Llewellyn King: Immigrants’ buoyancy, including success in science
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
I have been exploring the heights of scientific endeavor in reporting on artificial intelligence, from its use in medical research (especially promising) to its use in utilities and transportation. It is notable that many of the high achievers weren’t born here.
They have come here from everywhere, but the number of Asians is notable — and in that group, the number of women stands out.
As an immigrant, originally from what was called Rhodesia and is now called Zimbabwe, I am interested in why immigrants are so buoyant, so upwardly mobile in their adopted countries. I can distill it to two things: They came to succeed, and they mostly aren’t encumbered with the social limits of their upbringing and molded expectations. America is a clean slate when you first get here.
A friend from Serbia, who ascended the heights of academe and lectured at Tulane University, said his father told him, “Don’t go to America unless you want to succeed.”
A Korean mechanical engineer, who studied at American universities and now heads an engineering company that seeks to ease the electricity crisis, told me, “I want to try harder and do something for America. I chose to come here. I want to succeed, and I want America to succeed.”
When I sat at lunch in New York with an AI startup’s senior staff, we noticed that none of us was born an American. Two of the developers were born in India, one in Spain and me in Zimbabwe.
We started to talk about what made America a haven for good minds in science and engineering and we decided it was the magnet of opportunity, Ronald Reagan’s “shining city upon a hill.”
There was agreement from the startup scientists-engineers — I like the British word “boffins” for scientists and engineers taken together — that if that ever changes, if the anti-immigrant sentiment overwhelms good judgment, then the flow will stop, and the talented won’t come to America to pursue their dreams. They will go elsewhere or stay at home.
In the last several years, I have visited AI companies, interviewed many in that industry and at the great universities, such as Brown, UC Berkeley, MIT and Stanford, and companies such as Google and Nvidia. The one thing that stands out is how many of those at the forefront weren’t born in America or are first generation.
They come from all over the globe. But Asians are clearly a major force in the higher reaches of U.S. research.
At a AI conference, organized by the MIT Technology Review, the whole story of what is happening at the cutting-edge of AI was on view: faces from all over the world, new American faces. The number immigrants was awesome, notably from Asia. They were people from the upper tier of U.S. science and engineering confidently adding to the sum of the nation’s knowledge and wealth,
Consider the leaders of top U.S. tech companies who are immigrants: Microsoft, Satya Nadella (India); Google, Sundar Pichai (India); Tesla, Elon Musk (South Africa); and Nvidia, Jensen Huang (Taiwan). Of the top seven, only Apple’s Tim Cook, Facebook’s Jeff Zuckerberg and Amazon’s Andy Jassy can be said to be traditional Americans.
A cautionary tale: A talented computer engineer from Mexico with a family that might have been plucked from the cover of the Saturday Evening Post lived in the same building as I do. During the Trump administration, they went back to Mexico.
There had been some clerical error in his paperwork. But the humiliation of being treated as a criminal was such that rather than fight immigration bureaucracy, he and his family returned voluntarily to Mexico. America’s loss.
Every country that has had a large influx of migrants knows that they can bring with them much that is undesirable. From Britain to Germany to Australia, immigration has had a downside: drugs, crime and religions that make assimilation difficult.
But waves of immigrants have built America, from the Scandinavian and German wheat farmers that turned the prairies into a vast larder to Jews from Europe who moved to Hollywood in the 1930s and made America pre-eminent in entertainment, to today’s global wave that is redefining Yankee know-how in the world of neural networks and quantum computing.
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.
Llewellyn King: What might happen if Google is broken up?
Google headquarters, in Mountain View, Calif.
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
Alphabet Inc.’s Google has few peers in the world of success. Founded on Sept. 4, 1998, it has a market capitalization of $1.98 trillion today.
It is global, envied, admired, and relied upon as the premier search engine. It is also hated. According to Google (yes, I googled it), it has 92 percent of the search business. Its name has entered English as a noun (google) and a verb (to google).
It has also swallowed so much of world’s advertising that it has been one of the chief instruments in the humbling and partial destruction of advertising-supported media, from local papers to the great names of publishing and television; all of which are suffering and many of which have failed, especially local radio and newspapers.
Google was the brainchild of two Stanford graduate students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. In the course of its short history, it has changed the world.
When it arrived, it began to sweep away existing search engines quite simply because it was better, more flexible, amazingly easy to use, and it could produce an answer from a few words of inquiry.
There were seven major search engines fighting for market share back then: Yahoo, Alta Vista, Excite, Lycos, WebCrawler, Ask Jeeves and Netscape. A dozen others were in the market.
Since its initial success, Google, like Amazon, its giant tech compatriot, has grown beyond all imagination.
Google has continued its expansion by relentlessly buying other tech companies. According to its own search engine, Google has bought 256 smaller high-tech companies.
The question is: Is this a good thing? Is Google’s strategy to find talent and great, new businesses or to squelch potential rivals?
My guess is some of each. It has acquired a lot of talent through acquisition, but a lot of promising companies and their nascent products and services may never reach their potential under Google. They will be lost in the corporate weeds.
In the course of its acquisition binge, Google has changed the nature of tech startups. When Google itself launched, it was a time when startup companies made people rich when they went public, once they proved their mettle in the market.
Now, there is a new financing dynamic for tech startups: Venture capitalists ask if Google will buy the startup. The public doesn’t get a chance for a killing. Innovators have become farm teams for the biggies.
Europe has been seething about Google for a long time, and there are ongoing moves to break up Google there. Here, things were quiescent until the Department of Justice and a bipartisan group of attorneys general brought suit against the company for monopolizing the advertising market. If the U.S. efforts to bring Microsoft to heal is any guide, the case will drag on for years and finally die.
History doesn’t offer much guidance as to what would happen if Google were to be broken up; the best example and biggest since the Standard Oil breakup in 1911 is AT&T in 1992.
In both cases, the constituent parts grew faster than the parent. The AT&T breakup fostered the Baby Bells — some, like Verizon, have grown enormously. Standard Oil was the same: The parts were bigger than the sum had been.
When companies have merged with the government’s approval, the results have seldom been the corporate nirvana prophesied by those urging the merger, usually bankers and lawyers.
Case in point: the 1997 merger of McDonnell Douglas and Boeing. Overnight the nation went from having two large airframe manufacturers to having just one, Boeing. The price of that is now in the headlines as Boeing, without domestic competition, has fallen into the slothful ways of a monopoly.
Antitrust action against Google has few lessons to be learned from the past. Computer-related technology is just too dynamic; it moves too fast for the past to illustrate the future. That would have been true at any time in the past 20 years (the years of Google’s ascent), but it is more so now with the arrival of artificial intelligence.
If the Justice Department succeeds, and Google is broken up after many years of litigation and possible legislation, it may be unrecognizable as the Google of today.
It is reasonable to speculate that Google at the time of a breakup may be many times its current size. Artificial intelligence is expected to bring a new surge of growth to the big tech companies, which may change search engines altogether.
Am I assuming that the mighty ship Google is too big to sink? It hasn’t been a leader to date in AI and is reportedly playing catch up.
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.
Llewellyn King: The wild and fabulous medical frontier with predictive AI
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
When is a workplace at its happiest? I would submit that it is during the early stages of a project that is succeeding, whether it is a restaurant, an Internet startup or a laboratory that is making phenomenal progress in its field of inquiry.
There is a sustained ebullience in a lab when the researchers know that they are pushing back the frontiers of science, opening vistas of human possibility and reaping the extraordinary rewards that accompany just learning something big. There has been a special euphoria in science ever since Archimedes jumped out of his bath in ancient Greece, supposedly shouting, “Eureka!”
I had a sense of this excitement when interviewing two exceptional scientists, Marina Sirota and Alice Tang, at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), for the independent PBS television program White House Chronicle.
Sirota and Tang have published a seminal paper on the early detection of Alzheimer’s Disease — as much as 10 years before onset — with machine learning and artificial intelligence. The researchers were hugely excited by their findings and what their line of research will do for the early detection and avoidance of complex diseases, such as Alzheimer’s and many more.
It excited me — as someone who has been worried about the impact of AI on everything, from the integrity of elections to the loss of jobs — because the research at UCSF offers a clear example of the strides in medicine that are unfolding through computational science. “This time it’s different,” said Omar Hatamleh, who heads up AI for NASA at the Goddard Space Flight Center, in Greenbelt, Md.
In laboratories such as the one in San Francisco, human expectations are being revolutionized.
Sirota said, “At my lab …. the idea is to use both molecular data and clinical data [which is what you generate when you visit your doctor] and apply machine learning and artificial intelligence.”
Tang, who has just finished her PhD and is studying to be a medical doctor, explained, “It is the combination of diseases that allows our model to predict onset.”
In their study, Sirota and Tang found that osteoporosis is predictive of Alzheimer’s in women, highlighting the interplay between bone health and dementia risk.
The UCSF researchers used this approach to find predictive patterns from 5 million clinical patient records held by the university in its database. From these, there emerged a relationship between osteoporosis and Alzheimer’s, especially in women. This is important as two-thirds of Alzheimer’s sufferers are women.
The researchers cautioned that it isn’t axiomatic that osteoporosis leads to Alzheimer’s, but it is true in about 70 percent of cases. Also, they said they are critically aware of historical bias in available data — for example, that most of it is from white people in a particular social-economic class.
There are, Sirota and Tang said, contributory factors they found in Alzheimer’s. These include hypertension, vitamin D deficiency and heightened cholesterol. In men, erectile dysfunction and enlarged prostate are also predictive. These findings were published in “Nature Aging” early this year.
Predictive analysis has potential applications for many diseases. It will be possible to detect them well in advance of onset and, therefore, to develop therapies.
This kind of predictive analysis has been used to anticipate homelessness so that intervention – like rent assistance — can be applied before a family is thrown out on the street. Institutional charity is normally slow and often identifies at-risk people after a catastrophe has occurred.
AI is beginning to influence many aspects of the way we live, from telephoning a banker to utilities’ efforts to spot and control at-risk vegetation before a spark ignites a wildfire.
While the challenges of AI, from its wrongful use by authoritarian rulers and its menace in war and social control, are real, the uses just in medicine are awesome. In medicine, it is the beginning of a new time in human health, as the frontiers of disease are understood and pushed back as never before. Eureka! Eureka! Eureka!
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.
Dr. Yukie Nagai's predictive learning architecture for predicting sensorimotor signals.
— Dr. Yukie Nagai - https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2018.0030
Llewellyn King: How the move to a MAGA-style Britain flopped
Areas of the world that were part of the British Empire, with current British Overseas Territories underlined in red.
— Photo by RedStorm1368
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
“Make America Great Again.” Those words have been gently haunting me not because of their political-loading, but because they have been reminding me of something, like the snatches of a tune or a poem which isn’t fully remembered, but which drifts into your consciousness from time to time.
Then it came to me: It wasn’t the words, but the meaning; or, more precisely, the reasoning behind the meaning.
I grew up among the last embers of the British Empire, in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). I am often asked what it was like there.
All I can tell you is that it was like growing up in Britain, maybe in one of the nicer places in the Home Counties (those adjacent to London), but with some very African aspects and, of course, with the Africans themselves, whose land it was until Cecil John Rhodes and his British South Africa Company decided that it should be British; part of a dream that Britain would rule from Cape Town to Cairo.
Evelyn Waugh, the British author, said of Southern Rhodesia in 1937 that the settlers had a “morbid lack of curiosity” about the indigenous people. Although it was less heinous than it sounds, there was a lot of truth to that. They were there and now we were there; and it was how it was with two very different peoples on the same piece of land.
But by the 1950s, change was in the air. Britain came out of World War II less interested in its empire than it had ever been. In 1947, under the Labor government of Clement Attlee, which came to power after the wartime government of Winston Churchill, it relinquished control of the Indian subcontinent — now comprising India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
It was set to gradually withdraw from the rest of the world. The empire was to be renamed the Commonwealth and was to be a club of former possessions, often more semantically connected than united in other ways.
But the end of the empire wasn’t universally accepted, and it wasn’t accepted in the African colonies that had attracted British settlers, always referred to not as “whites” but as “Europeans.”
I can remember the mutterings and a widespread belief that the greatness that had put “Great” into the name Great Britain would return. The world map would remain with Britain's incredible holdings in Asia and Africa, colored for all time in red. People said things like the “British lion will awake, just you see.”
It was a hope that there would be a return to what were regarded as the glory days of the empire when Britain led the world militarily, politically, culturally, scientifically, and with what was deeply believed to be British exceptionalism.
That feeling, while nearly universal among colonials, wasn’t shared by the citizens back home in Britain. They differed from those in the colonies in that they were sick of war and were delighted by the social services which the Labor government had introduced, like universal healthcare, and weren’t rescinded by the second Churchill administration, which took power in 1951.
The empire was on its last legs and the declaration by Churchill in 1942, “I did not become the king’s first minister to preside over the dissolution of the British Empire,” was long forgotten. But not in the colonies and certainly not where I was. Our fathers had served in the war and were super-patriotic.
While in Britain they were experimenting with socialism and the trade unions were amassing power, and migration from the West indies had begun changing attitudes, in the colonies, belief flourished in what might now be called a movement to make Britain great again.
In London in 1954, it got an organization, the League of Empire Loyalists, which was more warmly embraced in the dwindling empire than it was in Britain. It was founded by an extreme conservative, Arthur K. Chesterton, who had had fascist sympathies before the war.
In Britain, the league attracted some extreme right-wing Conservative members of parliament but little public support. Where I was, it was quite simply the organization that was going to Make Britain Great Again.
It fizzled after a Conservative prime minister, Harold MacMillan, put an end to dreaming of the past. He said in a speech in South Africa that “winds of change” were blowing through Africa, though most settlers still believed in the return of empire.
It took the war of independence in Rhodesia to bring home MacMillan’s message. We weren’t going to Make Britain Great Again.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com, and he based in Rhode Island.
whchronicle.com
Llewellyn King: Three out-of-step environmental groups
Rachel Carson researching with Robert Hines on the New England coast in 1952. Her book Silent Spring helped launch the environmental movement.
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
Greedy men and women are conspiring to wreck the environment just to enrich themselves.
It has been an unshakable left-wing belief for a long time. It has gained new vigor since The Washington Post revealed that Donald Trump has been trawling Big Oil for big money.
At a meeting at Mar-a-Lago, Trump is reported to have promised oil industry executives a free hand to drill willy-nilly across the country and up and down the coasts, and to roll back the Biden administration’s environmental policies. All this for $1 billion in contributions to his presidential campaign, according to The Post article.
Trump may believe that there is a vast constituency of energy company executives yearning to push pollution up the smokestack, to disturb the permafrost and to drain the wetlands, but he has gotten it wrong.
Someone should tell Trump that times have changed and very few American energy executives believe — as he has said he does — that global warming is a hoax.
Trump has set himself not only against a plethora of laws, but also against an ethic, an American ethic: the environmental ethic.
This ethic slowly entered the consciousness of the nation after the seminal publication of Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson, in 1962.
Over time, concern for the environment has become an 11th Commandment. The cornerstone of a vast edifice of environmental law and regulation was the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969. It was promoted and signed by President Richard Nixon, hardly a wild-eyed lefty.
Some 30 years ago, Barry Worthington, the late executive director of the United States Energy Association, told me that the important thing to know about the energy-versus-environment debate was that a new generation of executives in oil companies and electric utilities were environmentalists; that the world had changed and the old arguments were losing their advocates.
“Not only are they very concerned about the environment, but they also have children who are very concerned,” Worthington told me.
Quite so then, more so now. The aberrant weather alone keeps the environment front-and-center.
This doesn’t mean that old-fashioned profit-lust has been replaced in corporate accommodation with the Green New Deal, or that the milk of human kindness is seeping from C-suites. But it does mean that the environment is an important part of corporate thinking and planning today. There is pressure both outside and within companies for that.
The days when oil companies played hardball by lavishing money on climate deniers on Capitol Hill and utilities employed consultants to find data that, they asserted, proved that coal use didn’t affect the environment are over. I was witness to the energy-versus-climate-and-environment struggle going back half a century. Things are absolutely different now.
Trump has promised to slash regulation, but industry doesn’t necessarily favor wholesale repeal of many laws. Often the very shape of the industries that Trump would seek to help has been determined by those regulations. For example, because of the fracking boom, the gas industry could reverse the flow of liquified-natural-gas at terminals, making us a net exporter not importer.
The United States is now, with or without regulation, the world’s largest oil producer. The electricity industry is well along in moving to renewables and making inroads on new storage technologies like advanced batteries. Electric utilities don’t want to be lured back to coal. Carbon capture and storage draws nearer.
Similarly, automakers are gearing up to produce more electric vehicles. They don’t want to exhume past business models. Laws and taxes favoring EVs are now assets to Detroit, building blocks to a new future.
As the climate crisis has evolved so have corporate attitudes. Yet there are those who either don’t or don’t want to believe that there has been a change of heart in energy industries. But there has.
Three organizations stand out as pushing old arguments, shibboleths from when coal was king, and oil was emperor.
These groups are:
The Sunrise Movement, a dedicated organization of young people that believes the old myths about big, bad oil and that American production is evil, drilling should stop, and the industry should be shut down. It fully embraces the Green New Deal — an impractical environmental agenda — and calls for a social utopia.
The 350 Organization is similar to the Sunrise Movement and has made much of what it sees as the environmental failures of the Biden administration — in particular, it feels that the administration has been soft on natural gas.
Finally, there is a throwback to the 1970s and 1980s: an anti-nuclear organization called Beyond Nuclear. It opposes everything to do with nuclear power even in the midst of the environmental crisis, highlighted by Sunrise Movement and the 350 Organization.
Beyond Nuclear is at war with Holtec International for its work in interim waste storage and in bringing the Palisades plant along Lake Michigan back to life. Its arguments are those of another time, hysterical and alarmist. The group doesn’t get that most old-time environmentalists are endorsing nuclear power.
As Barry Worthington told me: “We all wake up under the same sky.”
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.
Llewellyn King: The trials of celebrity love, from Taylor-Burton to Swift-Kelce
Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra (1963)
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
I wouldn’t know Taylor Swift if she sat next to me on an airplane, which is unlikely because she travels by private jet. If she were to take a commercial flight, she wouldn’t be sitting in the economy seats, which the airlines politely call coach.
Swift (who lives in Watch Hill, R.I., part of the time) needs to go by private jet these days: She is dating Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, and that is a problem. Love needs candle-lightin,g not floodlighting.
Being in love when you are famous, especially if both the lovers are famous, is tough. The normal, simple joys of that happy state are a problem: There is no privacy, precious few places outside of gated homes where the lovers can be themselves.
They can’t do any of the things unfamous lovers take for granted, like catching a movie, holding hands or stealing a kiss in public without it being caught on video and transmitted on social media to billions of fans. Dinner for two in a cozy restaurant and what each orders is flashed around the world. “Oysters for you, sir?”
Worse, if the lovers are caught in public not doing any of those things and, say, staring into the middle distance looking glum, the same social media will erupt with speculation about the end of the affair.
If you are a single celebrity, you are gossip-bait, catnip for the paparazzi. If a couple, the speculation is whether it will be wedding bells or splitsville.
The world at large is convinced that celebrity lovers are somehow in a different place from the rest of us. It isn’t true, of course, but there we are: We think their highs are higher and lows are lower.
That is doubtful, but it is why we yearn to hear about the ups and downs of their romances; Swift’s more than most because they are the raw material of her lyrics. Break up with Swift and wait for the album.
When I was a young reporter in London in the 1960s, I did my share of celebrity chasing. Mostly, I found, the hunters were encouraged by their prey. But not when Cupid was afoot. Celebrity is narcotic except when the addiction is inconvenient because of a significant other.
In those days, the most famous woman in the world, and seen as the most beautiful, was Elizabeth Taylor. I was employed by a London newspaper to follow her and her lover, Richard Burton, around London. They were engaged in what was then, and maybe still is, the most famous love affair in the world.
The great beauty and the great Shakespearian actor were the stuff of legends. It also was a scandal because when they met in Rome, on the set of Cleopatra, they were both married to other people. She to the singer Eddie Fisher and he to his first wife, the Welsh actress and theater director Sybil Williams.
Social rules were tighter then and scandal had a real impact. This scandal, like most scandals of a sexual nature, raised consternation along with prurient curiosity.
My role at The Daily Sketch was to stake out the lovers where they were staying at the luxury Dorchester Hotel, on Park Lane.
I never saw Taylor and Burton. Day after day I would be sidetracked by the hotel’s public-relations officer with champagne and tidbits of gossip, while they escaped by a back entrance.
Then, one Sunday in East Dulwich, a leafy part of South London where I lived with my first wife, Doreen, one of the great London newspaper writers, I happened upon them.
Every Sunday, we went to the local pub for lunch, which included traditional English roast beef or lamb. It was a good pub — which today might be called a gastropub, but back then it was just a pub with a dining room. An enticing place.
One Sunday, we went as usual to the pub and were seated right next to my targets: the most famous lovers in the world, Taylor and Burton. The elusive lovers, the scandalous stars were there next to me: a gift to a celebrity reporter.
I had never seen before, nor in the many years since, two people so in love, so aglow, so entranced with each other, so oblivious to the rest of the room. No movie that they were to star in ever captured love as palpable as the aura that enwrapped Taylor and Burton. You could warm your hands on it. Doreen whispered from behind her hand, “Are you going to call the office?”
I looked at the lovers and shook my head. They were so happy, so beautiful, so in love I didn’t have the heart to break the spell.
I wasn’t sorry I didn’t call in a story then and I haven’t changed my mind.
Love in a gilded cage is tough. If Swift and Kelce are at the next table — unlikely -- in a restaurant, I will keep mum. Love conquers all.
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.
Web site: whchronicle.co
Llewellyn King: The case for ‘hotter’ nuclear power in dealing with the electricity crunch
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
The drumbeat for more nuclear power grows louder all the time.
As the demand for more electricity rises inexorably (now agreed at about 2 percent a year nationally and more in specific areas), the case for a surge in nuclear-power-plant development becomes stronger. Solar and wind with their intermittency can’t accommodate the growth alone.
Polls put public support for nuclear power in the United States at around 60 percent. Environmentalists who once opposed nuclear now endorse it.
Every day in newspapers and places where opinions are heard, experts are asserting that the world can’t reach its climate goals without nuclear energy. For the U.S., that seems clear. The prognosticators in and out of government say it is so.
There is political support in both parties, and nuclear has been on a technological march: better safety, better fuel, less steel and concrete. A platoon of small modular reactors (SMRs) — which generate 400 megawatts or less of electricity compared to the plants now operating, which are mostly over 1,000 MW — is in the wings.
The argument for these SMRs has been that because they are smaller, they will be cheaper to build, with much of the fabrication done in a factory, and easier to site.
The first of the breed is from NuScale, which has been under development for more than a decade, but recently lost its first U.S. customer, Utah Associated Municipal Power System, because of the rising projected cost of electricity from the plant.
A lot of interest is focused on the Natrium reactor, planned for a former coal-fired plant site in Wyoming and backed in part by Bill Gates and with participation from GE Hitachi.
Several utilities are looking at other designs. Of these only NuScale uses a modified light-water system, which is the technology on which the world’s 400-plus power generating reactors have been based.
The case for new technologies is eloquently made in a new and extraordinarily complete but very accessible book, New Nuclear Is Hot, by longtime nuclear advocate Robert Hargraves, a Ph.D. physicist.
Hargraves’s argument is that the alternative technologies now under development are hotter: They operate at far higher temperatures than the old reactors and are better for industrial uses; more of the heat is converted to electricity, less is wasted on disposing of so called low-grade heat, and the plants are smaller, easier to build and are inherently safer.
It is a convincing list of virtues.
Hargraves says, “New nuclear reactors exploit hotter heat in fluids such as molten salts, liquid sodium or helium gas. The red-hot temperature heat puts 50 percent more of the reactor’s fission energy into electrical energy, not into the cooling water that condenses turbine-generator steam. Waterside new nuclear-power plants use about half of the cooling water of current ones.”
Additionally, Hargraves says, “Hot heat also brings new uses. Hot heat can break hydrogen out of seawater cheaply, heat buildings, power electrochemical separators to capture CO2, and energize new refineries to produce net zero fuels from the CO2 and hydrogen.”
Hargraves is a promoter of thorium reactors and is one of the founders of ThorCon, a company that hopes to build a thorium reactor in Indonesia.
But the underlying challenge to nuclear energy and to providing the nation with enough electricity, as it converts to an electric economy, isn’t technology but money. First-of-its-kind reactors are expensive.
Even tried-and-true light water reactors are tricky to build. The two new units of the Vogtle plant in Georgia came in $17 billion over budget and 7 years late. The story for the latest reactor built in Finland has been similar: cost overruns and delays.
New reactors are expensive and that expense is hard to estimate. That means if the nation wants electricity, it needs to think up ways of financing the new future of nuclear power outside of the traditional avenues of finance. A nuclear plant can last for 100 years or more, but the big hurdle is the billions of dollars required up front.
It becomes a national survival issue: Will the nation have enough electricity for the future or will it accept electricity shortages as a limiting factor in the economy?
The nuclear establishment doesn’t need more endorsements. It needs to lay out a plan for not what should be built, but how it will be paid for — and it needs that plan now.
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.
Help keep ‘White House Chronicle’ on the air!
From Llewellyn King:
Dear Friends,
My long-running news and public affairs program, White House Chronicle, which airs weekly on PBS and public, educational and government cable access channels across the country, is looking for sponsors.
We have had some wonderful support over the years, including the Stevens Institute of Technology, the American Petroleum Institute, Exelon Corporation, Anterix, the Edison Electric Institute, the Salt River Project, and the Large Public Power Council.
Due to recent realignments and retirements, we are now seeking new support.
Sponsoring the program can be a great branding tool. In Washington, for example, it airs on WETA, Channel 26, leading the Sunday morning talk shows. The audio airs four times on SiriusXM Radio’s popular POTUS (Politics of the United States), Channel 124.
White House Chronicle has worldwide carriage on Voice of America Television and Radio in English.
The program is the mother ship of my operations. It makes all my other work possible. Its mission is to examine the intersection of science, technology and society. How we live today, and how we will live tomorrow.
It is my belief that this intersection often has a greater impact than does politics alone.
My and co-host Adam Clayton Powell III's guests have been some of the leading lights of technological and scientific progress. Recently they have included Ernest Moniz, former secretary of energy; Vint Cerf, vice president and chief internet evangelist at Google; Stuart Russell, professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley; and John Savage, professor emeritus of computer science at Brown University.
The program has been ahead on the issues of the transformative impact of artificial intelligence, the use of hobbyist drones in warfare, and the crisis in electricity supply.
If you would like to get the benefit of a variable branding message on all our broadcast platforms, please get in touch with me at llewellynking1@gmail.com.
Cheers,
Llewellyn
Executive Producer and Host
White House Chronicle on PBS;
Columnist, InsideSources Syndicate;
Contributor, Forbes and Energy Central;
Commentator, SiriusXM Radio
Llewellyn King: More and more, be happy you speak English
English-speaking peoples monument on Bush House, London
— Photo by Goodwillgames
ATHENS
If you hold a professional certificate, whether it is for information technology or language proficiency, or if you hold one for best practices in project management, you may have a Greek entrepreneur to thank.
He is Byron Nicolaides, founder and CEO of PeopleCert, the global testing company based in Athens.
I sat down with him in his office in the city’s center recently to find out how a businessman in Greece could affect standards of conduct and performance around the world.
It is a tale that begins with a very poor Greek family living in Istanbul — Nicolaides uses the old name for the Turkish capital, Constantinople, where once, he said, there was a community of more than 100,000 Greeks, which has dwindled to just 2,000 today. His parents were English teachers and had no fixed incomes. “Sometimes,” he said, “they would be paid in kind with a chicken or some bread.”
From this poverty their son, Byron, rose to be one of the richest men in Greece or Turkey. The company he created in 2000, is a global leader in professional and language skills certification. In 2021, it became the first Greek unicorn, reaching a capital value of more than $1 billion.
Note that his parents were English teachers — and this is important.
As I talked to Nicolaides, he enthused about the universality of English and how it has been a unifying force in the world. No worry about how English may crush marginal but traditional languages.
Nicolaides is passionate about English. Without it, he wouldn’t be the success he is today. He sees it as a great binding force, a great way for peoples and nations to talk to each other and to avoid friction. He wants everyone to know English
He asked me, “What is the second-biggest language in the world?” I look at the ceiling and start thinking about the two large population countries, India and China. I say uncertainly, “Hindi.”
With boyish happiness, Nicolaides, a young 65 of athletic build and a full head of hair, says, “Bad English.”
His enthusiasm for the English language becomes a man whose company tests English proficiency around the world — and he lists Fortune 500 companies (including Goldman Sachs and Citibank), NASA, the FBI, the CIA, universities and other institutions.
As Nicolaides unspools his life story, one is captivated by how a poor boy of Greek heritage made his way to Bosphorus University, where he earned a BA in business administration, and then to the University of La Verne in Southern California, where he earned an MBA.
Whereas Nicolaides’ upbringing and education in Turkey might seem to be a challenge — Turkey and Greece are seldom on the best of terms — it has been a great advantage to him.
His break was in 1986, when he went to work for Merrill Lynch in Greece, becoming its highest earner. The company was looking for someone to open the Turkish market, offering a $5,000 to $10,000 signing bonus. Nicolaides took the bonus, and the job made him a millionaire by age 31.
At that point, he told me, he had more money than he knew what to do with, so he did the thing all Greeks with money do, “I went into shipping.”
Nicolaides spent a year in the shipping industry and hated it. He said the only thing all the other shipping millionaires could talk about was “money, money, money.” Although today he has much, much more money, he feels he is helping humanity with the educational purpose of PeopleCert.
If he lucked out beyond expectations with Merrill Lynch, he lucked out with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, too, albeit indirectly.
During the Falklands War, Nicolaides said, the Iron Lady was appalled at the lack of interoperability between the British forces. She demanded the introduction of the kind of best practices and certification which later became a pillar of PeopleCert.
Thatcher’s requirement was developed by a British company in which Nicolaides had an investment. Later, he bought that company and PeopleCert became unstoppable: It has certified 7 million people around the world and is growing at 36 percent a year.
Reflecting on this odyssey by a golden Greek, I realize that native English speakers start with a huge advantage in that the world is open in a way that it isn’t to those who don’t speak English.
When I first visited Athens in the 1960s, getting around depended on finding an English speaker. They were few and far between. Today everyone seems to speak English, and well.
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 Iskand.
Byron Nicolaides
Llewellyn King: Cynically denigrating the news media has become a mainstay — attacking the messenger rather than the message
Outside the Reuters news service building in Manhattan
Newspapers "gone to the Web" in California
— Photo by SusanLesch
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
In the 1990s, someone wrote in The Weekly Standard — it may well have been Matt Labash — that for conservatives to triumph, all they had to do was to attack the messenger rather than the message. His advice was to go after the media, not the news.
Attacking the messenger was all well and good for the neoconservatives, but their less-thoughtful successors, MAGA supporters, are killing the messenger.
The news media— always identified as the “liberal media” (although much of the news media are right wing) — are now often seen, due to relentless denigration, as a force for evil, a malicious contestant on the other side.
No matter that there is no liberal media beyond what has been fabricated from political ectoplasm. Traditionally, most news proprietors have been conservative and many, but not most reporters, have been liberal.
It surprises people to learn that when you work in a large newsroom, you don’t know the political opinions of most of your colleagues. I have worked in many newsrooms over the decades and tended to know more about my colleagues’ love lives than their voting preferences.
This philosophy of “kill the messenger” might work briefly but down the road, the problem is no messenger, no news, no facts. The next stop is anarchy and chaos — you might say, politics circa 2024.
Add to that social media and their capacity to spread innuendo, half-truth, fabrication and common ignorance.
There is someone who writes to me almost weekly about the failures of the media — and I assume, ergo, my failure — and he won’t be mollified. To him, that irregular army of individuals who make a living reporting are members of a pernicious cult. To him, there is a shadow world of the media.
I have stopped remonstrating with him on that point. On other issues, he is lucid and has views worth knowing on such subjects as the Middle East and Ukraine.
That poses the question: How come he knows about these things? The answer, of course, is that he reads about them, saw/heard the news on television or heard it on radio.
Reporters in Gaza and Ukraine risk their lives, and sometimes lose them, to tell the world what is going on in these and other very dangerous places. No one accuses them of being left or right of center.
But send the same journalists to cover the White House, and they are assumed to be unreliable propagandists, devoid of judgment, integrity or common decency, so enslaved to liberalism that they will twist everything to suit a propaganda purpose.
That thought is on display every time Rep. Elise Stefanik (R.-N.Y.), an avid Trumper, is interviewed on TV. Stefanik attacks the interviewer and the institution. Her aim is to silence the messenger and leave the impression that she isn’t to be trifled with by the media, shades of Margaret Thatcher. But I interviewed “The Iron Lady,” and I can say she answered questions, hostile or otherwise.
Stefanik’s recent grandstanding on TV hid her flip-flop on the events on Jan. 6, 2021, and failed to tell us what she would do if she were to win the high office she clearly covets.
I have been too long in the journalist’s trade to pretend that we are all heroes, all out to get the truth. But I have observed that taken together, journalists tell the story pretty well, to the best of their own varied abilities.
We make mistakes. We live in terror of that. An individual here and there may fabricate — as Boris Johnson, a former British prime minister, did when he was a correspondent in Brussels. Some may, indeed, have political agendas; the reader or listener will soon twig that.
The political turmoil we are going through is partly the result of media denigration. People believe what they want to believe; they can seize any spurious supposition and hold it close as a revealed truth.
You can, for example, believe that ending natural-gas development in the United States will lead to carbon reduction worldwide, or you can believe that the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection with loss of life and the trashing of the nation’s great Capitol Building was an act of free speech.
One of the more dangerous ideas dancing around is that social media and citizen journalists can replace professional journalists. No, no, a thousand times no! We need the press with the resources to hire excellent journalists to cover local and national news, and to send, or station, staff around the world.
Have you seen anyone covering the news from Ukraine or Gaza on social media? There is commentary and more commentary on social media sites, all based on the reporting of those in danger and on the spot.
This is a trade of imperfect operators, but it is an essential one. For better or for worse, we are the messengers.
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.
Llewellyn King: Jimmy Carter haunts natural-gas decisions
Constellation’s Everett (Mass.) LNG Facility is the longest-operating liquefied natural gas (LNG) import facility of its kind in the United States.
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
The ghost of Jimmy Carter may be stalking energy policy in the White House and the Department of Energy.
In the Carter years, the struggle was for nuclear power. Today it is for natural gas and America’s booming liquefied-natural-gas future.
Decisions Carter took during his presidency are still felt today. Carter believed that nuclear energy was the resource of last resort. Although he didn’t overtly oppose it, he did damn it with faint praise. Carter, along with the environmental movement of the time, advocated for coal.
The first secretary of energy, James Schlesinger, a close friend of mine, struggled to keep nuclear alive. But he had to accept the reprocessing ban and the cancellation of the fast-breeder reactor program with a demonstration reactor in Clinch River, Tenn. Breeder reactors are a way of burning nuclear waste.
More importantly, Carter (ironically?), a nuclear engineer, believed that the reprocessing of nuclear fuel — then an established expectation — would lead to global proliferation. He thought that if we put a stop to reprocessing at home, it would curtail proliferation abroad. Reprocessing saves up to 97 percent of the uranium that hasn’t been burned up the first time, but the downside is that it frees bomb-grade plutonium.
Rather than chastening the world, Carter essentially broke the world monopoly on nuclear energy enjoyed, outside of the Soviet bloc, by the United States. Going forward, we weren’t seen as a reliable supplier.
Now the Biden administration is weighing a move that will curtail the growth in natural-gas exports, costing untold wealth to America and weakening its position as a stable, global supplier of liquified natural gas. It is a commodity in great demand in Europe and Asia, and pits the United States against Russia as a supplier.
What it won’t do is curtail so much as 1 cubic foot of gas consumption anywhere outside of the United States.
The argument against gas is that it is a fossil fuel, and fossil fuels contribute to global warming. But gas is the most benign of the fossil fuels, and it beats burning coal or oil hands down. Also, technology is on the way to capture the carbon in natural gas at the point of use.
But some environmentalists — duplicating the folly of environmentalism in the Carter administration — are out to frustrate the production, transport and export of LNG in the belief that this will help save the environment.
The issue that the White House and the DOE are debating is whether the department should permit a large, proposed LNG export terminal in Louisiana at Calcasieu Pass, known as CP2, and 16 other applications for LNG export terminals.
The recent history of U.S. natural gas and LNG has been one of industrial and scientific success: a very American story of can-do.
At a press conference in 1977, the then-deputy secretary of energy, Jack O’Leary, declared natural gas to be a depleted resource. He told a reporter not to ask about it anymore because it wasn’t in play.
Deregulation and technology, much of it developed by the U.S. government in conjunction with visionary George Mitchell and his company, Mitchell Energy, upended that. The drilling of horizontal wells using 3D seismic data, a new drill bit, and better fracking with an improved fracking liquid, changed everything. Add to that a better turbine, developed from aircraft engines, and a new age of gas abundance arrived.
Now the United States is the largest exporter of LNG, and it has become an important tool in U.S. diplomacy. It was American LNG that was rushed to Europe to replace Russian gas after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
In conversations with European gas companies, I am told they look to the United States for market stability and reliability.
Globally gas is a replacement fuel for coal, sometimes oil, and it is essential for warming homes in Europe. There is no alternative.
The idea of curbing LNG exports, advanced by the left wing of the Democratic Party and their environmental allies, won’t keep greenhouse gases from the environment. It will simply hand the market to other producers such as Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.
To take up arms against yourself, Carter-like, is a flawed strategy.
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.
Llewellyn King: Christmas sweeps up the world
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
I am an oddball. I like to work on Christmas.
I don’t know how it is now, but when I was younger and worked for newspapers, variously in Africa, Britain and the United States, I always volunteered to work over the holiday and loved it. There was a special Christmas camaraderie, often more than a little nipping at the eggnog, and the joy to know that senior staff weren’t around — and, especially, to know that they weren’t needed. We, the juniors, could do it.
When you were unimportant otherwise, being in charge of a daily newspaper was the kind of Christmas gift one savored. It was a case of being news editor, city editor or chief correspondent for a day.
The senior editors were gone, and the junior staff had the run of the proceedings. Lovely fun, it was.
But not every worker is happy to labor on the great day. Consider the parish priest.
Once, I stayed with my wife, Linda Gasparello, at The Homestead, the grand hotel in Hot Springs, Va., where affluent Washingtonians have been spending Christmas since the 1800s.
Having feasted happily but unwisely on Christmas dinner in the hotel’s baronial dining room, we felt the need for a little drive and perhaps a walk. We fetched up at The Inn at Gristmill Square, in Warm Springs. The town abuts the hotel’s 2,300 acres and is a delightful contrast, small and cozy.
At the bar was the local Episcopal priest. He was enjoying a little bottled Christmas cheer. Together, we had some more of what had brought him to his relaxed state and, looking dolefully at me, he said, “I love my job. I love my parishioners. But Christmas is so hard on a parish priest, that is why I am here with my friend,” he indicated the bartender.
He explained that apart from the additional services, he was expected to call on many families, attend many parties, eat lunches and dinners, and visit the sick and attend the everyday pastoral work of his office. The poor father was exhausted and enjoying Christmas in his private way, far from the madding crowd.
Clearly, this was nothing like the lark of working on newspapers at Christmas. But we shared more cheer, and he told me of how the real Christmas for him was in his daily pastoral work. He also liked working on Christmas, just that his lasted all year and got a bit hectic toward the 25th of December.
I marvel at Christmas. How it grips the whole world. How transcendental it is. How it sweeps up denominations. How Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and animists get into the spirit of it.
Also, I marvel at how Christmas has been modified globally to fit the Northern European tradition, with snow and mistletoe and songs that often have no religious relationship — like “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” or “White Christmas.”
My mother — who, like me, grew up in Africa — was against what she saw as the cultural appropriation of Christmas by the snowy European influence. She insisted on covering the house in ferns and other greenery, which she cut and hung on the 24th of December. Not an hour earlier. The 12 days of Christmas began for her on Christmas Eve and extended to Twelfth Night. Decorating earlier was heresy.
In vain, I pleaded for cotton wool snow, even though there was no snow in Bethlehem, and told her there was no greenery in the desert.
“Good King Wenceslas” was, it is believed, the Duke of Bohemia, now the Czech Republic. But to us in Africa, in the summer in the Southern Hemisphere, the snow lay deep and crisp and even in our imaginations.
That is the miracle of Christmas. It is for everyone, celebrated in its own way across the continents, inside and outside of Christendom.
Christmas is the world’s happy place. Enjoy!
On Twitter: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS, and an international energy consultant. He’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.
Llewellyn King: Kissinger, Schlesinger and me
Secretary of Defense James R. Schlesinger with President Gerald R. Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger during a briefing at The White House, in November, 1974.
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
Henry Kissinger has died aged 100. I remember him through his archrival, James Schlesinger.
April 24, 1980 was a bleak day for the United States. It was the day we lost helicopters and eight men in the desert during Operation Eagle Claw, the failed attempt to rescue the hostages held by Iran.
Two Washington titans were out of office, chafing at their distance from power, their inability to take action and the attendant sense of impotence. They also disliked — no, hated — each other.
These giants were Henry Kissinger and James Schlesinger. Kissinger had been a national-security adviser and secretary of state. He shaped geopolitical thinking for the latter half of the 20th Century. He informed foreign policy as no other has.
Schlesinger had been the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, director of the CIA, secretary of defense and the first secretary of energy.
I had started covering Schlesinger as a journalist when he was at the AEC in 1971, and we formed a friendship which would last until his death.
I created The Energy Daily in 1973 and later Defense Week, high-impact newsletters dominant in their fields at the time. I had a keen desire to know what was going on with the failed rescue attempt. Although Defense Week was weekly, we frequently put out daily supplements. Along with The Energy Daily, these were hand-delivered in Washington. We got the news out fast.
I had helped Schlesinger with the creation of the Department of Energy as a sounding board and, at times, as the public voice of his frustration with the Carter administration — where Schlesinger, a Republican, didn’t always fit.
On that day of fate in the Iranian desert, I called Schlesinger to get the story. He astounded me by telling me that he was in close contact with Kissinger. “Henry has better sources than I do on this,” he said.
I remember that sentence verbatim because it was so extraordinary to hear Schlesinger refer to Kissinger by his first name. I had never heard it and except for that day, when I heard Schlesinger refer to Kissinger as “Henry” all day, I never heard it again. Before and afterwards, it was always just “Kissinger,” often preceded with a derogatory qualification.
“Henry may know.” “I’ll ask Henry.” “Let me see what Henry has heard.” All day Schlesinger had an open line to Kissinger, asking questions on my behalf.
I assumed that the rift between two of the most formidable figures in Washington was bridged. Some said this animosity went back to their time at Harvard. Certainly, it reached its zenith during the Nixon administration when both men were high office-holders with considerable input into national policy.
Later, in 1984, Kissinger published one of the volumes of his memoirs. I asked Schlesinger if he had read the book. (He seemed to read everything.)
He responded with a string of invective against Kissinger. Obscenities often flowed from Schlesinger, but this was epic. So much for first names and respect that one day, that day of entente.
When Kissinger told The Washington Post’s Sally Quinn famously at a party that he was a “secret swinger,” he wasn’t far off. Kissinger loved the social world and his place in it.
By contrast, Schlesinger entertained sparingly at his modest home in Arlington, Va. My wife, Linda Gasparello, and I were there frequently, and it was always takeaway Chinese food and lots of Scotch.
In all the years I knew him, Schlesinger only came to my home once, although I must have gone to his scores of times —especially toward the end of his life when he liked to talk about the British Empire with me and European history with Linda.
That one visit to an apartment I had in the center of Washington wasn’t pure socializing either. The deputy editor of The Economist, the legendary Norman Macrae, was the guest of honor. Schlesinger, then secretary of energy, was keen to meet Macrae and so he and his wife, Rachel, came.
In government, Kissinger thought Schlesinger was too hardline, too reckless in his attitude to the Soviet Union, Iran and, later, Saddam Hussein. Schlesinger thought Kissinger’s reputation was overblown and he enjoyed the machinations of negotiation without regard to the end result.
I never formally met Kissinger. But at a dinner in Washington where Kissinger had spoken and was taking questions afterwards, someone at my table asked me to ask his question, on the grounds that asking questions was my job.
I thought it was a stupid question, but I asked it anyway. Kissinger glowered at me, so everyone could see who had asked the question, and declared, “That is a stupid question.”
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.
Llewellyn King: As the electricity sector is reinvented, there's an urgent need for engineers and technicians to support them
At the new (founded 1997) but already highly prestigious Olin College of Engineering, in Needham, Mass.
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
I have a soft spot for engineers and engineering. It started with my father. He called himself an engineer, even though he left school at 13 in a remote corner of Zimbabwe (then called Southern Rhodesia) and went to work in an auto repair shop.
By the time I remember his work clearly, in the 1950s, he was amazingly competent at everything he did, which was about everything that he could get to do. He could work a lathe, arc weld and acetylene weld, cut, rig, and screw.
My father used his imagination to solve problems, from finding a lost pump down a well to building a stand for a water tank that could supply several homes. He worked in steel: African termites wouldn’t allow wood to be used for external structures.
Electricity was a critical part of his sphere; installing and repairing electrical-power equipment was in his self-written brief.
Maybe that is why, for more than 50 years, I have found myself covering the electric-power industry. I have watched it struggle through the energy crisis and swing away from nuclear to coal, driven by popular feeling. I have watched natural gas, dismissed by the Carter administration as a “depleted resource,’’ roar back in the 1990s with new turbines, diminished regulation, and the vastly improved fracking technology.
Now, electricity is again a place of excitement. I have been to four important electricity conferences lately, and the word I hear everywhere about the challenges of the electricity future is “exciting.”
James Amato, vice president of Burns & McDonnell, a Kansas City, Mo.-based engineering, construction, and architecture firm that is heavily involved in all phases of the electric infrastructure, told me during an interview for the television program White House Chronicle that this is the most exciting time in supplying electricity since Thomas Edison set the whole thing in motion.
The industry, Amato explained, was in a state of complete reinvention. It must move off coal into renewables and prepare for a doubling or more of electricity demand by mid-century.
However, he also told me, “There is a major supply problem with engineers.” The colleges and universities aren’t producing enough of them, and not enough quality engineers — and he emphasized quality — are looking toward the ongoing electric revolution, which, to those involved in it, is so exhilarating and the place to be.
This problem is compounded by a wave of age retirements that is hitting the industry.
I believe that the electricity-supply system became a taken-for-granted undertaking and that talented engineers sought the glamor of the computer and defense industries.
Now, the big engineering companies are out to tell engineering school graduates that the big excitement is working on the world’s biggest machine: the U.S. electric supply system.
My late friend Ben Wattenberg, demographer, essayist, presidential speechwriter, television personality, and strategic thinker, hosted an important PBS documentary film and co-wrote a companion book, The First Measured Century: The Other Way of Looking at American History. He showed how our ability to measure changed public policy as we learned exactly about the distribution of people and who they were. Also, how we could measure things down to parts per billion in, say, water.
In my view, this is set to be the first engineered century, in tandem with being the first fully electric century. We are moving toward a new level of dependence on electricity and the myriad systems that support it. From the moment we wake, we are using electricity, and even as we sleep, electricity controls the temperature and time for us.
The new need to reduce carbon entering the atmosphere is to electrify almost everything else, primary transportation — from cars to commercial vehicles and eventually trains — but also heavy industrial uses, such as making steel and cement.
Amato said there is not only a shortage of college-educated engineers needed on the frontlines of the electric revolution but also a shortage of competent technicians or those trained in the crafts that support engineering. These are people who wield the tools, artisans across the board. In the electric utilities, there is also a need for line workers, a job that offers security, retirement, and esprit.
In the 1960s, the big engineering adventure was the space race. Today, it is the stuff that powers your coffeemaker in the morning, your cup of joe, or, you might say, your jolt of electrons.
On Twitter: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS, and is based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.
Editor’s note: Readers should read about this Massachusetts-based company.
Llewellyn King: Memories of people I knew from the Manhattan Project; beautiful "Barbie'
Important sites in the Manhattan Project. Alamogordo is where the first atomic bomb was detonated, on July 16, 1945. The map would have been better if it had included the site of uranium 238 refining for the project by Metal Hydrides Inc., in Beverly, Mass.
Edward Teller’s (1908-2003) badge photo at the Manhattan Project’s Los Alamos, N.H., facility. Called “The Father of the Hydrogen Bomb,’’ he was seen as an inspiration for the eponymous scientist in Stanley Kubrick’s classic 1964 black comedy Dr. Strangelove.
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
I have been to the movies. I haven’t done that since before the COVID shutdown.
I went to see two huge movies that have each grossed $1 billion so far, and I enjoyed them enormously. They are, of course, Barbie and Oppenheimer.
I went to see Barbie because I thought I should know what people were discussing. I went to see Oppenheimer because, in a sense, I have skin in that game. I knew a few people who worked on the Manhattan Project, and two of them were characterized in the movie: Hans Bethe and Edward Teller, known as the father of the hydrogen bomb.
About Barbie: It is a fantasy romp filled with popular, real-life messages. I had to see how director Greta Gerwig would make an adult movie about a doll, albeit a storied one — with brilliant imagination is how.
Oppenheimer, by contrast, is a major cinematic work, a remarkable recapturing of history and character development on the screen. Christopher Nolan is a director at the top of his game. He deserves a comparison with Orson Welles and David Lean.
Across the board, it is a triumph, compelling and true to the facts and the personalities. The evocative recreation of Los Alamos as it must have been, of the tower from which the first nuclear device was detonated, rings true. I have crawled all over the nuclear-test site and spent many hours at Los Alamos, where I used to give an annual lecture on energy or the relationship of humans to science.
In November 1975, Bethe and another veteran of the Manhattan Project, Ralph Lapp, and I put together a panel of 24 Nobel laureates (including Bethe) to defend civilian nuclear power. We got them all together on a stage at the National Press Club, in Washington. I had hoped that it would be a seminal event, ending some of the nonsense being spread about nuclear radiation.
Ralph Nader took up arms against us and assembled 36 Nobel laureates who were cool to nuclear. Ours were physicists, engineers and mathematicians who had a vast understanding of nuclear and endorsed it enthusiastically.
We didn’t win. Bethe, as I recall, was philosophical about being trounced.
I first met Teller in Geneva. I was to introduce him at a conference, and we had breakfast together. He seemed distracted and confused. But he was in top form when he spoke.
Later, I got to know him better. He gave a series of speeches for conferences I had organized on the Strategic Defense Initiative — colloquially known as Star Wars. He often sat slumped in his chair, clutching his enormous walking stick. But he stood erect on the podium, arguing vigorously the case for Ronald Reagan’s program.
The Oppenheimer movie reminded me of two institutions I covered intensely as a reporter: the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and its congressional overseer, the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy.
The committee was supposed to check the AEC. The AEC was a tool of the powerful and wildly pro-nuclear committee — the only joint committee empowered to introduce legislation in both houses of Congress. The reality of that partnership was that the committee proposed and the AEC disposed.
The movie is extraordinary in capturing the workings of Congress and how a nod or a smile can put great events in motion.
This understanding of the nuances and mores of Washington, and particularly the arcane theatricality of the congressional hearings, is accurate in ways seldom captured on film. This is more surprising given that the director is an Englishman who lives a very private life in Los Angeles.
I leave it to sociologists to ponder how two movies as different as Barbie and Oppenheimer could open simultaneously, becoming huge hits. If you see these movies, especially Oppenheimer, see them in the theater. They deserve that big-screen and wraparound-sound environment.
On Twitter: @llewellynking2
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS.
White House Chronicle
Llewellyn King: Wherein we go cruising for out-of-control tourism
Costa Mediterranea in Argostoli, Greece
— Photo by Kefalonia2015
Huge cruise ship at Bar Harbor, Maine. Cruise ships are increasingly irritating many locals in famous tourist spots in New England in the cruise lines’ May-October season.
Europe reeled this summer from heat, wildfires, migrants and worries about Russia’s war in Ukraine, but also from too much tourism. I know, I was part of the problem.
Tourism is the quick economic fix for poor nations, but it is also important to rich ones — until both get too much of it.
The places everyone wants to visit, often places on bucket lists, are choking on their success. Paris, Britain’s Stonehenge and the Lake District, Ireland’s Ring of Kerry and the jewels of Italy, Florence and Venice, all suffer summer overload.
Things were so bad in Venice this summer that cruise ships had to be waived off. The Greek islands of Santorini, Corfu and Mykonos were, likewise, inundated with cruisers and other tourists.
Yet tourism is vital to many economies. The emerging tourist destinations along Croatia’s Dalmatian Coast are the latest to feel the benefits and problems of tourism. The sites, the roads and the facilities are stretched, but tourism has meant economic well-being for the region, especially as cruise ships have started calling.
Cruise ships, those big – and becoming gigantic — floating palaces overwhelm ports when they anchor, burden infrastructure and deposit lots of lovely money.
Greece and many countries along the Adriatic Sea derive about 25 percent of their GDP from tourism, not the least of it from cruise ships. Cruise ships are very important to any shore community that has ancient ruins, historical and scenic cities, natural wonders — and the Balkan countries have all in abundance.
In early August, my wife and I cruised the Dalmatian Coast and Greek islands. When we booked the cruise, at the last minute, we were fully aware of the tourist pressure on Europe every summer, but learned that it is getting worse.
Most of the Dalmatian Coast is still visitable in summer and hugely rewarding, except for Dubrovnik, which we skipped. It is, I learned, showing stress from over-tourism. The full impact of the cruise ships hasn’t yet begun to wear on the small coastal towns, as it has on the most famous Greek islands.
You can’t pick a Greek islands itinerary in the summer that will avoid seeing too many cruise ships, carrying 2,500 and up passengers, arriving at the same destination at the same time.
Fira, on Santorini, is a fabulous cliff town, except when there are too many visitors going ashore from a flotilla of cruise ships anchored in the harbor.
Five cruise ships arrived at Fira simultaneously, ours among them, and untold thousands of tourists went ashore. To reach the charming town, you must ride a donkey or a cable car. My wife and I love donkeys, so we opted for the cable car. It was chaotic, verging on dangerous. Extraordinarily, the crowds waiting for hours to board the cable cars were well-behaved: no pushing, no audible outrage, just resigned queuing.
Lest you think cruise ships are filled only with Americans, cruising has become a global passion.
Cruisers see the world from the comfort and security of a very large, well-organized hotel that moves with them. They see so much more and take their selfies in so many more places than they could otherwise.
Cruising is big business, and the size of the ship seems not to deter anyone.
Royal Caribbean is about to add its Icon class: They will carry up to 7,000 passengers and 3,000 crew. To merchants and tax collectors they are golden galleons as the visitors spend their doubloons on tours, trinkets, meals and tips.
But over-tourism degrades the picturesque ports, cherished villages, and great structures of the past.
When I see a cruise ship, towering over a town from where history was born, I think: The barbarians arrive in shorts, clutching cameras and cell phones. I may be one of them, but I shall endeavor to avoid high summer in the future.
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.
Llewellyn King: We get bad politicians because running for office has become so ghastly
“The Demagogue,’’ by Jose Clemente Orozco
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
I am often asked why in a country of such talent and imagination the U.S. political class is so feeble. Why are our politicians so uninspiring, to say nothing of ignorant and oafish.
The short answer is because political life is awful and potential candidates have to weigh the impact on their families, plus the wear and tear of becoming a candidate, let alone winning.
I would name three barriers that keep good people out of politics: the money, the primary system and the media scrutiny.
Taking these in order, you must have access to enormous funding to be a candidate. Jefferson Smith, the character in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, the 1939 movie starring James Stewart, was appointed to a Senate seat. He didn’t have to subject his rectitude to the electoral process.
A candidate for Congress must get substantial funding from the outset and be prepared to spend much of his or her career raising money, which frequently means bending your judgment to the will of donors. Yes, Mr. Smith, to some extent the system is inherently corrupt.
I asked a major political consultant what he asks a candidate before going to work for him or her. First is money: Do you have your own or can you raise it? Second is skeletons in the closet: Have you been arrested for indecent exposure, drunk-driving or other offenses?
Finally, the consultant told me, he asks a candidate: What do you stand for. In short, the mechanisms of politics trump principle. A member of the House once told me that he spent much of his time meeting with donors and attending fundraisers. “You’ve got to do it,” he said.
In the days of the smoke-filled rooms – there really was a lot of smoke -- the party, the professionals, prevailed. In the primary-based system, the odds are on those who are extreme and appeal to the fringes of their party ideology. The party doesn’t shape today’s candidates, they shape the party.
Look at the Republicans, little recognizable from the party of old; the party which was held in check by moderate New England stalwarts. Or look at the way the Democrats fight to avoid falling into the chasm of the far left. Once the Democrats were held in check by labor, which gave the party an institutional center.
On the face of it, the primary system favors grassroots democracy and the individual. In fact, it favors those with rich friends, who will cough up.
Finally, there is the media scrutiny. If you want to run for office, you become a public plaything. Everything you ever wrote or said can and will be dredged up. Opposition-research operatives will interview old lovers; check on what you wrote in the school yearbook; rake through your social-media posts, and look for that unfortunate slip of the tongue in a local television interview years ago will be reprised on the evening news. You have a target on your back, and it will be there every day you are in office.
This delving into every corner of a life is a huge barrier that keeps a lot of talent out of politics. Anyone who has ever had a disputed business dealing, a DUI arrest (not even a conviction) or a messy divorce is advised to forego a political career, no matter how talented and how much real expertise Mr. Smith might bring to the state house or Congress.
Run for political office and you put your family at risk, your private life on display and, having been hung out to dry, you may not even win.
These are some of the factors that might explain why the Congress is so risible and why such outrageously fringy people now occupy high office.
Having observed politics on three continents, I firmly believe that it needs strong institutions in the form of local political associations and party structure, and that candidates should be judged on the body of their work, not on a slip of the tongue or an indiscretion.
However, the selection of candidates is always a hard call. If parties have too much control over the system, party hacks are favored and new, quality candidates are shut out.
If primaries continue as they have, the fringes triumph. Just look at the Congress — a smorgasbord of wackiness.
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.
Llewellyn King: Smoke spreads amidst global warming but beware overzealous regulation
Smoke from Canadian forest fires in the Delaware River Valley. See New England’s “Dark Day’’.
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
The smoke from wildfires in Canada that has been blown down to the United States, choking New York City and Philadelphia with their worst air quality in history and blanketing much of the East Coast and the Midwest, may be a harbinger for a long, hot, difficult summer across America.
It could easily be the summer when the environmental crisis, so easily dismissed as a preoccupation of “woke’’ Greens and the Biden administration, moves to center stage. It could be when America, in a sense, takes fright. When we realize that global warming is not a will-or-won’t-it-happen issue like Y2K at the turn of the century.
Instead, it is here and now, and it will almost immediately start dictating living and working patterns.
In an extraordinary move, Arizona has limited the growth in some subdivisions in Phoenix. The problem: not enough water. Not just now but going forward.
The floods and the refreshing of surface impoundments, such as Lake Mead and Lake Powell, the nation’s largest reservoirs, haven’t solved the crisis.
All along the flow of the Colorado River, aquifers remain seriously depleted. One good, rainy season, one good snowpack may recharge a dam, but it doesn’t replenish the aquifers that hydrologists say have been undergoing systematic depletion for years.
An aquifer isn’t just an underground river that runs normally after rainfall. It takes years to recharge these great groundwater systems. These have been paying the price of overuse for years; across Texas and all the way to the Imperial Valley, in California, unseen damage has been done.
It isn’t just water that looms as a crisis for much of the nation, there is also the sheer unpredictably of the weather.
I talk regularly with electric- and gas-utility company executives. When I ask them what keeps them awake at night, they used to respond, “Cybersecurity.” Recently, they have said, “The weather.”
This year, we are entering the tropical-storm season with unusually warm ocean temperatures in the Atlantic and the Pacific. The doleful conclusion is that these will signal severe and very damaging weather activity across the country.
The utilities have been hardening their systems, but electricity is uniquely affected by weather. The dangers for the electricity industry are multiple and all affect their customers. Too much heat and the air-conditioning load gets too high. Too much wind and power lines come down. Too much rain and substations flood, poles snap and there is crisis, from a neighborhood to a region.
In the electricity world, the words of John Donne, the 16th-Century English metaphysical poet, apply, “No man is an island entire of itself.”
There is another threat that the electricity-supply system will face this summer if the weather is chaotic: overzealous politics and regulation.
It is the electric utilities that are most identified in the public mind with climate change. The public discounts the myriad industrial processes as well as the cars, trucks, bulldozers, trains and ships that lead to the discharge of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Instead, it is utilities that have a target pinned to them.
A bad summer will lead to bad regulatory and bad political decisions regarding utilities.
Foremost are likely to be new attacks on natural gas and its supply chain, from the well, through the pipes, into the compressed storage, and ultimately to combustion turbines.
At this time, natural gas – about 60-percent cleaner than coal — is vital to keeping the lights on and the nation running when the wind isn’t blowing, or the sun has set or is obscured.
The energy crisis that broke out in the fall of 1973, and lasted pretty well to the mid-1980s, was characterized by silly over-reactions. First among these was probably the Fuel Use Act of 1978, which got rid of pitot lights on gas stoves and even threatened the eternal flame at Arlington Cemetery.
It also accelerated the flight to coal because, extraordinarily, that was the time of the greatest opposition to nuclear power — from the environmental communities.
This summer may be a wakeup for climate change and how we husband our resources. But wild overreaction won’t quiet the weather.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS, and a long-time editor, writer and consultant in the international energy sector. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com, and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.
#global warming #Llewellyn King #electric utilities
Llewellyn King: Investing in a green future that works
Fonio is an African sustainable “supergrain.’’
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
Adam Smith, the great Scottish economist and moral philosopher, didn’t have to confront the environmental crisis, the health-care delivery challenge or any of today’s issues. But his economic theory and moral philosophy — his unseen hand — are as pertinent today as they were in his lifetime.
Notably, Smith believed market forces were a force for good and a force for simply getting things done, acting.
A cardinal virtue of the market at work is discipline. Respect for the bottom line works wonders in producing discipline and results, even in the green economy that places a premium on sustainability.
And it is why Pegasus Capital Advisors, the fast-growing, impact investment firm based in Stamford, Conn., is having so much success in Africa, the Caribbean and South America, and Southeast Asia. In all, Pegasus is exploring investments in more than 40 countries.
An investment by Pegasus, under its ebullient founder, chairman and CEO, Craig Cogut, must make money and meet other strict criteria. It must help — and maybe save — the local environment. It must benefit local people with employment at decent wages. And it must have a long future of social and economic benefit.
And Pegasus always looks for a strong local partner.
In Africa, Cogut told me, the growing of sustainable crops should be wedded to cold storage and processing, which should be local. He has invested in a marketer of fonio, an African “supergrain.”
“Agriculture and fishing are important sources of food in the global south, but they get shipped out and they need to stay local,” Cogut said.
“In Ecuador, we’re focused on sustainable fishing and shrimp farming,” he said, adding, “Shrimp is an amazing source of protein, but you have to do it in an environmentally correct way.”
Cogut has two passions, and they are where he directs investments: the environment, and health and wellness.
A Harvard-trained lawyer, Cogut took his first job with a law firm in Los Angeles. He became an environmentalist while living there and visiting the nearby National Parks frequently. To this day, watching birds while hiking on Audubon Society trails in Connecticut, where he lives, is his passion.
He learned the art of big deals while working with the investment bank Drexel Burnham Lambert during its heyday. When it folded, in 1990, Cogut became one of the founding partners of Apollo Advisors, the wildly successful private-equity firm. After leaving Apollo, in 1996, he founded Pegasus, the private-equity firm that is making a difference.
A Pegasus success is Six Senses, which manages eco hotels and resorts with sensitivity to the environment. Pegasus sold Six Senses to IHG in 2019 and is currently partnering with IHG to develop new Six Senses resorts, including an eco-hotel on one of the Galapagos islands.
“We have been working with the Ecuadorian national park system to replicate what was there before Darwin’s time,” Cogut said.
Another previous Pegasus investment has restored a biodiesel plant in Lima, Peru. This plant, which has been sold, provides diesel fuel, produced from food waste and agricultural waste. “It is now helping the Peruvian government reach its environmental goals,” he said.
Off the coast of Nigeria, Cogut was appalled by natural-gas flaring, done in association with oil production. He personally invested in a company to capture the gas and convert it to liquefied natural gas, which is now used to displace diesel in electricity generation — much better for human health and the environment.
After his original investment, a large African infrastructure investor has become the majority owner. This is Cogut’s win-win, where sustainability and commerce come together.
I had a disagreement over how to help Africa’s economy with Britain’s chancellor of the exchequer, Gordon Brown, shortly before he became prime minister. He was trying to raise $50 billion for Africa. I asked Brown how it would be invested so that it would achieve real, positive results. He said, rather unconvincingly, “We’ll give it to the right people.”
If that encounter had taken place today, I would have been able to say, “Call Pegasus. Craig Cogut is the man who can help you.”
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.
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Stamford , above, has miles of accessible shoreline for recreation and much parkland.
— Photo by John9474 #Pegasus Capitol Advisors
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Llewellyn King: Pray tell, Oracle, how we get out of this
“Consulting the Oracle,’’ by John William Waterhouse (1849-1917)
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
When the ancient Greeks wanted to learn what their future held, they would consult with oracles. Alexander the Great, for one, visited the Oracle at Siwa, an oasis in the Egyptian desert. According to his biographer, Plutarch, the oracle told Alexander that he was destined to conquer the world.
In these tumultuous days when we, the electorate are offered a choice between an old, old president and his daffy vice president and a slightly less old vengeful reprobate with a persecution complex, I did the smart thing: I consulted the oracle.
No, I didn’t cross the desert on a camel, nor as Alexander did on his much-loved horse, Bucephalus, nor in a snazzy BMW SUV.
I did go to the oracle of the day, which is the only place I know to seek and get what seems to be extraterrestrial advice: the Bing AI. I asked the oracle several questions and got some interesting answers.
When it came to the big question, I beseeched the Bing AI, “Great Oracle, I am an American voter, and I am in an awful tizzy. I don’t know whom to support in the next presidential election.
“It seems to me that one candidate, President Joe Biden, a decent man, may be too old to navigate the difficult waters ahead in domestic and international affairs.
“As for another candidate, former President Donald Trump, many people find aspects of his conduct reprehensible.
“What to do? For me, this is even harder because I am a columnist and television commentator, and I need to have something to say. I am sure you understand, Great Oracle.”
Well, the Bing AI, clammed up: It delivered only the formal histories of both men.
I had thought my question would spark a revelation, a wise analysis, or a contradiction of my view of the candidates. Clearly, I shall have to wait for the day when I get into real AI chat: ChatGPT.
Mostly, I had thought that the oracle would tell me that all the presidential hopefuls so far will be toast by November 2024; that new candidates will bring us hope, fire up party enthusiasm and let rip.
Are new faces and new choices too much to hope for?
Republicans are wrestling with their prospective candidate after his latest character stain: He has been found liable for defamation and sexual abuse in a civil trial. What does this mean for the whole issue of what we look for in the character of candidates? Rectitude was once considered essential. Not for Trump. Post-Trump is post-rectitude.
Just under 70 percent of the electorate have told pollsters that they think Biden is too old to run for re-election. That isn’t, I submit, a conclusion arrived at by pondering what it means to be 80. That is a conclusion, again I submit, they have come to by looking at the president on TV — on the few occasions they see him there.
Clearly, he doesn’t have the strength or the confidence to hold a press conference. These are vital.
In America, the press conference is the nearest thing we have to question time in the British House of Commons. It is the time of accounting. Biden is behind in his accounting as audited by the press corps.
Harold Meyerson, editor at large of The American Prospect, is avowedly liberal. He is one of the most skillful political writers working today; deft, informed, convincing, and you know where he stands. He stands with the Democrats.
So, it is significant when he raises a question about Biden and when he draws attention, as he did on May 9, to Biden’s absence from public engagement.
Meyerson wrote, “Right now, the Democrats are drifting uneasily toward a waterfall and hoping Biden can somehow navigate the looming turbulence. By autumn, if he hasn’t had some measurable success in … allaying much of the public’s fears of a president drifting into senescence, then some prominent Democrat (a category that doesn’t include Robert Kennedy Jr. or Marianne Williamson) had damn well better enter the race.”
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.
The Centerville Mill, in West Warwick