Even ‘real men’ will drive this Ford electric pickup truck
President Biden test-driving a pre-production Ford F-150 Lightning at Ford's Rouge Electric Vehicle Center, in Dearborn, Mich.
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
A huge swath of American drivers and the electric utility industry are waiting for a pickup truck. Not just any pickup truck, but one that could change the way we get around and, for many, how we work.
The pickup truck that’s expected to cause the Earth to move is the all-electric Ford F-150 Lightning. Electric utilities are keeping a wary eye on it and so is an enthusiastic public, jamming Ford’s order books ahead of the arrival of the first trucks next year. Year after year, the gasoline-fueled F-150 has been America’s best-selling truck both for work and pleasure.
In Texas and much of the West, the pickup truck is more than a vehicle: It is a symbol of a way of life and the freedom of the open road. It fits the cowboy inheritance.
But it is also a vehicle for work. Many kinds of work depend on pickup trucks and the Ford F-150 is the leader. Dodge Ram and Toyota Tundra are right behind Ford in this extremely competitive and profitable market.
Builders, carpenters, painters, farmers, delivery services, along with others beyond enumeration, use pickup trucks as the base of their business activity.
In Texas, they are preferred transportation for many individuals and families. With an extended cab, a pickup truck is a car with load-carrying capacity, having the ability to tow a boat, a horse trailer, or a camper with ease.
But they also are luxurious. The interior and the ride of the modern pickup truck is a thing of beauty, the automobile crafters’ art at its zenith. If you haven’t ridden in one, try it. You may never want to stoop to a car again or settle for an SUV, which is a halfway point to the glory of the American pickup truck.
With the Ford F-150 Lightning, workers will be able to plug such electrical equipment as saws, pumps and drills into their trucks.
But there is something else generating grand expectations: It is that the Lightning, if it works as advertised, will turn millions of skeptics into buyers.
All-electric pickup trucks will have a revolutionary impact, especially where driving a truck is the norm. For millions in the South and the West, the new pickup trucks will make electric vehicles socially acceptable, destigmatized. No longer will EVs be the effete preserve of the coastal elites.
That will be a breakthrough for EVs in general and will have a significant impact on the rate at which they are adopted and, consequently, on the rush to install charging infrastructure.
Still, there will be a range of issues. Ford says the basic Lightning (at about $42,000) will have a range of 230 miles; one with two batteries and additional horsepower, costing an additional $10,000, will get 300 miles. If the power-takeoff features are used for operating equipment, the mileage will come down.
Nonetheless, the Lightning is expected to streak across the automotive sky and supercharge the popularity of EVs. If the Lightning performs as expected, it will usher in a whole family of all-electric pickups. It will also speed an increase in demand, which the auto factories won’t be able to meet in the immediate future.
The utilities will have to get ready, too.
Texas, which has one of the largest, if not the largest, penetration of pickup trucks per capita, may be facing electricity shortages in the years ahead. Data companies have been moving to the state, putting a strain on electricity demand.
Andres Carvallo, a polymath friend, is a former electric utility executive and now is a principal at CMG Consulting and a professor at Texas State University. He points out the possible stress on electric utilities. “ERCOT [Electricity Reliability Council of Texas] is about an 80-gigawatt energy market at peak capacity today. There are around 22 million registered vehicles in Texas,” he says, “If they were all-electric and each had a 100-kWh battery, they would require 2,200 gigawatts to charge at the same time. So how do you manage the gap?”
Down the road, Texas and the rest of the country is going to need an awful lot of new, clean electricity.
Of course, there won’t be 100 percent deployment of electric vehicles for many decades, and they won’t all be charging at the same time. But this shouldn’t escape the electric utilities, which have to plan now for then.
When real men start driving all-electric rigs, things will happen — revolutionary things.
On Twitter: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. He’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.
Chris Powell: Appeal on abortion won’t lure Texas firms to Conn.
M ANCHESTER, Conn.
While he tries to be a moderate Democratic governor and indeed is more moderate than his predecessor, Connecticut’s Ned Lamont still feels obliged to make regular obeisance to his party's left wing, which constitutes a majority of the party's activists. So last week the governor posted on his social media channels a minute-long video encouraging businesses in states that are restricting abortion to relocate to Connecticut.
Connecticut, the governor said, is "family-friendly" and its liberal abortion law "respects" women.
The new abortion law in Texas is not just almost prohibitive but bizarre, delegating enforcement to civil lawsuits for damages. But it would not have been enacted if Texas was not full of women whose idea of respect includes protecting what they call the pre-born. The women of Texas are fully capable of getting the law repealed.
In the meantime, Connecticut's pitching businesses in Texas and other states restricting abortion is ridiculous, as is a similar appeal made to Texas businesses the other week by Chicago's economic-development agency, which placed an advertisement in the Dallas Morning News.
The Chicago agency's chief executive, Michael Fassnacht, told Bloomberg News: "We believe that the values of the city you are doing business in matter more than ever before." But of course the "values" of Chicago encompass scores of shootings and dozens of murders almost every weekend, while the "values" of Illinois include the country's worst insolvency.
Connecticut does not have the violent crime of Chicago, nor is Connecticut quite as insolvent as Illinois. Connecticut has advantages of climate, geography and culture. But in friendliness to business, Texas clobbers Connecticut and Illinois, having no corporate- and personal-income taxes while Connecticut and Illinois have both.
The Tax Foundation says the personal-tax burden in Connecticut and Illinois is above 10 percent but is only 7.6 percent in Texas. That is, Connecticut's personal-tax burden is almost a third higher than that of Texas.
Not surprisingly, Texas long has been gaining population relative to the rest of the country while Connecticut has been losing.
With such a differential in taxes, even Texas businesses opposed to the new abortion law might save so much money by staying put and not relocating to Connecticut that they could afford to pay for their employees to come to Connecticut for abortions every year.
No amount of the governor's pandering to his party's left wing will make Connecticut's high taxes "family-friendly."
Nevertheless, higher taxes well may be on the way for Connecticut, since the governor and Democratic leaders in the General Assembly seem inclined to revive in a special legislative session what they call the Transportation Climate Initiative. The plan would raise wholesale taxes on gasoline so the added burden wouldn't be as visible as the retail tax and would claim that the new revenue would be spent on transportation projects that reduce pollution.
But the state is already rolling in emergency federal money and billions more in federal "infrastructure" appropriations may arrive soon, so Connecticut hardly needs more gas tax money.
Raising gasoline taxes will be most burdensome to the poor and middle class even as inflation is already roaring and eroding their living standards. Further, it would be unusual if any money raised by state government in the name of transportation wasn't diverted.
With its taxes already so high, state government needs mainly to set better priorities.
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Last week Governor Lamont announced with some pleasure that his administration will close another prison, the one in Montville, because the state's prison population is declining so much.
When the announcement was made four people had just been shot in separate incidents in Hartford over the Labor Day weekend, making nine shootings there for the previous week. There had just been four shootings in New Haven as well. The day before the prison announcement a Hartford man, a chronic offender, earned his 14th conviction and was sent back to prison.
The rise in violent crime and the failure to deter repeat offenders could make prison closings seem premature.
Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester.
Llewellyn King: Resilience is the key word now as utilities face increasing stresses
Regional transmission organizations in the continental U.S.
— Graphic by BlckAssn
WEST WARWICK
We all know that sinking feeling when the lights flicker and go out. If bad weather has been forecast, the utility has probably sent you advance warning that there could be outages. You should have a flashlight or two handy, fuel the car, charge your cell phone and other electronic devices, take a shower, and fill all the containers you can with water. If it is winter, put extra blankets on beds and pray that the power stays on.
Disaster struck mid-February in Texas. Uri, a freak and deadly winter storm, froze the state’s power grid. It lasted an unusually long time: five terrible days.
There was chaos in Texas, including more than 150 deaths. The suffering was severe. Paula Gold-Williams, president and CEO of San Antonio-based CPS Energy, told a recent United States Energy Association (USEA) press briefing on resilience that the deep freeze was an equal opportunity disabler: Every generating source was affected. “There were no villains,” she said.
Uri wasn’t just a Texas tragedy, but also a sharp warning to the electric utility industry across the country to look to their preparedness, and to take steps to mitigate damage from cyberattacks and aberrant, extreme weather.
This is known as resilience. It is the North Star of gas and electric utility companies. They all have resilience as their goal.
But it is an elusive one, hard to quantify and one that is, by its nature, always a moving target.
This industry-wide struggle to improve resilience comes at a time when three forces are colliding, all of them impacting the electric utilities: more extreme weather; sophisticated, malicious cyberattacks; and new demands for electricity.
On the latter rests the future of smart cities, electrified transportation, autonomous vehicles, delivery drones, and even electric air taxis. The coming automation of everything -- from robotic hospital beds to data mining -- assumes a steady and uninterrupted supply of electricity.
The modern world is electric and modern cataclysm is electric failure.
Richard Mroz, a past president of the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities, who had to deal with the havoc of Superstorm Sandy in 2012, said at the USEA press briefing, “All our expectations about our critical infrastructure, particularly our electric grid, have increased over time. We expect much more of it.”
Gold-Williams said extreme cold and extreme heat, as in Texas this year, put special pressures on the system. She said the future is a partnership with customers, and that they must understand that there are costs associated with upgrading the system and improving resilience. Currently, CPS Energy is implementing post-Uri changes, she said.
Joseph Fiksel, professor emeritus of systems engineering at Ohio State University, said at the USEA briefing that the U.S. electric system “performs at an extraordinary level of capacity” compared to other parts of the world. He said utilities must rethink how they design their systems to recognize the huge number of calamities around the world that have affected the industry.
A keen observer of the electric utility world, Morgan O’Brien, executive chairman of Anterix, a company that is helping utilities move to private broadband networks, believes communications are the vital link. He told me, “Resilience for utilities is the time in which and the means by which service is restored after ‘bad things’ happen, be they weather events of malicious meddling. Low-cost and ubiquitous sensors connected by wireless broadband technologies, are the instruments of resiliency for the modern grid. No network is so robust that failure is impossible, but a network enabled by broadband conductivity uses technology to measure the occurrence of damage and to speed the restoration of service.”
Neighborhood microgrids, fast and durable communications, diversity of generation, undergrounding critical lines, storage and cyber alertness are part of the resilience-seeking future.
As more is asked of electricity, resilience becomes a byword for keeping the fabric of the modern world intact. Or at least repairing it fast when it tears.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington,D.C.
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Llewellyn King: The Internet — where lies tangle with truth
“The Internet Messenger,” by Buky Schwartz, in Holon, Israel
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
In this, the Information Age, truth was supposed to be the great product of the times. Spread at the speed of light, and majestically transparent, the world of irrefutable truth was supposed to be available at the click of a key.
The Internet was to be like “Guinness World Records,” conceived by Sir Hugh Beaver, managing director of the Guinness Brewery, when he missed a shot while bird hunting in Ireland in 1951. This resulted in an argument between him and his hosts about the fastest game bird in Europe, the golden plover (which he missed) or the red grouse. The idea for a reference book that would settle that sort of thing was born, which could help promote Guinness and settle barroom disputes.
The first edition was published as “The Guinness Book of Records” in 1955 and was an instant bestseller. You might have thought that there was a thirst for truth as well as beer.
Despite the U.S. Supreme Court’s (dominated by Republican justices) repeated rejection of any suggestion that the presidential election of 2020 was fraudulent and that it wasn’t won by Joe Biden, the Republican governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, has called a rare special session of the Texas legislature to pass a restrictive voting package that will likely include the power for the legislature to overturn any election result it deems fraudulent.
This is happening across Republican-controlled states. They are ready to fix something big that isn’t broken.
Abbott has called the special session because the Texas legislature -- thanks to the Democrats denying him quorum in a parliamentary procedure -- didn’t get what amounts to a rollback of democracy in the regular session. Second time lucky.
What these Republicans are doing is equivalent to forcing men to wear blinders so they don’t stare at naked women on our streets, even though there are no naked women on our streets. Better be sure.
Behind all this rebuttal of truth is the Big Lie. It is promoted, cherished and burnished by Donald Trump and those who swallowed his brand of fact-free ideology. The Big Lie is with us and will cast its shadow of pernicious doubt over future elections down through time. The loser will cry fraud and state lawmakers will, under the new scheme of things, be entitled to overturn election results, violating the will of the people to serve their own political goals.
Mark Twain wrote a short essay in 1880 entitled “On the Decay of the Art of Lying.” If Twain were alive today, he might be tempted to retitle his work “The Ascent of the Art of Lying.”
The extraordinary thing about the Big Lie is its blatancy; the fact that it has been found untrue by the courts and by every investigation, yet it rolls on like the Mississippi, unyielding to fact, unimpeded by truth.
The Big Lie is an avalanche of political desire over democratic fact. It introduces corrosive doubt where there is no justification. It is a virus in the body politic that may go dormant but won’t be eradicated. The host body, democracy, is weakened and the infection can flare at any time, triggered by political ambition.
Historically, there have been primary sources of information and tertiary sources of doubt or refutation. For example, some believed that the oil companies were sitting on a gasoline substitute that would convert water to fuel. That is a falsehood that has been spread since the internal combustion engine created a need for gasoline. It was believed by a few conspiracy theorists and laughed off by most people.
When the fax machine came into being in the mid-1970s there were those who thought that the Saudi Arabian regime would fall because information about liberal society was getting into the country. Instead, Saudi conservatism hardened and there was no great liberalization. Today Saudis are online and there is no uprising, no government in exile, no large expatriate community seeking change. Truth hasn’t overwhelmed belief.
It is an awful truism that people believe what they want to believe, even if that requires the suppression of logic and the overthrow of fact. Gradually all facts become suspect, and the lie fights hand to hand with the truth.
As newspaper people joke, “Don’t let the facts stand in the way of a good story.” Democracy isn’t a good story; it is the great story of human governance. And it is being subverted by lies.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com, and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.
Don Pesci: Avoid 'cheap grace': Bring migrant kids to Conn.
U.S. Border Patrol officers processing migrant children in Texas
Central American migrants charging their phones in Mexico City on their way to the U.S. border.
VERNON, Conn.
The crisis at the border has now officially become “a border crisis.” A story in The Hartford Courant boldly labels it as such: “Lamont was personally asked by Vice President Kamala Harris recently if Connecticut could provide space for some of the thousands of children who are being kept in detention centers along the Texas border after fleeing from their Central American countries. Their numbers have increased as the federal government is facing a border crisis (emphasis mine).”
“Crisis” is not a term often found waltzing around with the new administration of President Joe Biden. But it has become impossible in recent days for Friends Of Biden (FOBs) to overlook the massive numbers of illegal – shall we, for once, call things by their right names? -- immigrants that have poured over the US border after Biden, a few weeks into his presidency, opened the door to illegal immigration while telling the huddled masses yearning to breathe free in Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico, “Don’t come in just yet. We’re not ready for you.”
They came, in numbers impossible to ignore.
Biden honeymooners scattered throughout the United States have managed thus far to obscure the predictable consequences of Democratic attempts to rid the nation of any trace of Trumpism. Slathering such failed attempts with political slant-ointment has not worked to obliterate the failed results of Biden’s thoughtless border policies. George Orwell taught us that the most difficult thing that writers must do is to notice what is lying right under their noses, and some people in the news business have taken his admonition to heart.
The unmanageable influx of illegal immigrants quickly became a crisis after the Biden administration disassembled Trump’s effective, though imperfect, multiple solutions to illegal border crossings. The Trump protocols included a wall, much derided by anti-Trump Democrats; an arrangement with south-of-the-border states that illegal immigrants passing through other countries on their way to the United States must apply for asylum in the pass-through countries, and tighter border security. All this was washed away, mostly by executive fiats, following Biden’s elevation to the presidency.
The came the deluge. Suddenly everyone was woke.
Now that the immigration horses have escaped the barn, the Biden administration is reconsidering patching breaches in the border wall and bribing – shall we call things by their right names for once? -- South American countries plagued for decades by failed socialist policies, so that the governments of said countries might consider giving the Biden administration a hands-up concerning illegal border crossings.
Answering a plea from Vice President Kamala Harris, Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont has agreed to lend a hand as well. After all, why should a border crisis that affects the entire nation be borne solely by California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, states lying on our country’s mystical borders?
Good question. Is it not a form of cheap grace for progressives in Connecticut to refuse to put their muscle where their mouths have been? This time, Connecticut progressives are not marching in lockstep with their brother progressives in the Biden-Harris administration.
Connecticut progressives are wiggling on the point. Middletown Mayor Ben Florsheim, perhaps the most progressive politician in the history of Middletown {home of Wesleyan University}, expressed reservations. “Taking kids out of cages in the Southwest and moving them into cages in the Northeast, Florsheim said, “is not an immigration policy. This is a literal decommissioned child prison. It’s a detention facility.” Actually, was a detention facility; no one has been detained in the closed Connecticut Juvenile Training School since April 12, 2018. Then too, Harris was not whispering policy prescriptions into Lamont’s ear during her visit to Connecticut. She was begging Lamont to let down a much needed political life line and, really, doesn’t the temporary housing in Connecticut of distressed children merit a soupcon of compassion from the progressive Mayor of Middletown? We are, after all, a nation of immigrants.
The Connecticut Justice Alliance’s executive director Christina Quaranta, said that the former juvenile-detention center “was not built to care for, support, or heal youth — especially youth already going through such significant trauma. Even if all evidence that [the training school] is a maximum security, hardware secure facility is removed, it still remains a large, cinderblock building, with inadequate living space for young people.”
Nope, Lamont said, “I visited there last week. I had no idea what to expect: cafeterias, classrooms, big outdoor recreation, indoor rec areas. I think the federal government would come in and make sure that when it came to where people actually sleep, they can do that in a way that the kids feel safe and feel like they’re at home. It’s secure, but it’s also welcoming.”
And that is the point, isn’t it? Lamont and Harris are right on this one: Connecticut should share the burden of national problems – the sooner the better. Welcoming illegal immigrant children to a facility that easily can be adjusted to meet their needs is no different than welcoming illegal immigrants into Connecticut’s sanctuary cities, and progressives who lodge flimsy objections to this mission of mercy are practitioners of cheap grace.
The crisis elsewhere should come home to roost, if only to show that Connecticut is better than those who pray in the church of cheap grace. Jesus, incidentally, called the practitioners of cheap grace “the tombs of the prophets.”
Don Pesci is a columnist based in Vernon.
Paul F.M. Zahl: Heroic border agents, pastors confront trafficking of minors and other woes at Texas facilities
Unaccompanied immigrant minors in McAllen, Texas, at Border Patrol facility in McAllen, Texas
— Border Patrol photos
On-Site Observations,
U.S. Border Patrol and Office of Refugee Resettlement facilities,
McAllen/Harlingen, Texas
15-16 January 2020
At the invitation of Pastor Todd Lamphere of Paula White Ministries, I was given the opportunity to visit the U.S. Border Patrol processing center at McAllen, Texas, and the ORR (i.e., Office of Refugee Resettlement) facility for unaccompanied minors, in this case boys age 13-17, at Harlingen, Texas.
{Editor’s note: Paula White is a pastor, televangelist, author and adviser to President Trump.}
The 19 in our group, who were mostly but not all pastors, were ushered right into the center of the complex issue presented by illegal immigration at the U.S. southern border. We got to see the situation there as it is on the ground.
Because this is a report of personal responses, I shall give just three broad-brush impressions of what we saw and heard:
1) The members of the Border Patrol who guided and accompanied us are of outstanding personal caliber. That includes Chief Carla Provost, who gave us an entire morning; the chief provost's deputy, Agent Scott; Agent Austin Skero, who briefed us initially; and also the agent in specific charge of the McAllen facility, whose name I forgot to write down.
These are men and women of obvious, outstanding dedication, professionalism, and self-sacrifice. Despite the sometimes negative coverage given them by the media, I did not hear one word of reactivity or animus. In fact, given the pressures that these officers are under, both from within the never-ending demands of their task itself and from the outside criticism they receive, they keep their cool in a way I found extremely impressive. Such over-burdened and under-supported representatives of the U.S. government should be treasured and not excoriated. I think I now regard them as heroes.
P.S. to point (1): At least half of the Border Patrol agents we met are Hispanic and/or people of color. Command of the Spanish language is an almost pre-requisite to serving there.
2) It was apparent, as we walked through the processing area at McAllen and the protocol was explained to us for each immigrant who is apprehended crossing illegally at the border (i.e., not crossing at a legal point of entry), that many of the cases involve fraud. Because of an expedited DNA test newly available to the Border Patrol, it is no longer anecdotal that many "family units" apprehended at the border are not what they claim to be. Or rather, large numbers of minors are being trafficked by the “coyotes’’ (individuals who smuggle people across the U.S. border, usually charging high fees) and cartels and using false identifications, taking unfair advantage of compassionate policies on the U.S. side.
It was more than sobering to hear the results of the new DNA testing, and to learn that minors are being routinely "passed back and forth" for the enriching of human traffickers. This story needs to be told.
P.S. to point (2): No one is being kept in cages. The chain-link fences we saw are what you see on any child's playground at school -- to protect and not imprison. Young people being held in the first 24 hours of their apprehension can go from fenced-in area to most other fenced-in areas, freely enter adjoining playground space, and connect with their friends. There is well founded concern about minor-on-minor sexual abuse, and that is the main reason for see-through fencing. Even so, although there are no cages, the Border Patrol is preparing to replace the chain-link fences with see-through plastic and/or glass barriers.
3) Among the true heroes of the immigration crisis at the Southern Border are the Christian churches. We stayed at a Baptist retreat center, one campus of which is the leased ORR (i.e., Office of Refugee Resettlement) facility at Harlingen. The chaplain of that campus, which has a capacity of 593 minor boys and is currently home to 160, is the Rev. Eli Lara, who has God's Spirit simply shining out from his face. Pastor Lara's ministry in recent years to the hundreds and hundreds of teenage boys who have been housed in Harlingen, almost all of whom are from the "Northern Triangle" of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, is as bright a light to young sufferers and strugglers as I have ever witnessed.
The Christian churches of the Rio Grande Valley, both Protestant and Catholic, have stepped up to the plate in a very big way. They are doing, right there, what churches in other parts of the country say that believers should be doing. Here in Harlingen is a story that merits the widest possible coverage: the Rio Grande faith communities' putting their shoulder to the wheel in service of God and neighbor.
In summary,
1) Our U.S. Border Patrol members are over-taxed, under-resourced, and came across to us as uniformed channels of efficient compassion and rough-and- ready sacrifice;
2) The on-again, off-again flood of immigration at the border has a lot to do with intentional fraud, i.e., the criminal taking-advantage of sincere aspirers for a better life by unscrupulous and greedy “coyotes’’ and cartels. Children and minors are grievously victimized in this cycle.;
(3) The Christian churches of the Rio Grande Valley are doing unheralded superb work, "works of love" in the best Kierkegaardian sense — that is, issuing in a harvest of new disciples and new hope within the battered, vulnerable population they are now serving. And I heard no one blowing their own horn.
Respectfully submitted,
Paul Zahl
The Rev. Dr. Paul F.M. Zahl
Dean/President emeritus
Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry
Ambridge, Penn.
Paul F.M. Zahl, a retired Episcopal minister, is also a writer and theologian.