People often ask me who are the most interesting or most influential people I have met. It is easy to say Margaret Thatcher or Bill Clinton, but sometimes the real history makers are never known outside of their specialty. One such was Richard Morley.

A mutual friend took me to meet Morley at his home in New Hampshire about 23 years ago. We spent a delightful afternoon there. He let me move a pile of earth from one spot to another with a backhoe operated by a personal computer.

I didn’t realize that I was in the presence of a great inventor, a member of industrial royalty, who had moved technology a giant step forward and sped up the automation revolution.

Morley did that in 1968 when he and colleagues at General Motors perfected the programmable logic controller. With the PLC, automation had arrived for the car industry and much else.

If it is moved, stored, welded, shaped, collated and shoved out the door, a series of programmed controllers ordered all that. In fact, for everything manufactured, PLCs are at work translating the blueprints into products.

They are everywhere, from the factory floor to advanced farms, to city water plants, to oil and gas drilling. They occupy a part of the modern world known as operational technology, or OT.

Vital though OT is, it gets less attention than its big sibling, information technology, or IT.

Matt Morris, managing director of security and risk consulting at 1898 & Co., the consulting arm of Burns & McDonnell, the big architecture, engineering and construction firm, told me, “IT is the ‘carpeted space,’ and OT is the ‘uncarpeted space’ ”

In other words, much of industry’s heavy lifting is done by OT, while IT has taken over all of the other more obvious functions of society, from accounting to airline reservations, from doctors’ offices to designing aircraft.

IT is king, but that is only part of the story.

Regarding cybersecurity, OT and IT differ, but both have their vulnerabilities. When we say cybersecurity, we mostly mean IT. OT is different, and the threats emanating from attacks on it are usually more strategic and harder to identify.

Attacks on OT aren’t necessarily as immediately detectable as those on IT. They can be very subtle but also highly destructive and expensive.

The classic example of what can be done to OT was provided not in an attack on the United States but by the United States in 2007 (and revealed in 2010) when the nation’s cyber-warriors were able to slow down or speed up uranium enrichment centrifuges in Iran. The Iranians didn’t know that their operating systems had been fooled surreptitiously. Their engineers were at a loss.

Now, 1898 & Co. is taking a bold step into the world of critical infrastructure resiliency with the creation of a new service aimed at offering full-time, proactive cybersecurity at critical infrastructure sites, like utilities, embracing IT and OT.

The company and its parent have enormous experience in utilities and other critical infrastructure, including oil rigs, refineries and water systems. Through a program they call “Managed Threat Protection and Response,” their aim is to take critical infrastructure defense and response to new levels. The capability is an addition to its existing Managed Security Services solution.

To implement this, the company has set up its program in Houston, far from its home base in Kansas City, Missouri, to be near the customers — much critical infrastructure has links to Houston — but also, as Mark Mattei, 1898 & Co. director of cybersecurity, told me, to avail itself of the talent in the area.

The company is opening up a new horizon in cybersecurity, focusing on OT.

With IT, you would want to throw a switch, avert or stop the attack as fast as possible. But with OT, a more measured response might be called for. You wouldn’t want to shut down a whole plant because one pump had had its controller attacked or bring down part of the electricity grid because a single substation had evidence that it was malfunctioning because of an attack in one component.

The more one learns about cybersecurity, the more one appreciates the unsung heroes who take on unknown enemies 24 hours a day, every day of the year.

We are on the threshold of something big in defending critical infrastructure. I am sure that Richard Morley would have approved of this new approach. He died in 2017.

I have gone over. All the way. I have fallen in love with artificial intelligence. We need it and I’m on board. 

My conversion was sudden. It happened on one memorable day, Feb. 8, 2023. It was a sudden strike in a well-worn heart by Cupid’s arrow.

My love life with technology has been either unrequited or messy. I was always the one who blew the relationship, I admit that.

It started with computer typesetting. I was a committed hot type man. I didn’t want to see that painted lady, computer technology, destroying my divine relationship with hot type. But she did and when I tried to make amends she was, er, cold, froze me out. 

Likewise, as an old-time newspaperman, I was very proficient and happy with Telex. Computer technology separated us.

The worst of all was my first encounter with the internet.

I was pursuing the story of nuclear fusion at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. A lab technician tried to interest me in the new device he was using to send messages: The internet. I blew it off. “That is just Telex on steroids,” I said. 

Ms. Internet doesn’t care to be scorned and she nearly cost me my manhood — well, my publishing company — when she took her terrible revenge. She killed print papers as well as hot type. She was a vengeful siren that way.

My conversion to AI began innocently enough. I was listening to a reporter on National Public Radio explaining how Microsoft’s new AI search engine would not only change the world of online searching but would also give Google a serious run for its money — billions of dollars, I might say parenthetically. 

The writing’s on the wall for Google unless it can get its AI to market fast. I was intrigued.

The illustration used by NPR reporter Bobby Allyn was that of buying a couch and carrying it home in your car. The new search engine, Allyn explained, will tell you if the couch you want to buy will fit in your car. It will know the dimensions of the car and, maybe, of the couch, too. Wow!

Then I went on to watch a wild, unruly hearing before the House Oversight Committee. A long-suffering panel of former Twitter executives faced some pointed abuse from the Republican members. Some of those members never got to pose a question: Their time was entirely taken up castigating the witnesses over alleged collusion with the Biden administration and over Hunter Biden’s laptop — the holy grail for conspiracy theorists. It was a performance worthy of a Soviet show trial.

The worst aspects of the new House were on display. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) was visibly flustered because she wasn’t in her seat when her time to question the witnesses arrived. She rushed back to it and was so excited that she was nearly incoherent.

Then there was Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) who was adamant that Twitter was advancing a political agenda by accepting the science that vaccines helped control the Covid-19 outbreak. She claimed Twitter had a political objective when it denied her free speech rights by suspending her account, after frequent warnings about her dangerous public health positions opposing vaccinations. 

The lady’s not for turning. Not by facts, anyway. That was clear. Any Southern charm she may possess was shelved in favor of invective. She told the former Twitter executives that she was glad they had been fired.

The clincher in my conversion to AI had nothing to do with the brutal thrashing of the experts, but with the explanation by Yoel Roth, former head of Trust and Safety at Twitter, who with forbearance explained that there were then and are now hundreds of Russian false accounts on Twitter aimed at influencing our elections and reaching deeply into our politics. Likewise, Iranian and Chinese accounts.

That is when it occurred to me: AI is the answer. Not the answer to the mannerless ways of the House hearing, but to the whole vulnerability of social media. 

We have to fight cyber excess with cyber: Only AI can deal with the volumes of malicious domestic and foreign material on the net. Too bad it won’t resolve the free speech issues, or the one that emerged at the House hearing: the right to lie without restraint.

This AI doubter is now an enthusiast. Bring it on. 

Police excess gained huge attention after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020 and again after the alleged beating death of Tyre Nichols in Memphis last month. But police excess isn’t new.

A friend, who had been drinking and could be quite truculent when drunk, was severely beaten in the police cells in Leesburg, Virginia, a couple of decades ago. I have never seen a man so badly hurt in a beating — and I have done my share of police reporting.

That he provoked the police, I have no doubt. But no one should be beaten by the police anywhere, ever, for any amount of provocation. I might mention that my friend — and the officers who might have killed him — are White.

I used to cover the Thames Police Court in the East End of London. That was before immigration had changed the makeup of the East End. It was then, as it had been for a long time, solidly White working class.

Every so often, a defendant would appear in the dock showing signs that he had been in a fight. One man had an arm in a sling, another had a black eye, and a third had bruises on his face. One thing was common: If they looked beaten up, they would be charged with “resisting arrest,” along with other charges like drunkenness and petty larceny.

In the press benches, we shrugged and would say something like, “They worked that bloke over.” We never thought to raise the issue of police brutality. It was just the way things were.

At least nowadays, when social norms don’t allow police to hit suspects, there is a slight chance of redress. Although I would wager that nearly all police violence goes unreported, the “blue wall” closes tightly around it.

People in uniform, men and women, hold dominion over a prisoner. If there is ethnic bias or verbal provocation, bad things can and do happen.

Yet, I hold a brief for the police. Policing is dangerous and heartbreaking work, especially in the United States, where guns are everywhere. Also, it is shift work, itself a stressing factor.

Wearing the blue isn’t easy, and abuse and danger go with the job. Sean Bell, a former British policeman, now a professor at the Open University, described the police workload in the United Kingdom this way, “Those in the policing environment can become a human vacuum for the grief, sorrow, distress and misfortune for the victims of crime, road crashes and the plethora of other incidents dealt with time after time.”

Many of the incidents of American police being shot and police exceeding their authority have as their genesis a traffic stop, as with Nichols. These are a cause of fear for both the police and criminals. It is where the rubber meets the road of law enforcement.

Motorists form our opinions of the police largely through traffic stops, which we rail against. But to the police, they are a  life-threatening hazard as they approach a car that may have a crazed or dangerous criminal driver with a gun. They face danger and tragedy in plain sight.

The only thing police officers are warier of than traffic stops are domestic violence calls. They are the worst, officers in Washington have told me.

Yet, the traffic stop is an essential police tool, partly for controlling traffic but, importantly, for arresting criminals, fugitives and drug transporters. It is how the police work within the constitutional prohibition on illegal search and seizure.

People who have control of other people — drill sergeants, wardens and the police — are in a position to abuse, and some do. A uniform and authority can bring out the inner beast. Remember what went on in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq?

After the two terrible incidents of police excess, Floyd and Nichols, all the solutions seem inadequate. But when out on the streets or in our homes, most of us are vitally aware that we feel secure because a call to 911 will bring the law — the men and women in blue who guarantee our safety and wellbeing.

What to do about police violence? Vigilance is the first line of defense, but appreciating the police and holding them to account helps. Not many police officers feel appreciated, and that isn’t good for them or for society.

“The policeman’s lot is not a happy one!” So wrote British dramatist W.S. Gilbert in “The Pirates of Penzance,” an 1879 comic opera, one of his collaborations with composer Arthur Sullivan.

And Gilbert and Sullivan had never dreamt of a traffic stop.

Big tech has siphoned off advertising and wants to be a global censor. 

The Department of Justice has filed suit against Google for its predatory advertising practices. Bully!

Not that I think Google is inherently evil, venal or greedier than any other corporation. Indeed, it is a source of much good through its awesome search engine.

But when it comes to advertising, Google, and others with high-tech platforms, have done inestimable damage. They have hoovered up most of the available advertising dollars, bankrupting much of the world’s traditional media and, thereby, limiting the coverage of the news — especially local news.

They have ripped the heart out of the economics of journalism.

Like other internet companies, they treasure their intellectual property while sucking up the journalistic property of the impoverished providers without a thought of paying.

While I doubt the DOJ suit will do much to redress the advertising imbalance (Axios argues the part of Google that the DOJ wants divested accounts for only 12 percent of the company’s revenue), it will keep the issue of what to do about big tech media churning.

The issue of advertising is an old conundrum, written extra-large by the internet.  Advertisers have always favored a first-past-the-post strategy. In practice, this has meant in the world of newspapers that a small edge in circulation means a massive gulf in advertising volume.

Broadcasting, through the ratings system, has been able to charge for the audience it gets, plus a premium for perceived audience quality — “60 Minutes” compared to, say, “Maury,” which was canceled last year.

But mostly, it is always about raw numbers of readers, listeners and viewers. As rough a calculation, first-past-the-post has meant 20 percent more of the audience turns into 50 percent more of the available advertising dollars.

I would cite The New York Times’ leverage over the Herald Tribune, The Baltimore Sun’s edge over the News-American, and The Washington Post’s advantage over the Evening Star. The weaker papers all in time folded even when they had healthy circulations, just not healthy enough.

With their massive reach, Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc., are killing off the traditional print media and wreaking havoc in broadcasting. This calls out for redress, but it won’t come from the narrow focus of the DOJ suit.

The even larger issue with Google and its compatriots is freedom of speech.

The internet tech publishers, for that is what they are, Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and others reserve the right to throw you off their sites if you indulge in speech, which, by contemporary standards, incites hate, violence or social disturbance.

Conservatives believe they are victimized, and I agree. Anyone whose speech is restricted by another individual or an institution is a victim of prejudice, albeit the prejudice of good intent.

Recently, I was warned by LinkedIn that I would be barred from posting on the site because I had transgressed — and two transgressions merit banning. The offending item was a historical piece about a World War II massacre in Greece. The offense may have been a dramatic photograph of skulls, taken by my wife, Linda Gasparello, displayed in the museum at Distomo, a scene of a barbarous genocide.

I followed the appeal procedure against the two-strikes-you’re-out rule, but I have heard nothing. I expect the censoring algorithms have my number and are ready to protect the public from me next time I write about an ugly historical event.

The concept of “hate speech” is contrary to free expression. It calls for censorship even though it professes otherwise. Any time one group of people is telling another, or even an individual, what they can say, free speech is threatened and the First Amendment is compromised.

The problem isn’t what is called hate speech but lying — a malady that is endemic in the political class.

The defense against the liars who haunt social media is what some find hateful speech: ridicule, invective, irony, satire and all the weapons in the literary quiver.

The right to bear the arms of free and open discourse shouldn’t be infringed by social media giants.

ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — I first heard about global warming being attributable to human activity about 50 years ago. Back then, it was just a curiosity, a matter of academic discussion. It didn’t engage the environmental movement, which marshaled opposition to nuclear and firmly advocated coal as an alternative.

Twenty years on, there was concern about global warming. I heard competing arguments about the threat at many locations, from Columbia University to the Aspen Institute. There was conflicting data from NASA and other federal entities. No action was proposed.

The issue might have crystallized earlier if it hadn’t been that between 1973 and 1989, the great concern was energy supply. The threat to humanity wasn’t the abundance of fossil fuels. It was the fear that there weren’t enough of them.

The solar and wind industries grew not as an alternative but rather as a substitution. Today, they are the alternative.

Now, the world faces a more fearsome future: global warming and all of its consequences. These are on view: sea-level rise, droughts, floods, extreme cold, excessive heat, severe out-of-season storms, fires, water shortages, and crop failures.

Sea-level rise affects the very existence of many small island nations, as the prime minister of Tonga, Siaosi Slavonia, made clear here at the annual assembly of the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), an intergovernmental group with 167 member nations.

It also affects densely populated countries like Bangladesh, where large, low-lying areas may be flooded, driving off people and destroying agricultural land. Salt works on food, not on food crops.

Sea-level rise threatens the U.S. coasts — the problem is most acute for cities such as Boston, New York, Miami, Charleston, Galveston and San Mateo. Flooding first, then submergence.

How does human catastrophe begin? Sometimes it is sudden and explosive, like an earthquake. Sometimes it advertises its arrival ahead of time. So it is with the Earth’s warming.

Delegates at the IRENA assembly felt that the bell of climate catastrophe tolls for their countries and their families. There was none of the disputations that normally attend climate discussions. Unity was a feature of this one.

The challenge was framed articulately and succinctly by John Kerry, U.S. special presidential envoy for climate. Kerry’s points:

—Global warming is real, and the evidence is everywhere.

—The world can’t reach its Paris Agreement goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2030 or the ultimate one of net-zero carbon by 2050 unless drastic action is taken.

—Warming won’t be reversed by economically weak countries but rather by rich ones, which are most responsible for it. Kerry said 120 less-developed countries produce only 1 percent of the greenhouse gases while the 20 richest produce 80 percent.

—Kerry, notably, declared that the technologies for climate remediation must come from the private sector. He wants business and private investment mobilized. 

The emphasis at this assembly has been on wind, solar and green hydrogen. Wave power and geothermal have been mentioned mostly in passing. Nuclear got no hearing. This may be because it isn’t renewable technically. But it does offer the possibility for vast amounts of carbon-free electricity. It is classed as a “green” source by many government institutions and is now embraced by many environmentalists.

The fact that this conference has been held here is of more than passing interest. Prima facie, Abu Dhabi is striving to go green. It has made a huge solar commitment to the Al Dhafra project. When finished, it will be the world’s largest single solar facility. Abu Dhabi is also installing a few wind turbines.

Abu Dhabi has a four-unit nuclear power plant at Barakah, with two 1,400-megawatt units online, one in testing and one under construction. Yet, the emirate is a major oil producer and is planning to expand its production from more than 3 million barrels daily to 5 million barrels.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has made oil more valuable, and even states preparing for a day when oil demand will drop are responding. Abu Dhabi isn’t alone in this seeming contradiction between purpose and practice. Green-conscious Britain is opening a new coal mine.

The energy transition has its challenges — even in the face of commitment and palpable need. The delegates who attended this all-round excellent conference will find that when they get home.

In the United States, utilities are grappling with the challenge of not destabilizing the grid while pressing ahead with renewables. Lights on, carbon out, is tricky.

It is easy to start hyperventilating over classified documents. It isn’t the classification but what is in the documents that counts. Much marked classified is rubbish.

I have been around the classification follies for years. In 1970, I did what might be called a study, but it was just a freelance article on hovercraft use by the military. I was paid $250 to write it.

In those days, there was no easy way to copy a document. The standard was to put several sheets of paper in a typewriter with carbon sheets between them. Like any other journalist, I started by going to the best library I could access — in this case, The Washington Post library. I read what was available, largely newspaper clippings, and wrote the article.

Arctic, a consulting company, paid me to write it, and I forgot about it. A couple of years later, I wanted the article — probably to use to get other work — and I asked Arctic for it. They said it had been delivered to the Pentagon long since, and I had better ask the commissioning Department of Defense office.

I did that and was told that I couldn’t have the article, nor could I even look at it because it had been “classified,” and I didn’t have clearance.

Like so much else, it had gone into the dark underworld of the classified from whence few pieces of paper ever return.

When James Schlesinger became chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission in 1971, one of the first things he did was revamp document classification. He told me that the AEC was classifying far more than was necessary and, as a result, the system wasn’t safer but more vulnerable.

His argument was that for classification to work, the people managing classified material had to have confidence that it was truly deserving of secrecy. He directed the declassification of the trivial and increased the security surrounding what was vital.

Schlesinger was succeeded as chairman by Dixy Lee Ray. At the time, I covered the nuclear industry, and Ray became a social friend and a subject.

Once, Ray and I went to dinner at the historic Red Fox Inn in Middleburg, Virginia. After a swell meal, we walked to her limousine in the parking lot behind the inn. She had something in her briefcase that she wished me to have.

But Ray always had her two dogs with her. One was a huge gray wolfhound, and the other was a smaller gray dog, which looked like the wolfhound but was half the size.

The dogs were in the car’s front seat, and a high wind was blowing. Ray opened one back door, and I opened the other. Then she opened her briefcase and was rifling through the contents — some of which were marked as classified with a telltale, red X — when the big wolfhound jumped onto the back seat. He knocked over the briefcase, and the wind blew documents all over the parking lot.

It was a security crisis. Not that Soviet agents were dining at the Red Fox Inn that night, but if any document marked as secret was found and handed to the police, a major scandal would have resulted.

For the best part of an hour, Ray, myself and her driver scoured the parking lot, the grassy areas and the bushes for documents.

In the early morning, I drove back to the inn to ensure we had made a clean sweep. State secrets in the parking lot of a pub make for hot headlines and end careers.

In the age of computers, classified documents — and who knows if they should be marked as such — are much less likely to be put into paper folders.

Once, the Congressional Joint Committee, which oversaw the Atomic Energy Commission, held a hearing in its secure hearing room in the U.S. Capitol, where all the documents before the members and the witnesses were marked “eyes only.” The hearing had to be canceled because no one could say anything.

Also, at one of the major nuclear weapons laboratories, I deduced what a machine I was told was used for conducting “scientific experiments” really was. The director assured the technician showing it, “Don’t worry, King is too stupid to know what it is.” He was right, and another state secret was saved.

A perfect storm is gathering over the electric utility industry in the United States. It may break this year, next year or the year after, but break it will.

That is the consensus from utility executives I have been talking to over the past month. Several issues together amount to a clear danger of widespread blackouts and brownouts in the coming years. They come under the rubric of “transition.”

There are, in fact, two transitions stretching the electric utility industry. One is the climate imperative to turn from fossil fuels, primarily coal and natural gas with a smidgeon of oil, to renewables, almost totally wind and solar.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration reckons that electricity from solar and wind will rise this year from 24 percent to 26 percent and that natural gas, the workhorse of the generation mix, will fall from 38 percent to 36 percent. The balance is dwindling coal use at 19 percent, and nuclear, hydro and geothermal generation making up the rest.

That leaves a significant need for new renewable generation: That is the first transition. It isn’t going as fast as the environmental lobby, or the Biden administration, would like, nor even as fast as the utilities would like. It has been substantially crimped by the supply chain tangle.

The American Public Power Association and the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association have been vocal about the shortage of pole transformers. The supply has dried up. Without transformers, new hookups are impossible and old ones are threatened if the transformers fail. The waiting list for something as simple as a bucket truck is three years.

Recent legislation has poured money at an unprecedented rate into the development of renewables, but none of it will help in the short term. It is a case of trying to force more of something into a bladder that is expanding too slowly and that can’t expand faster because of multiple restraints. A utility executive told me that the money is, if anything, making matters worse.

One of the things most concerning to the utilities is the fate of natural gas, both for its availability and price. Gas remains the principal go-to fuel for utilities. Many regard gas as a storage system even if they aren’t burning it to generate power daily.

Gas is special because it is relatively clean, it can be stored, and it can be installed in a short time at many locations. It doesn’t require trains, as does coal, and it works in any weather if the plants have been properly weatherized. Also, gas is very efficient so more of it can be transformed into electricity through so-called combined-cycle plants. It beats coal and nuclear hands down on the simplicity of the infrastructure it needs. Its efficiency is rated at about 64 percent versus 32 percent, or thereabouts, for coal.

Many utility executives believe gas should be the primary way we store energy. They advocate maintaining a robust gas infrastructure so that it can come online quickly when needed and can run for as long as needed, unlike batteries.

But national gas policy is confusing. We want gas to be sent to Europe but not piped to New England, which may have an electricity deficit this winter, if not the next.

The second transition, working in tandem with the first, is electrification.

The United States is already headed toward a totally electrified transportation system, but heavy industry, like steel and cement, is also switching to electricity. Demand is showing the first signs of explosive growth. By 2050, demand will have more than doubled, according to many surveys.

While that alone is destabilizing, there is a wild card: the new unpredictable weather behavior.

This winter so far, we have had floods in California, freezing in Texas, tornadoes in the Midwest, and record snowfall in Buffalo. Add this to the other variables in electricity delivery, and you have a very troubling picture with such things as attacks on substations, cyberattacks and that pesky supply chain.

My advice: Keep spare batteries handy and a good supply of canned food. If you are sitting in the dark, you don’t want to be hungry.

There are no new years, just new dates.

As the old year flees, I always have the feeling that it is doing so too fast; that I haven’t finished with it, even though the same troubles are in store on the first day of the new year.

Many things are hanging over the world this transition. None is subject to quick fixes.

Here are the three leading, intractable mega-issues:

First, the war in Ukraine. There is no resolution in sight as Ukrainians survive as best they can in the rubble of their country, subject to endless pounding by Russian President Vladimir Putin. It is as ugly and flagrant an aggression as Europe has seen since days of Hitler and Stalin.

Eventually, there will be a political solution or a Russian victory. Ukraine can’t go on for very long, despite its awesome gallantry, without the full engagement of NATO as a combatant. It isn’t possible that it can wear down Russia with its huge human advantage and Putin’s dodgy friends in Iran and China.

One scenario is that after winter has taken its toll on Ukraine, and the invading forces, a ceasefire-in-place is declared, costing Ukraine territory already held by Russia. This will be hard for Kyiv to accept — huge losses and nothing won.

Kyiv’s position is that the only acceptable borders are those which were in place before the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014. That almost certainly would be too high a price for Russia.

Henry Kissinger, writing in the British magazine “The Spectator,” has proposed a ceasefire along the borders that existed before the invasion of last February. Not ideal but perhaps acceptable in Moscow, especially if Putin falls. Otherwise, the war drags on, as does the suffering, and allies begin to distance themselves from Ukraine.

A second huge, continuing crisis is immigration. In the United States, we tend to think that this is unique to us. It isn’t. It is global.

Every country of relative peace and stability is facing surging, uncontrolled immigration. Britain pulled out of the European Union partly because of immigration. Nothing has helped.

This year 504,00 are reported to have made it to Britain. People crossing the English Channel in small boats, with periodic drownings, has worsened the problem.

All of Europe is awash with people on the move. This year tens of thousands have crossed the Mediterranean from North Africa and landed in Malta, Spain, Greece, and Italy. It is changing the politics of Europe: Witness the new right-wing government in Italy.

Other migrant masses are fleeing eastern Europe for western Europe. Ukraine has a migrant population in the millions seeking peace and survival in Poland and other nearby countries.

The Middle East is inundated with refugees from Syria and Yemen. These millions follow a pattern of desperate people wanting shelter and services, but eventually destabilizing their host lands.

Much of Africa is on the move. South Africa has millions of migrants, many from Zimbabwe, where drought has worsened chaotic government, and economic activity has come to a halt because of electricity shortages.
Venezuelans are flooding into neighboring Latin American countries, and many are journeying on to the southern border of the United States.

The enormous movement of people worldwide in this decade will have long-lasting effects on politics and cultures. Conquest by immigration is a fear in many places.

My final mega-issue is energy. Just when we thought the energy crisis that shaped the 1970s and 1980s was firmly behind us, it is back — and is as meddlesome as ever.

Much of what will happen in Ukraine depends on energy. Will NATO hold together or be seduced by Russian gas? Will Ukrainians survive the frigid winter without gas and often without electricity? Will the United States become a dependable global supplier of oil and gas, or will domestic climate concerns curb oil and gas exports? Will small modular reactors begin to meet their promise? Ditto new storage technologies for electricity and green hydrogen?

Energy will still be a driver of inflation, a driver of geopolitical realignments, and a driver of instability in 2023.

Add to worsening weather and the need to curb carbon emissions, and energy is as volatile, political, and controversial as it has ever been. And that may have started when English King Edward I banned the burning of coal in 1304 to curb air pollution in the cities.

Happy New Year, anyway.

While the rafters are ringing with praise for the nuclear fusion breakthrough at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, let me inject a sour note. This isn’t the beginning of cheap, safe, non-polluting electricity.

It is a scientific milestone, not an electricity one. Science tantalizes, but it also deceives. Often the mission turns out not to be the one for which years of scientific research were aiming.

I would remind the world that science stirred great hope — futilely — with the idea of superconductivity at ambient temperatures after some laboratory success.

The history of fusion is a clear illustration of expectation dashed, revived, resurrected and dashed again. Now there is some hope with a stunning lab success: the first future experiment with “gain,” meaning more energy came out of the experiment than went into it.

Fusion has been the goal, the light at the end of the tunnel, for nuclear researchers for more than 60 years. In that time, there have been false prophets, failed attempts, elaborate claims and just hard slog.

That hard slog has shown what is possible: more power has been achieved in a fusion experiment for a fraction of a second. That is a huge success, but it isn’t limitless electricity, as some have heralded.

Fission — which makes possible our power reactors and warships — is splitting the atom to release heat, which is converted, via steam, into electricity.

Fusion, beguiling fusion, seeks to do what happens in stars and the sun — fusing two atoms together to produce heat, which, in a reactor, would be used to create steam and turn turbines, making electricity.

Governments and researchers have salivated over the possibility of fusion for decades, and it has been well-funded worldwide compared with other energy sources.

Getting fusion temperatures at or above those on the sun must be achieved to fuse two deuterium atoms together. Deuterium, also called “heavy hydrogen,” is an isotope of hydrogen. If you can do that and sustain the reaction for months and years, you can design a reactor that would create steam, or use some other fluid, to turn a turbine.

There are two approaches scientists have used to get fusion. One is inertial fusion, used in the breakthrough at the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, near San Francisco, which involves hitting a pellet with a concentrated beam of energy: The lab used 192 super-powerful lasers to get fusion.

In the early 1980s, I spent time at Livermore and watched an experiment to hit the target with big accelerators. There were, as I recall, eight of them the size of cars. The research scientist showing me the facility said that accelerators the size of locomotives were needed to continue the experiments.

The other approach to get fusion is the tokamak, a Russian word describing a doughnut-shaped machine where plasma is superheated with electricity, and the whole thing is held together in powerful magnetic fields. This is the technology being pursued internationally by a 35-nation consortium at the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor in Cadarache, southern France.

This tokamak, or toroidal approach, is the one most favored in the community to succeed eventually as a source of heat to make electricity.

Also, a lot of solid work on fusion has been done at the General Atomics facility in La Jolla, California, and at research facilities across the United States and worldwide. I visited the General Atomics site many times, crawled inside the machine, and wondered at the math and science that have gone into the pursuit of fusion.

Back in the 1970s, physicist Keeve “Kip” Siegel believed he could achieve fusion with simple, off-the-shelf optical lasers. He died of a stroke in March 1975 while testifying before the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy in defense of his laser fusion research.

Bob Guccione, founder and publisher of Penthouse, hooked up with a former member of Congress from Washington state, Mike McCormack, and together they sought to promote fusion.

Two eminent scientists, Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann, thought they had a breakthrough with so-called cold fusion. But this chemical process hasn’t panned out.

When I was looking at that fusion experiment at Livermore in the early 1980s, the researcher showed me a wonderful new way of communicating with other scientists around the world on his computer. I thought it was just a Telex on steroids and went back to questions about fusion, despite my guide’s enthusiasm for the new communications system.

It was the internet, and I missed the big story — as big as a story can get — to keep reporting on fusion. You can see why I may be soured.

 

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Photo: During the Dec. 13 press conference announcing ignition, Department of Energy Under Secretary for Nuclear Security and Administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration Jill Hruby said in achieving ignition, LLNL researchers have “opened a new chapter in NNSA’s science-based Stockpile Stewardship Program,” enabling scientists to modernize nuclear weapons and unlock new avenues of research in nuclear science.

In medieval times, aggressors cut the water supply and poisoned the wells. In the 21st century, they go for the electric supply.

The aggressors today know that electricity is a vital commodity; without it, civilized life fails, suffering begins. It is a war of special cruelty against the civilian population.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose forces haven’t fared well on the ground against the Ukrainian military, has turned to the civilian population. He has unleashed a vicious campaign against Ukraine’s electric grid.

The unfolding result — winter is just beginning — is untold suffering. There is no quick fix, no way to fly in electricity as you can fly in food and munition, and no equal retaliation. The vulnerability lies in the nature of electricity itself. It is a quintessentially complex, real-time system.

When an electric system is harmed, it is incapacitated for months and even years. A storm passes through, trees fall on the lines, and crews repair them quickly or bypass the damaged transmission.

But when the guts of the system — the sophisticated interplay of wires and substations, turbines, power electronics and myriad connectors — are damaged, power can be off for months, and that assumes that there isn’t a war raging.

This vulnerability has just been exhibited by an attack with firearms on a substation in North Carolina. A turbine was shot up, and 30,000 people will be without electricity for days and possibly weeks. That scenario is with the full resources of U.S. power companies, working in unison, to help restore power.

Imagine trying to get power back online with precision weapons raining on parts of a grid? Realize that much of a bulk power supply system is bespoke; that big things like turbines aren’t sitting on a shelf. They are usually made to order, mostly in China nowadays.

If you have the stomach for it, imagine the suffering in Ukraine at the start of winter: no light, no heat, no water because electricity pumps city water. Europe is set for a brutal winter, but nothing like the catastrophe unfolding in Ukraine.

First, Europe, like much of the world, is trying to move from fossil fuels to renewables. But it has been a messy transition, especially in Britain, where the expectations for a smooth transition were too rosy.

The British failed to build enough gas storage in the hope it wouldn’t be needed; shilly-shallied for years about committing to new nuclear power; and had an absolute confidence that the wind in the North Sea was a steady force.

Then things went wrong for Britain.

The first was the wind drought of last autumn in the North Sea and across Europe. It had a particular effect on Britain, which had to use more of its gas reserves to get through — and so was set for near disaster when the Russian war against Ukraine erupted nine months ago, pushing the price of gas up tenfold. British electric prices have soared, and the government has had to promise to pay substantial subsidies to affected households.

Germany, though, is the poster child for what not to do.

First, Germany has allowed itself to rely on Russia for nearly 40 percent of its natural gas — a principal fuel for electric generation — while, at the same time, closing its very reliable nuclear power plants. Germany also imports large quantities of petroleum and hard coal from Russia.

Germany isn’t only a problem to itself, but it also may be one for its neighbors in Europe. It is the richest country in Europe, and there is some fear that it will use some of its wealth to buy gas and push prices higher. That hasn’t happened, but it is a fear expressed across the energy sector.

Another fear is that as Germany needs so much gas to keep its industrial machine going that it will break ranks and cut a side deal with Russia, throwing Ukraine under the bus. But that hasn’t happened either.

The big challenge for Europe is how it will defend the remains of the Ukrainian grid, how fast it can help Ukraine restore power to the whole country, and how it might block the merciless aerial assault.

That is a political and security question for Europe and the United States: How far will the allies go in risking a nuclear war?

The lesson of Ukraine is clear: Protecting the physical infrastructure of the electric supply, the grid, is as much a part of national security as is cybersecurity.