This is one reason that living in a third world country is not that bad a lot of my neighbours are without electricity and do very well. I do what I can to eliminate my reliance on electricity. This in a strange way might help these people who are diabetic getting them of processed food and back to natural foods a lot of experiments show that when people go back to natural foods their diabetes goes away. With an EMP the cities would suffer the most and the danger for the others is the city people going into the countryside and take what they have. I have plans for building a wood gasifier which converts wood into gas that can be used to run generators. I do have solar water heater for showers and washing. I could live without electricity or make my own if I had to. We only get electricity 10 hours a day now so it is not a big change.
Ive also lived a fairly easy and sheltered life...I don't think I could cope with the ravaging hordes of desperate people...drug addicts without their drugs, criminals, starving scared people. There would me rape, murder etc at every turn. I can't even function unless I get my 8 hrs of sleep....no thanks. If you start thinking about the actual reality of what it will be like...it's depressing. If I was younger then I'm sure I would give it a try but not now.
Somewhat related to this discussion, when I moved to Texas, I first lived in a condominium in Brownsville that had air conditioning, and my car had air conditioning. I was not used to the kind of heat we had in the Rio Grande Valley, and couldn't get used to it as long as I was living in an air conditioned place and driving an air conditioned car. My time at work was miserable. I had to use Gold Bond powder in order to walk, given the heat rash that I had gotten, and which would just start to alleviate during a weekend, only to start all over again on Monday. Later, when I moved to a house in Los Fresnos that didn't have air conditioning, I thought I'd buy a window conditioner or two in order to make the house livable, and meanwhile try to get by with fans. After a couple of fairly miserable days trying to sleep in that kind of heat, I got used to it. Although I still felt the heat, of course, I found that a fan was sufficient. My rash went away and never returned. When I bought a new car, I purposefully bought one without air conditioning. When I got married, my wife made me have air conditioning put into it, but it never worked well, or for long. My point is, as Martin pointed out, there are people who are living without electricity in their homes, so that part of it won't be so hard for them to bear. They are likely still dependent on other services or products that are currently require electricity, such as the distribution of food to grocery stores and other products or services that they use. I have visited several Amish homes, and I can tell you that they are not roughing it. You will find switches on the wall that turn gas lights on and off. You won't find much use of oil or kerosene lamps because they have determined that these are not healthy alternatives to electricity. You will find refrigerators operating on butane or another gas, and wood heating and cooking stoves are as much of an advantage as they are a hardship, particularly when you have a ready supply of wood available. But do they have the ability to produce their own propane, or make their own oil? If not, whether or not they are aware of it, they are dependent on electricity. Depending on what they do for a living, many of the Amish do use electricity in their work and, depending on the rules in their particular church colony, some of them consider electricity to be okay if it is supplied by a generator rather than through the power grid.
But it's different when you are used to that way of life. I didn't have A\C for a week in Fresno last summer when my air died and it was torture. A neighbor lent me a portable unit but that didn't do the best job but it helped.
There are and have been people preparing for these kinds of disasters and yet even with all they have and are doing...if the worse scenerio comes they still will be shocked at how "unprepared" they are. So many of us though will have no clue what to do as we have been spoiled rotten here in America.
@Ken Anderson "But do they have the ability to produce their own propane, or make their own oil? If not, whether or not they are aware of it, they are dependent on electricity." Producing fuel gas, such as Methane or Propane or the like, using everyday materials available, is no simple task. As @Martin Alonzo pointed out, gasification of wood, or better yet, coal, might provide a means, but none of this would be easy. Yes, dependence on electricity is strongly a "given". Now, if one had a producing natural gas well, as my co-worker in Colorado had, this would be a wonderful prize to possess. Or property owned having a seam of coal available. However, requiring combustible gas to heat water or cook food is an extravagance, though less so than using it to produce light using those little silk "mantles"--- those are treated with Thorium Oxide. That's why they glow brightly with a white light, while giving off measurable amounts of Radon gas! By now, most everyone has heard of Radon, and the hazard it poses. Having plenty of trees available for firewood and heavy-duty hand saws and splitting tools, plus a strong back, eliminate he gasoline-powered saws. Up in the woods we often resorted to a daily policy of strive to complete plans during daylight, sleep when it gets dark. Frank
No matter how well prepared you are, you will die. The population of New York City is 8,537,673. .....London, 7,825,200. .....Shanghai, 24.21 million ......... Tokyo, 36 million........ Mumbai, India, 21.3 million. Consider all the other cities in the world. If the power goes off permanently in a country, most, if not all those people will die. Rats, flies, cockroaches, and other vermin will feast on the dead bodies. Disease and pestilence will be rampart. It will spread over the country. Then the world. You might be able to find food and heat. You might be able to fight off marauders. But it would only take one disease carrying fly to wipe out whole villages. Then other villages.......... I hope the world leaders are aware that if they destroy a country by destroying it's power grid, they would be signing their own death warrant. The only survivors would be in remote conclaves.... And even they would have flies.
I have seen talk at the prepper sites that a strong solar flare would have the same effect as a EMP, and of course a direct hit by a large enough asteroid be far worse: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/scie...er-dino-killing-asteroid-hit-earth-180960032/
Thank goodness I live in a third world country where they still cook with wood and sometimes go to the river for water. We also know what it is like to go with out electricity for a long time
I'm a bit old now to try to adapt to that senario. Yet, I remember living without electricity for a number of year so I know it can be done. I spent fourteen months in Korea, two winters in the mountains with no fires and only the clothes on my back in often sub zero temperatures and no electricity . The difference now and then was that commodities were readily available. Kerosene for lamps was an available commodoity everywhere, even at the cornner grocery store. Wood was readily available. The necessary things were taken care of in daylight hours. The hardship would be greater today and city life would cbe harder than rural or farm life. But it could be done and it wouldn't take us too long to adjust. Necessity being the mother of invention. We'd find a way, we'd learn from each other, we'd help each other and we'd work like hell to defeat whatever caused it.