Engineers and parts will have to be brought in from elsewhere, possibly custom fabricated. This one is nice because your characters could plant those bombs on the unit-train basically anywhere. Sometimes these trains sit in sidings or storage yards for days before being transited to the plant, exceptionally hard to secure.
For example – someone who spent some time studying publically available publicity photos of the plant could identify the turbine hall and figure out the rough positions of the turbines from the outside. Since many of these plants are in unpopulated/remote areas, it’s quite reasonable to find a good firing position 1Km or so from the building. Sometimes you can even find a facility located in a valley surrounded by open hillside (they need to be near cooling water, and it’s expensive to pump it up). One of your characters could fire a dozen or so shots of something like .50 cal Mk211 Raufoss or other AP ammunition into the side of the turbine hall, estimating the best locations to try to hit the sides of the turbine. Even if just the casing is cracked, this is easily a 3-6month downtime. Scrag the turbine itself, and your characters could put the plant out of commission for over a year.
The interesting thing about terrorism is that there is a distinct force multiplier effect. The reason that these plants aren’t hardened against these kinds of attacks is that it’s really expensive to do so. Turbine halls are built out of the cheapest available structural materials, steel beams and transite or other cheap paneling. Belts are only covered by structures when they have to be, and even then the structures are as weak as they can get away with. Nobody is inspecting incoming railcars for defects, nevermind explosives.
Once a hit is made with any of these methods, plants have two choices: don’t increase security and eat the increased insurance costs and risk of downtime, or increase security at massive expense (with no corresponding increase in profits). If I were writing the story, the explosives in the railcars attack would be what I’d have my characters do first for several reasons: once a few plants have been hit, they’re going to have to start inspecting incoming cars. This will have to be a *manual* inspection, which is going to severely slow down the pace that cars can be processed through the dumper/reclaim system. This increases labour costs significantly, which is a capitalist’s worst nightmare. Worse – any suspected ‘bombs’ that they find will need to be dealt with. This will likely require evacuating the incoming cars area and waiting on a police bomb squad. Once a few real bombs have been deployed, I’d have my characters publish a document with all of the known coal handling facilities (why limit it to power plants, ports and terminals too) and their associated supply lines – with special attention to all the sidings that a unit train might be left at. A real bomb or a couple sections of capped pipe glued to a car by a teenage anarchist will cause equal delays to the terminal. Leverage stochastic terror here – give scared young people a simple, low risk way to damage the industries that are ruining their future, and your characters would have some takers.
Sorry to go on at length – i’ve been driving a lot lately with plenty of time to think.
It just occurred to me…
Didn’t some far-right groups try to take down some power grids via shooting some ?transformers? ?substations? a… couple? years back?
So, I dunno… partially I feel rather conflicted discussing how to better execute something the fascists already attempted.
On the other hand, maybe just focus on the publicity arm or things, and try and get the anti-fossil-fuel narrative out there before the fascists get their fascist narrative out there?
Less risk, less terrorism, and just co-opting shitty terrorism for a better purpose?
Lochaber at 15,
It was as recent at this year (https://www.npr.org/2023/01/18/1149694402/another-north-carolina-power-substation-shot) but seems to go back abbout 4 years.
I think it should be noted that the morons carrying out these attacks were mainly just disabling transformers serving the general public and did not seem to target anyone with real power.
There was a book out a few years ago about the near future that had (eco?) terrrorists destroying world infrastructure by creating a bacteria that broke down long chain polymers (plastics) and a nanotech that wrecked electronics (I cannot remember the mechanism proposed). This had the effect of ruining virtually all information technology and a good bit of hardware (because plastic is in so much stuff). Marcus’ story is similar in that the terrorists made plans and prepared and did not announce anything until they actually began the attacks so there were no activities to trigger infiltration by any agencies.
It’s been tried before. Brits in WW2, as the story goes, at least the one I’m familiar with, had lots of barrage balloons and one got away dragging a long steel cable. This then blew into power lines and shutting down a significant section of the grid. They eventually got to the point where a barrage balloon dragging a cable made it to France and did cause a major outage. More of a harassment than a war winning technique.
The US did much the same thing during one of the Iraqi wars. That time we use carbon fibers on reels deployed from cruise missiles. There were some significant results but they were deemed too inconsistent and unreliable to count on. In the end the conclusion that it was more reliable and cost effective to just blow up the towers or transformer banks.