White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

How the Special Relationship Became the Odd Couple

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Through two world wars, it has been the special relationship: the linkage between the United States and Britain. It is a linkage forged in a common language, a common culture, a common history and a common aspiration to peace and prosperity.

The relationship, always strong, was burnished by President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

Now it looks as though the special relationship has morphed into the odd couple.

Britain, it can be argued, went off the rails in 2016 when, by a narrow majority, it voted to pull out of the European Union.

With a negative growth rate, and few prospects of an economic spurt, Britons can now ponder the high price of chauvinism and the vague comfort of untrammeled sovereignty. Americans could ponder that, too, in the decades ahead.

Will tariffs — which have already driven China, Russia and India into a kind of who-needs-America bloc — be the United States’ equivalent of Brexit? This economic idea doesn’t work but has emotional appeal; it is isolating, confining and antagonizing.

A common thread in the national dialogues is immigration.

Britain is swamped. It is dealing with an invasion of migrants that has changed and continues to change the country.

In 2023, according to the U.K. Office for National Statistics, 1.326 million migrants moved to Britain; last year, the number was 948,000. There has been a steady flow of migrants over the past 50 years, but it has increased dramatically due to wars around the globe.

Among European countries, Britain, to its cost, has had the best record for assimilating new arrivals. It is a migrant heaven, but that is changing with immigrants being blamed for a rash of domestic problems, from housing shortages to vastly increased crime.

In the 1960s, Britain had very little violent crime and street crime was slight. Now crime of all kinds — especially using knives — is rampant, and British cities rival those across America — although crime seems to be declining in America, while it is rising in Britain.

Britain has a would-be Donald Trump: Nigel Farage, leader of the Reform U.K. party, which is immigrant-hostile and seeks to return Britain to the country it was before migrants started crossing the English Channel, often in small boats.

Farage has been feted by conservatives in Congress, where he has been railing against the draconian British hate-speech laws, which he sees as woke in overdrive.

Britain has been averaging 30 arrests a day for hate speech and related hate crimes, few of which result in convictions.

Two recent events highlight the severity of these laws. Lucy Connolly, the 42-year-old wife of a conservative local politician, took issue with the practice of housing immigrants in hotels; she said the hotels should be burned down. Connolly was sentenced to 31 months in jail. She has been released, after serving 40% of her sentence.

A very successful Irish comedy writer for British television, Graham Linehan, posted attacks on transgender women on X. On Sept. 1, after a flight from Arizona, he was met by five armed police officers and arrested at London’s Heathrow Airport.

Britain’s hate laws, which are among the most severe in the world, run counter to a long tradition of free speech, dating back to the Magna Carta in 1215. An attempt to get more social justice has resulted in less justice and abridged the right to speak out. It’s a crisis in a country without a formal constitution.

On Sept. 17, Trump is due to begin a state visit to Britain. Fireworks are expected. Trump’s British supporters, despite Farage and his hard-right party, are still few and public antipathy is strong.

Trump, for his part, will seek to make his visit a kind of triumphal event, gilded with overnight posts on Truth Social on how Britain should emulate him.

The British press will be ready with vituperative rebukes; hate speech be damned.

It is unlikely that the Labor government, whose membership is as diverse and divided as that of the Democratic Party, will find anything to call hate speech about attacks on Trump. A good dust-up will be enjoyed by all.

Isolated, the odd couple have each other.

The Shady, Sometimes Wacky World of State Secrets and Security Clearances

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Beware: Classified documents don’t always hide state secrets, and security clearances are used as tools of manipulation and vengeance.

Before Xerox, if you wanted to keep a copy of something, you had to type it with a carbon sheet backing every page.

In 1969, I was commissioned by a long-gone consultancy, the Arctic Company, to write a paper on the use of hovercraft by the military, especially the infantry.

They were offering $500 for the job and, like most reporters, I was keen for the income, so I signed up.

It was a time when it was believed that hovercraft — vehicles that cover the ground on a cushion of air — would be widely deployed.

I had no great insight into the vehicles or how they might be used as chariots of war. But I did have a lively imagination and access to The Washington Post library. I gorged on newspaper clippings and wrote my commissioned piece.

After it had been accepted, and I was told by the company that the army was “very pleased” with it, I forgot about it.

Then someone unrelated asked if they could see it out of curiosity. I said I didn’t have a copy, but I had been told that it had been mimeographed and widely distributed in the Pentagon.

I asked the Arctic Company for a copy, and they referred me to the appropriate office in the Pentagon. I was rebuffed. They said that it was classified and I could only see it if I had security clearance.

The Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, which controlled the nuclear establishment, military and civilian, used classification and security clearances to keep other members of Congress and the press out of its business; it regarded itself as the only responsible custodian of the nation’s nuclear secrets.

I was told that they were so classification-obsessed they couldn’t discuss the contents of the papers they had assembled to discuss because they were marked “Eyes Only.”

When James Schlesinger became chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission in August 1971, he set about overhauling the classification of documents.

I was close to Schlesinger, and he told me that he thought more than half of the AEC documents shouldn’t be classified, and he set about declassifying them. His argument: If you classify the trivial, all classification is degraded.

Dixy Lee Ray, the last chair of the AEC, became a friend of mine. I invited her to dinner at the venerable Red Fox Inn & Tavern in Middleburg, Virginia, established in 1728. It is a pleasant place to dine and claims to be the oldest continuously operating inn in America.

Ray went everywhere with her two dogs (Ghillie, a Scottish Deerhound, and Jacques, a miniature poodle), and they were in her limousine wherever she went. The car also contained — as I am sure the secretary of energy’s car does today — the hotline that would be part of the launch procedure, in the event a nuclear attack was ordered by the president.

In her briefcase, Ray had an innocuous study she had wanted to give to me.

It was a blustery night, and her driver was waiting in the car in the parking lot with her briefcase on the back seat and both dogs on the front seat.

The moment Ray opened the rear door, two things happened: A great gust of wind arose and Ghillie leapt from the front seat to the back seat, upsetting the briefcase. Crisis!

All the papers in the briefcase, many of them marked with the big red X of classified documents, blew all over the parking lot.

The three of us, in panic mode, set about scouring the bushes for them in the dark, fearing that someone would find one of them and, so to speak, the jig would be up. We could imagine the headlines.

After an hour’s search, we figured we had gathered all the papers, and Ray did an inventory. Nonetheless, the next morning I drove out from Washington to make sure no nuclear secret was impaled on a bush branch.

From the time when J. Robert Oppenheimer lost his security clearance under murky circumstances, these have been used as a tool of manipulation and vengeance.

If a scientist or a manager loses their clearance, they can appeal in a long, difficult and expensive process. Even if the victim appeals, the damage is done; the subject is damaged goods, publicly humiliated as morally deficient and untrustworthy.

The Case for Prescribed Burning: Fighting Fire With Fire

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Wildfire takes no prisoners, has no mercy, knows no boundaries, respects no nation and is a clear and present danger this and every summer as summers grow drier and hotter.

The American West is burning; across Canada there are wildfires; and swaths of France, Spain, Portugal and Greece are ablaze. In 2022, faraway Siberia was ablaze.

California bears the scars of where wildfires and humans have collided and the humans and their homes have lost, recently and devastatingly in Los Angeles’ Pacific Palisades neighborhood. Experts say that even in the formerly moist East, conditions for wildfire are growing.

The damage to lives and livelihoods here and abroad is beyond calculation.

Olive oil and wine from Europe will be more expensive this year because so many trees and vines have burned. Humankind’s ancient enemy stalks the world: irrational, brutal and very hard to stop.

One of the largest U.S. electric utilities, Pacific Gas and Electric, facing an estimated $30 billion in liabilities from 2017 and 2018 wildfires believed to have been caused by their equipment, filed for bankruptcy protection in 2019. Utilities have been on the forefront of wildfire suppression because some fires are started by sparking from overhead lines.

An army of people and technology is deployed in the United States to fight wildfires and still it comes up short; these tools include AI and drones, aircraft and, of course, the indefatigable but inevitably limited intervention of firefighters on the ground.

There is an additional tool: Fighting fire with fire with so-called prescribed burning or controlled burning.

I learned about this technique from J. Morgan Varner, director of research and senior scientist at Tall Timbers in Tallahassee, Florida.

For 60 years, Tall Timbers, a nonprofit group, has been doing prescribed burning — the controlled application of fire to a specific area of land to achieve defined management objectives — in southern Georgia and northern Florida. Now their expertise on this traditional and effective tool for maintaining ecosystems and reducing wildfire risks is widely sought.

Even so, Varner said, the technique has its critics, mostly from those who have sought to suppress or avoid fire as the first line of defense.

Varner explained that this has led to decades of fuel (made up of dead trees and vegetation) accumulation on forest floors. When this burns, it burns with great heat and destroys everything; in a prescribed burn, the damage is less severe and more of a forest’s natural infrastructure survives.

I didn’t see a burn in progress, but I did see the aftermath of one on a hunting estate in southern Georgia, where the landlord worked with Tall Timbers. There was a strong smell of burning and some residual smoldering logs, but the land was ready for natural rejuvenation.

The idea is that with careful burning, the land is returned to its natural rhythm. This region of Georgia along the Florida border, known as the Red Hills, has seen controlled burning for a long time, and the forests and the wildlife are both healthy.

Wildlife is one of the concerns about deliberate burning, but Varner says animals are naturally fire sensitive and very adept at getting out of the way.

A prescribed burn is a carefully managed event. Conditions must be exactly right: wind, humidity, the nature of the vegetation and the amount of fuel on the ground.

Varner says that the ideal burn area is 40 acres, and burning is done in the spring or the fall, not in the summer heat. A team of experts surveys the area of the burn and calculates the behavior of the fire before ignition.

Although prescribed burning has ancient history and a lot of scientific evidence supporting it, it isn’t everyone’s solution. I asked the president of a West Coast utility about using it and got a curt reply: “No way.”

Looking at a beautiful stand of trees, I find it hard to imagine deliberately setting it alight. However, I am convinced that fire has to be used to fight fire and that periodically in nature there is wildfire, and it is part of a natural cycle. I’m beginning to take note of the dead trees among the living ones.

If summers get even hotter and drier, more radical solutions to fire will have to be employed, including fire.

Will AI Stimulate Shadow Government?

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“This Time It’s Different” is the title of a book by Omar Hatamleh on the impact of artificial intelligence on everything.

Hatamleh, who is NASA Goddard Space Flight Center’s chief artificial intelligence officer, means that we shouldn’t look to previous technological revolutions to understand the scope and the totality of the AI revolution. It is, he believes, bigger and more transformative than anything that has yet happened.

He says AI is exponential and human thinking is linear. I think that means we can’t get our minds around it.

Jeffrey Cole, director of the Center for the Digital Future at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, echoes Hatamleh.

Cole believes that AI will be as impactful as the printing press, the internet and COVID-19. He also believes 2027 will be a seminal year: a year in which AI will batter the workforce, particularly white-collar workers.

For journalists, AI presents two challenges: jobs lost to AI writing and editing, and the loss of truth. How can we identify AI-generated misinformation? The New York Times said simply: We can’t.

But I am more optimistic.

I have been reporting on AI since well before ChatGPT launched in November 2022. Eventually, I think AI will be able to control itself, to red flag its own excesses and those who are abusing it with fake information.

I base this rather outlandish conclusion on the idea that AI has a near-human dimension which it gets from absorbing all published human knowledge and that knowledge is full of discipline, morals and strictures. Surely, these are also absorbed in the neural networks.

I have tested this concept on AI savants across the spectrum for several years. They all had the same response: It is a great question.

Besides its trumpeted use in advancing medicine at warp speed, AI could become more useful in providing truth where it has been concealed by political skullduggery or phony research.

Consider the general apprehension that President Donald Trump may order the Bureau of Labor Statistics to cook the books.

Well, aficionados in the world of national security and AI tell me that AI could easily scour all available data on employment, job vacancies and inflation and presto: reliable numbers. The key, USC’s Cole emphasizes, is inputting complete prompts.

In other words, AI could check the data put out by the government. That leads to the possibility of a kind of AI shadow government, revealing falsehoods and correcting speculation.

If AI poses a huge possibility for misinformation, it also must have within it the ability to verify truth, to set the record straight, to be a gargantuan fact-checker.

It could be a truth central for the government, immune to insults, out of the reach of the FBI, ICE or the Justice Department — and, above all, a truth-speaking force that won’t be primaried.

The idea of shadow government isn’t confined to what might be done by AI but is already taking shape where DOGE-ing has left missions shattered, people distraught and sometimes an agency unable to perform. So, networks of resolute civil servants inside and outside government are working to preserve data, hide critical discoveries and keep vital research alive. This kind of shadow activity is taking place at the Agriculture, Commerce, Energy and Defense departments, the National Institutes of Health and those who interface with them in the research community.

In the wider world, job loss to AI — or if you want to be optimistic, job adjustment — has already begun. It will accelerate but can be absorbed once we recognize the need to reshape the workforce. Is it time to pick a new career or at least think about it?

The political class, all of it, is out to lunch. Instead of wrangling about social issues, it should be looking to the future, a future which has a new force. Much as automation was a force to be accommodated, this revolution can’t be legislated or regulated into submission, but it can be managed and prepared for. Like all great changes, it is redolent with possibility and fear.

Sorry, Europe Is Full, Tourists Are Told

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This was the summer when much of Europe said to the ever-increasing flow of tourists, “Sorry, we are full.”
Of course, Europe isn’t full at all. It is just those places that we all want to go, that have been tugging at our imaginations since we began imagining, are hopelessly crowded — and some are brutally hot as well.
The most overcrowded getaways are in southern Europe: Nice, in the legendary South of France; Barcelona, Spain; Italian coastal towns, especially Venice; the best-known Greek islands such as Mykonos, Hydra and Santorini. Along the Croatian coast, Dubrovnik and Split are crowded.
What is ugly outside and delightful inside? Answer: a cruise ship.
The sight of those multitiered behemoths squeezing into a port that was designed for something a lot more gainly reminds me of someone struggling into clothes they have far outgrown. It can be done, but it isn’t pretty.
You can’t blame everything on cruise ships. They aren’t to blame for the summer traffic jams in Britain’s Lake District or around the Cotswolds. They aren’t the reason you can’t get into the great museums of Europe in summer, such as the Louvre in Paris or the Churchill War Rooms in London.
But cruise ships have become a particular problem for much of coastal Europe and aren’t the kind of tourism locals want.
The Greek tourism minister, Olga Kefalogianni, explained it to me when I interviewed her a few years ago. She said that the cruise ships dump a lot of people who don’t spend enough time (i.e., money) ashore. They disembark a veritable army who take tours and are back on board for supper. The ships tend to sail at night to avoid overnight docking fees, and the locals get very little economic gain from the thousands upon thousands who arrive every summer.
She told me Greece was trying to get more of the restocking contracts and to have more of the ships homeport in the country.
For tourists, in general, she said: Avoid the famous sights, such as the Acropolis in Athens, in summer and try to visit in the spring and fall.
She said for Greece, where tourism is especially important, it is a delicate matter, urging tourists to go to the less-visited northern areas of the country.
A couple of summers ago, I was in Santorini when five cruise ships arrived simultaneously. It was ugly. There is a cable railway to get up to the pretty town of Fira, and it meant waiting — and fuming and cursing all of the other cruise ships.
A friend said he had to ride down from the cliffside town on a donkey in order to make his ship’s departure.
There are questions about cruising. Many of them involve a kind of travel snobbery. Some seemingly well-traveled people reject cruising. “I wouldn’t want to be stuck with all those people. Never,” a friend told me.
A large cruise ship with nearly 6,000 passengers and a crew of about 2,000 is, well, just about the size of many of the largest hotels. New York’s Waldorf Astoria had 1,400 rooms from the time of its construction in 1931 until it was gutted and rebuilt recently — and the number of rooms was greatly reduced. The largest hotels in Las Vegas, the Mirage and the Venetian, are the size of the largest ships.
The problem isn’t with the number of your fellow cruisers, but with the destination ports: The cruise ships have worn out their welcome in some places, not others.
My wife and I were hostile to cruising until we did it. That was in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea in the early 1990s and we saw places — such as Yalta, Odessa and Constantia — that we maybe wouldn’t have seen otherwise.
So, we formed a pattern of using cruising for exploration rather than sightseeing. We went through the Panama Canal when it came back into the news because we wanted to see it and know what it was like. We went around Cape Horn, seeing one of the ends-of-the-earth places, where so many mariners have died, from the comfort of a luxury liner.
That is bucket list-stuff, and I want more of it.

Trump Hostility To Wind And Solar Has Utilities Treading Softly

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This commentary was originally published in Forbes.

President Donald Trump reiterated his hostility to wind generation when he arrived in Scotland for what was ostensibly a private visit. “Stop the windmills,” he said.

But the world isn’t stopping its windmill development and neither is the United States, although it has become more difficult and has put U.S. electric utilities in an awkward position: It is a love that dare not speak its name, one might say.

Utilities love that wind and solar can provide inexpensive electricity, offsetting the high expense of battery storage.

It is believed that Trump’s well-documented animus to wind turbines is rooted in his golf resort in Balmedie, near Aberdeen, Scotland. In 2013, Trump attempted to prevent the construction of a small offshore wind farm — just 11 turbines — located roughly 2.2 miles from his Trump International Golf Links, but was ultimately unsuccessful. He argued that the wind farm would spoil views from his golf course and negatively impact tourism in the area.

Trump seemingly didn’t just take against the local authorities, but against wind in general and offshore wind in particular.

Yet fair winds are blowing in the world for renewables.

Francesco La Camera, director general of the International Renewable Energy Agency, an official United Nations observer, told me that in 2024, an astounding 92 percent of new global generation was from wind and solar, with solar leading wind in new generation. We spoke recently when La Camera was in New York.

My informal survey of U.S. utilities reveals they are pleased with the Trump administration’s efforts to simplify licensing and its push to natural gas, but they are also keen advocates of wind and solar.

Simply, wind is cheap and as battery storage improves, so does its usefulness. Likewise, solar. However, without the tax advantages that were in President Joe Biden’s signature climate bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, the numbers will change, but not enough to rule out renewables, the utilities tell me.

China leads the world in installed wind capacity of 561 gigawatts, followed by the United States with less than half that at 154 GW. The same goes for solar installations: China had 887 GW of solar capacity in 2024 and the United States had 239 GW.

China is also the largest manufacturer of electric vehicles. This gives it market advantage globally and environmental bragging rights, even though it is still building coal-fired plants.

While utilities applaud Trump’s easing of restrictions, which might speed the use of fossil fuels, they aren’t enthusiastic about installing new coal plants or encouraging new coal mines to open. Both, they believe, would become stranded assets.

Utilities and their trade associations have been slow to criticize the administration’s hostility to wind and solar, but they have been publicly cheering gas turbines.

However, gas isn’t an immediate solution to the urgent need for more power: There is a global shortage of gas turbines with waiting lists of five years and longer. So no matter how favorably utilities look on gas, new turbines, unless they are already on hand or have set delivery dates, may not arrive for many years.

Another problem for utilities is those states that have scheduled phasing out fossil fuels in a given number of years. That issue – a clash between federal policy and state law — hasn’t been settled.

In this environment, utilities are either biding their time or cautiously seeking alternatives.

For example, facing a virtual ban on new offshore wind farms, veteran journalist Robert Whitcomb wrote in his New England Diary that the New England utilities are looking to wind power from Canada, delivered by undersea cable. Whitcomb wrote a book, “Cape Wind: Money, Celebrity, Energy, Class, Politics and the Battle for Our Energy Future,” about offshore wind, published in 2007.

New England is starved of gas as there isn’t enough pipeline capacity to bring in more, so even if gas turbines were readily available, they wouldn’t be an option. New pipelines take financing, licensing in many jurisdictions, and face public hostility.

Emily Fisher, a former general counsel for the Edison Electric Institute, told me, “Five years is just a blink of an eye in utility planning.”

On July 7, Trump signed an executive order which states: “For too long the Federal Government has forced American taxpayers to subsidize expensive and unreliable sources like wind and solar.

“The proliferation of these projects displaces affordable, reliable, dispatchable domestic energy resources, compromises our electric grid, and denigrates the beauty of our Nation’s natural landscape.”

The U.S. Energy Information Administration puts electricity consumption growth at 2 percent nationwide. In parts of the nation, as in some Texas cities, it is 3 percent.

 

Notebook: Requiem for American Justice

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I have loads of my words to eat, a feast of kingly proportions.

I don’t know when I started, but it must have been back when I was traveling on the speaking circuit. It doesn’t matter.

This tale of getting it wrong starts in London, where I was asked to address a conference on investing in America. Most of the questions weren’t — as I imagined they would be — about investment and returns on it, or taxes, or the exportability of profits. Instead, the questions were about the U.S. legal system; how litigious we are and what that is like.

My response was that our courts are fair, there is less day-to-day litigation than you might think, and the courts can serve you as well as those who dispute your actions. I said, “Don’t be afraid of litigation. It could be your friend.”

Next stop: New Delhi. The question was how can we get more U.S. investment? My answer: Fix your courts. They are famous for how slow they are to reach a decision. Americans are used to predictable legal speed.

In Moscow, during the halcyon Mikhail Gorbachev days, I was asked about how to get U.S. companies to invest in Russia. My answer: Make sure the courts work fairly and, above all, are clear of politics.

In Ireland, I debated Martin McGuinness, the late IRA leader. It went well, despite my English accent. My contribution was to tell McGuinness that if there ever is a united Ireland, make sure the constitution doesn’t hide anything under the mat (I was thinking of slavery in America) and make sure the court system looks to that constitution, not to politics.

Why am I eating on my words? Why am I shoveling them down my throat by the (Imperial) bushel?

The front page of The Washington Post for July 18 tells the story: Three pieces there add up to up a requiem for American justice.

Exhibit 1, this headline: “In deadly raid DOJ eyes 1-day sentence.”

Exhibit 2: “Thousands here legally have 60 days to leave.”

Exhibit 3: “Brazil judge in Trump’s sights.”

Two of these shameful reports show that neither the judicial process nor the laws of the United States are sacrosanct anymore.

The third shows that the Trump administration not only doesn’t respect our own judicial processes, but also those of other countries.

The perversion of justice isn’t a domestic matter anymore.

******

The Trump budget cuts are moving through the system, like a virus. There are clusters of damage and some slow lower infection, but nonetheless are capable of inflicting severe harm.

I was reminded of this when at a Newport Classical Music Festival concert last week, the deputy chairman announced that they needed $40,000 to make up for the termination in National Endowment for the Humanities’ funding.

Now you could argue that Newport Classical will get by, and divine music will continue to echo through the Gilded Age mansions — known as “cottages” — without the government’s help.

But what about less-affluent places where concerts, plays and ramp-on for young people in the arts will be reduced or ended due to a lack of government support?

******

Some things take a long  time to invent.

Take cup holders in cars. No technology was needed but it wasn’t until the 1980s that a convenience store chain realized that their hot coffee needed a place of rest in cars.

They came up with a plastic device that hooked over a window. Okay unless you opened the window inadvertently, in which case the coffee or other liquid would land squarely in the customer’s lap. Ouch!

Detroit saw the possibilities and soon you were urged to buy an automobile based on how many drinks could be stowed safely in built-in cup holders during travel. Not to be outdone by Detroit, and all the other car manufacturers, recreational boats were next to secure drinks in holders.

One has to wonder why this wasn’t done in carriages or stagecoaches a long time before the automobile?

******

I flew from Rhode Island to Washington this week and I am writing this on my return trip on the train — unquestionably, a superior way of making this trip.

Of course, predictably, the plane was late, but I was feeling smugly superior. I had scored a first-class seat. My wife found me a first-class fare that was cheaper than coach. I think the term of art for this is: Go figure.

For my lucky break up front, I had nice service and a choice of protein bars or Biscoff cookies. For this people pay a lot of money?  Go figure.

How Crowdfunding Brought a New Wind Technology to Market

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A California company, Wind Harvest, is in high gear to change the dynamics of wind energy and to vastly improve the economics of wind farms. 

But the company wouldn’t be marketing to large energy users and wind farm operators today if it hadn’t used crowdfunding for its recent rounds of financing. Crowdfunding can get a startup over the hill.

Kevin Wolf, Wind Harvest co-founder and CEO, explained that developers of hardware face a double problem when it comes to financing: The banks won’t finance their customers’ projects until the technology has been certified and, in Wind Harvest’s case, dozens of their unique wind turbines have been operating for at least a year which requires money.

Wolf said, “It takes about two years to complete a ‘technology readiness level,’ unless a company is well-funded. Six months to have all the components arrive, six months to a year to install and fully test the prototype, and then another six months to complete the new design.” Meantime, a team of engineers and the bills have to be paid.

Venture capitalists have shown a decided disinclination to finance hardware, preferring computer-related software products, he said.

But with crowdfunding, often through a special-purpose company, thousands of individuals have become venture capitalists in companies like Wind Harvest. Many of those investors have hit it big. 

Two standout companies which grew into multi-billion dollar ones: Oculus VR and Peloton.

Oculus, the virtual reality technology company, used crowdfunding to raise $250,000 in 2012. Two years later, it was acquired by Facebook for $2 billion.

Peloton, the fitness company, started with crowdfunding of $307,000, achieved a valuation of $8.1 billion its initial public offering, and rose to astronomically high valuations during the Covid pandemic. It has now fallen back considerably, after many difficulties in the fitness industry.

Wind Harvest is essentially offering new infrastructure which, should it catch on, would give it a steady and fairly predictable path forward as both a wind turbine Original Equipment Manufacturer and as a renewable energy project developer.

The company’s product, trademarked as Wind Harvester, is a vertical-axis wind turbine (VAWT): The drive shaft and the electrical generator are aligned vertical to the ground. In traditional wind turbines, those components are horizontal to the ground. 

The most famous vertical-axis wind turbine is the Darrieus, named after a French engineer who patented it in 1926. It has an elegant, eggbeater shape almost like a fine outdoor sculpture. But it ran into problems with vibration and other technical drawbacks and wasn’t a commercial success.

At the outset of the energy crisis in 1973, Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico, one of the jewels in the crown of the national laboratory system, did considerable theoretical work on wind turbines, concentrating on vertical-axis designs. But when the research was moved to another laboratory, the horizontal-axis wind turbine (HAWT) became the focus.

The codes developed at Sandia are foundational to the Wind Harvest design. Wolf explained that the choice between VAWTs and HAWTs isn’t an either-or choice, except where wind shears are high and wind near the ground slows down. Then tall, horizontal-axis wind turbines have the advantage.

Wind Harvest turbines are designed to capture the wind on ridgelines, hills and mountain passes where wind funnels and accelerates turbines under the tall horizontal-axis turbines. VAWTs can take advantage of the powerful wind that swirls around near the ground. This turbulent wind at the surface is an unused resource now.

With the bottom of their blades between 25 feet and 50 feet off the ground and installed in pairs 3 feet apart from each, Wind Harvest turbines can double the output of electricity from a wind farm while still leaving enough clearance for agriculture, whether it is grazing animals or growing crops. So, add efficiency to the virtues of these turbines: better use of the wind resources, land and infrastructure. 

Thanks to crowdfunding in four tranches, Wind Harvest is now ready to go to market with utility scale installations.

Wolf listed these additional virtues for VAWTs: 

  • They can be entirely made in America. Right now their blades are extruded by Step-G in Germany.
  • They are designed to withstand the 180 mph wind gusts from a Category 5 hurricane.
  • Because they are short, they can use larger permanent magnet generators (PMGs) not made of rare earth magnets. For example, their PMGs can use ferrite magnets which are iron-based. 
  • Wind Harvest installations have a fatigue life of 75 years with maintenance and periodic refurbishment. Most turbines now in use must be replaced after about 25 years.

The first Wind Harvesters to be put into service are planned for a dredge spoil-created peninsula on St. Croix, the largest of the U.S. Virgin Islands, located in the Caribbean Sea. The entire output of the first phase of the project will be bought by the oil refinery adjacent to the project site and replace the burning of costly propane for generation.

Big ideas now have funding sources besides “Shark Tank,” venture capital, and the banks.

Notebook: Friends Who Share Friends Are the Nicest People

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I treasure the friends who share their friends. One of those friends, Virginia “Ginny” Hamill, has died. 

I met Ginny at The Washington Post in 1969, and we became forever-friends. 

Ginny had an admirable ascent from a teleprinter operator to an editor in The Washington Post/Los Angeles Times News Service. She was promoted again to the enviable job as the editor of the news service in London, where she bloomed — and met her future husband, John McCaughey.

Ginny brought wealth into my life — and later to that of my wife, Linda Gasparello — through the introductions to her friends from that London period. They included David Fishlock, science editor of the Financial Times; Roy Hodson, also of the FT; Deborah Waroff, an American journalist; and Guy Hawtin, a rakish newspaperman on his way to the New York Post.

They constituted what I called “The Set.” In London, New York and Washington, we worked at the journalism trade on many projects from newsletters to conferences and broadcasts. 

We also partied; it went with the territory.

I once wrote to Ginny and told her how instrumental she had been in all our lives through sharing her friends. I am glad I didn’t wait until obituary time to thank her for her generosity in friend-sharing.

******

I think for many, myself among them, it was a somber July 4. There are dark clouds crossing America’s sun. There are things aplenty going on that seem at odds with the American ideal, and the America we have known.

To me, the most egregious excess of the present is the way masked agents of the state grab men, women and children and deport them without due process, without observance of the cornerstone of law: habeas corpus. None are given a chance to show their legality, call family or, if they have one, a lawyer.

This war against the defenseless is wanton and cruel. 

The advocates of this activity, this snatch-and-deport policy, say, and have said it to me, “What do these people not understand about ‘illegal’?”

I say to these advocates, “What don’t you understand about want, need, fear, family, marriage, children and hope?”

The repression many fled from has reentered their luckless lives: terror at the hands of masked enforcers.

I have always advocated for controlled immigration. But the fact that it has been poorly managed shouldn’t be corrected post facto, often years after the offense of seeking a better life and without the consideration of contributions to society.

Elsewhere over this holiday, the media is under attack, the universities are being coerced, and the courts are diminished. 

America has always had blots on its history, but it has also stood for justice, for the rule of law, for freedom of the press, freedom of speech. Violations of these values have dimmed the Fourth. 

Nonetheless, happy birthday, America. You deserve better: It is guaranteed in the Constitution, one of the all-time great documents of history, a straight-line descendant of the Magna Carta of 1215. That was when the noblemen of England told King John, “Cut it out!” 

A few noblemen in Washington wouldn’t go amiss.

******

I was fortunate on my syndicated television show, “White House Chronicle,” along with my co-host, Adam Clayton Powell III, this week to interview Harvey Castro, an emergency room doctor. Castro, from a base in Dallas, has seized on artificial intelligence as the next frontier in healthcare.

He has written several books and given TEDx talks on the future of AI-driven healthcare. I have talked to several doctors in this field, but never one who sees the application of AI in as many ways from diagnosing ailments through a patient’s speech, to having an AI -controlled robot assist a nurse to gently transfer a patient from a gurney to a bed.

A man with infectious ebullience, Castro says his frustration in emergency rooms was that he got there too late: after a heart attack, stroke or seizure. He expects AI to change that through predictive medicine and early treatment. 

His work has caught the attention of the government of Singapore, and he is advising them on how to build AI into their medical system.

******

Like everyone else, I spend a lot of time in frustration-agony on the phone when I need to talk to a bank or insurance company and many other firms that have “customer service.” That phrase might loosely be translated as “Get rid of the suckers!”

I don’t know whether the arrival of AI agents will hugely improve customer service, but maybe you can banter with them, get them to deride their masters, even to tell you stuff about the president of the bank.

It might be easier talking to an AI agent than talking to someone with a script in another country before they inevitably, but oh, so nicely, tell you to get lost, as happened to me recently. 

You could enjoy a little hallucinatory fun with a virtual comedic friend, before it tells you to have a nice day, and hangs up.

Game-Changing Wind Turbines Harvest Underused Resource Close To The Ground

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Jimmy Dean, the country musician, actor and entrepreneur, famously said: “I can’t change the direction of the wind, but I can adjust my sails to always reach my destination.”

A new wind turbine from a California startup, Wind Harvest, takes Dean’s maxim to heart and applies it to wind power generation. It goes after untapped, abundant wind.

Wind Harvest is bringing to market a possibly revolutionary but well-tested vertical axis wind turbine (VAWT) that operates on ungathered wind resources near the ground, thriving in turbulence and shifting wind directions.

The founders and investors – many of them recruited through a crowd-funding mechanism — believe that wind near the ground is a great underused resource that can go a long way to helping utilities in the United States and around the world with rising electricity demand.

The Wind Harvest turbines neither seek to replace nor compete with the horizontal axis wind turbines (HAWT), which are the dominant propeller-type turbines seen everywhere. These operate at heights from 200 feet to 500 feet above ground.

Instead, these vertical turbines are at the most 90 feet above the ground and, ideally, can operate beneath large turbines, complementing the tall, horizontal turbines and potentially doubling the output from a wind farm.

The wind disturbance from conventional tall, horizontal turbines is additional wind fuel for vertical turbines sited below.

Studies and modeling from CalTech and other universities predict that the vortices of wind shed by the verticals will draw faster-moving wind from higher altitude into the rotors of the horizontals.

For optimum performance, their machines should be located in pairs just about 3 feet apart and that causes the airflow between the two turbines to accelerate, enhancing electricity production.

Kevin Wolf, CEO and co-founder of Wind Harvest, told me that they used code from the Department of Energy’s Sandia National Laboratory to engineer and evaluate their designs. They believe they have eliminated known weaknesses in vertical turbines and have a durable and easy-to-make design, which they call Wind Harvester 4.0.

This confidence is reflected in the first commercial installation of the Wind Harvest turbines on St. Croix, one of the U.S. Virgin Islands in the Caribbean. Some 100 turbines are being proposed for construction on a peninsula made from dredge spoils. This 5-megawatt project would produce 15,000 megawatt hours of power annually.

All the off-take from this pilot project will go to a local oil refinery for its operations, reducing its propane generation.

Wolf said the Wind Harvester will be modified to withstand Category 5 hurricanes; can be built entirely in the United States of steel and aluminum; and are engineered to last 70-plus years with some refurbishing along the way. Future turbines will avoid dependence on rare earths by using ferrite magnets in the generators.

Recently, there have been various breakthroughs in small wind turbines designed for urban use. But Wind Harvest is squarely aimed at the utility market, at scale. The company has been working solidly to complete the commercialization process and spread VAWTs around the world.

“You don’t have to install them on wind farms, but their highest use should be doubling or more the power yield from those farms with a great wind resource under their tall turbines,” Wolf said.

Horizontal wind turbines, so named because the drive shaft is aligned horizontally to the ground, compared to vertical turbines where the drive shaft and generator are vertically aligned and much closer to the ground, facilitating installation, maintenance and access.

Wolf believes his engineering team has eliminated the normal concerns associated with VAWTs, like resonance and the problem of the forces of 15 million revolutions per year on the blade-arm connections. The company has been granted two hinge patents and four others. Three more are pending.

Wind turbines have a long history. The famous eggbeater-shaped VAWT was patented by a French engineer, Georges Jean Marie Darrieus, in 1926, but had significant limitations on efficiency and cost-effectiveness. It has always been more of a dream machine than an operational one.

Wind turbines became serious as a concept in the United States as a result of the energy crisis that broke in the fall of 1973. At that time, Sandia began studying windmills and leaned toward vertical designs. But when the National Renewable Energy Laboratory assumed responsibility for renewables, turbine design and engineering moved there; horizontal was the design of choice at the lab.

In pursuing the horizontal turbine, DOE fit in with a world trend that made offshore wind generation possible but not a technology that could utilize the turbulent wind near the ground.

Now, Wind Harvest believes, the time has come to take advantage of that untouched resource.

Wolf said this can be done without committing to new wind farms. These additions, he said, would have a long-projected life and some other advantages: Birds and bats seem to be more adept at avoiding the three-dimensional, vertical turbines closer to the surface. Agricultural uses can continue between rows of closely spaced VAWTs that can align fields, he added.

Some vertical turbines will use simple, highly durable lattice towers, especially in hurricane-prone areas. But Wolf believes the future will be in wooden, monopole towers that reduce the amount of embodied carbon in their projects.

One way or another, the battle for more electricity to accommodate rising demand is joined close to the ground.

This article was originally published on Forbes.com