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Utilities Have the Transition Blues — No Way From Here to There

January 7, 2023 by Llewellyn King 2 Comments

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.

Filed Under: King's Commentaries

New Year Faces Old Problems: War, Immigration and Energy

December 24, 2022 by Llewellyn King 1 Comment

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.

Filed Under: King's Commentaries

Fusion Dreams Have Broken Many Hearts, Now New Hope

December 17, 2022 by Llewellyn King Leave a Comment

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.

 


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.

Filed Under: King's Commentaries

The Cold and the Dark Are Putin’s Ultimate Weapons

December 9, 2022 by Llewellyn King Leave a Comment

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.

Filed Under: King's Commentaries

Media in the Time of the Internet — Mugged but Needed

December 3, 2022 by Llewellyn King Leave a Comment

Trying to predict the future of the internet or even to see how it will become a reliable source of fact, like old-fashioned newspaper and television reporting, is to my mind the equivalent of standing on the sand spit at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, and predicting the future of aviation.

As the effect of the internet evolved, publishers of yore wished it away. I was one of those. Although I did tell the Newsletter Publishers Association way back that putting a print story down a wire wasn’t enough, that they should develop products for this new medium.

A few were up early and caught the worm while newsletter publishers like me slept in — notably The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and The Economist. They embraced and adjusted their offerings for the internet.

They are all publications that traditionally have had a preponderance of readers interested in issues beyond local coverage. The Wall Street Journal has always had a business audience and adapted quickly.

The New York Times was able to leverage its global and national followers and convert them to reading online. The Economist had an obvious business and world affairs audience to tap into.

The Washington Post’s internet adoption was more dynamic.

When the Graham family sold The Post to the then-richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos, many of us believed he would be another rich man buying a newspaper to keep it going and to reap the social opportunities that go with the franchise. But Bezos saw the future and poured money into the Post, not to keep it alive but to expand it hugely in the cyberworld. He was right and has pulled off a publishing coup.

What wasn’t seen by anyone I knew in the publishing world and isn’t in the literature is no one understood how the internet would suck up nearly all the advertising dollars.

The pure internet companies, peripherally in publishing, have vacuumed up the advertising, creating great wealth for their owners.

While they haven’t had a background in publishing, and haven’t even thought of themselves as publishers, they have added news — often generated by legitimate news organizations — as a giveaway, which they haven’t paid for; if you write for a newspaper or a magazine, you have been ripped off by an internet publisher.

The irony is that back in the 1980s and ’90s, newspaper and television properties were highly valued and selling for multiples never dreamed of. It was the time when Al Neuharth was building the Gannett chain and launching USA Today. I knew Neuharth, himself a newspaperman through and through.

Now that empire has been sold and many of its once-proud local titles are closed or look more like pamphlets than newspapers. The advertising, and with it the revenue, has gone to the internet behemoths.

But they aren’t newspapers, and their owners aren’t publishers. They are aggregators, and thanks to the wonder of the internet, they have a global presence and penetration beyond the wildest dreams of Rupert Murdoch, Conrad Black and the Sulzberger dynasty.

I salute those publications that are taking the fight to the internet by creating daily online editions and keeping the craft-of-old alive.

These include The New Yorker and The Spectator, an English magazine trying to get an American presence.

On a recent visit to Edinburgh, my wife and I ducked into a newsagent, the traditional British shop that sells newspapers, magazines and sundries, to buy some newspapers. Hanging above the shop’s entrance was a large blue sign advertising The Scotsman. The owner told my wife that he didn’t sell newspapers anymore, and nobody needed to read them.

If you know there is a war going on in Ukraine, it is because the traditional media has told you so, because brave reporters are there on the spot, not online. Repeat this line for Iran, China, Mexico to say nothing of Washington, Toronto, London, Rome, Moscow and Beijing.

We need the old media, often called the mainstream media. We earned that moniker. The Hill, Axios and Politico show where journalism might be headed nationally. But who will cover the statehouse, the school board and the courts? In the dark, all those institutions stray.

In a courthouse in Prince William County, Virginia, I asked about press coverage. The woman showing me around sighed and said, “We used to have reporters, they even had their own table, but not anymore.” Lady Justice had closed one eye.

Filed Under: King's Commentaries

Utilities Beware: The Whole IoT Is At Risk From Itself

November 26, 2022 by Llewellyn King Leave a Comment

Has the internet of things — the vast, interconnected, computer-centered ecosystem of today — reached a point where it is so complex, so multilayered, has so many architects, and has so many national interests embedded in it that it has become a threat to itself?

Will the electric grid, the financial system or the air traffic control apparatus implode not by the hand of a malicious hacker but because the system — which is now systems of systems — has become the most subtle threat it faces?

Worse, as the speed of telephony increases with 5G, will that speed up the system implosion with devastating consequences?

Will this technological meltdown be triggered from within by a long-forgotten piece of code, a failed sensor or inferior products in vital, load-bearing points in this system?

This kind of disaster from complexity is known as “emergent behavior.” Remember that concept. Likely, you will hear a lot about it going forward.

Emergent behavior is what happens when various objects or substances come together and trigger a reaction which can’t be predicted, nor can the trigger be predetermined.

Robert Gardner, founder and principal at New World Technology Partners and a National Security Agency consultant, tells me that the computer ecosystem is highly subject to emergent behavior in the so-called complex, adaptive system of systems which is today’s cyberworld. It is a world which has been built over time with new layers of complexity added willy-nilly as computing, and what has been asked of it, has become a huge, impregnable structure, beyond the reach of its present-day architects and minders, including cybersecurity aficionados.

In At The Creation

Gardner, to my mind, is worth listening to because he was, if you will, in at the beginning. At least, he was on hand and worked on the computer evolution, starting in the 1970s when he helped build the first supercomputers and has consulted with various national laboratories, including Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos. He has also played a key role in the development of today’s super-sophisticated financial computing infrastructure, known as “fintech.”

Gardner says of emergent behaviors in complex systems, “They can’t be predicted by examining individual components of a system as they are produced by the system as a whole — facilitating a perfect storm that conspires to produce catastrophe.”

Complexity is the new adversary, he says of these huge, virtual systems of systems.

Gardner adds, “The complexity adversary does not require outside assistance; it can be summoned by minor user, environmental or equipment failures, or timing instabilities in the ordinary operation of a system.

“Current threat detection software does not seek or detect these system conditions, leaving them highly vulnerable.”

Gardner cites two examples where the system failed itself. The first example is when a tree branch which fell on a power line in Ohio set in motion a blackout across the Michigan, New York, and Canada. The system became the problem: It went berserk, and 50 million people lost power.

The second example is how something called “counterparty risk” sped the demise of Lehman Brothers, the Wall Street colossus. That was when a single default embedded in the system initiated the implosion of the whole structure.

No Nefarious Actors

Of these, Gardner says, “There were no nefarious actors to defend against; the complex, heterogeneous nature of the systems themselves led to emergent behaviors.”

Going forward, the best practices in cyber hygiene won’t defend against catastrophe. The entwined systems are their own enemy. Utilities take note.

And the danger may get worse, according to Gardner.

The villain is 5G: the super-fast phone and data system now being deployed across the country. It will come in what are called “slices,” but for that you can read stages.

· Slice one is what is being built out now: It is faster than today’s 4G, which is what phones and data use currently. It features mobile broadband.

· Slice two, called “machine to machine,” is faster yet.

· Slice three will move vast quantities of data at astounding speeds which, if the data is damaging to the system and has occurred at an unidentifiable location, represents a threat to a whole tranche of human activity.

Self-destroying machines will be unstoppable when they have 5G slice three to speed bad information throughout their system and connected systems. Tech Armageddon.

Filed Under: King's Commentaries

All Through the Night — Remembering Radio Host Bohannon

November 19, 2022 by Llewellyn King 2 Comments

A great voice is stilled. James “Jimbo” Bohannon died of cancer of the esophagus on Nov. 12. Only weeks earlier, he had to resign from his “Jim Bohannon Show,” the overnight broadcast that aired on 500 radio stations, largely AM, weeknights from 11 p.m. to 2 a.m. ET.

Jim was a big man with a big voice, a big curiosity and a big heart. Over most of the 29 years that his show was on the air, I had the pleasure of being a guest from time to time.

At first, my wife, Linda Gasparello — a writer, broadcaster and an occasional guest on the show — and I would journey to a studio in suburban northern Virginia — the building always looked forbidding in the dark of night. Later, the show moved to the CBS studios on M Street in Washington. But in recent years, Bohannon broadcast from his home in Westminster, S.C.

As with most of us in the trade, I believe “in studio” trumps virtual. But one of the pleasures of radio is that it is portable and can be done with a phone anywhere. Before Jim took over the show, it was the springboard for Larry King, who once interviewed me in a bedroom in the Algonquin Hotel in New York. That was odd, but I was used to guesting on the radio from odd spots, like sitting in a parked car in a hotel lot overlooking the River Moy in Ballina, Ireland.

Jim’s show was a mixture of guests, whom he interviewed with genuine curiosity and gruff respect for views other than his own, and call-ins. He also was kind. I asked him to interview a friend, Ryan Prior, who was establishing a charity to support Chronic Fatigue Syndrome research and medical education. Bohannon asked informed and perceptive questions and elicited an interesting hour of broadcasting with his skill as an interviewer.

He was less indulgent of crazy folks. If you do call-in radio, you get crazies. When their rants began, Jim simply cut them off. No apology, but no indulgence either. Some were regulars and went to lengths to circumvent the security provisions of Westwood One, the show’s syndicator.

One technique was to use a different phone for each attempt, say a wife’s or a neighbor’s phone. I once said, “George, in St. Louis, did you take your medicine today?” Jim chuckled, but I doubt he would have addressed a caller that way. Jim had a superficial toughness — he was a Vietnam veteran — but his kindness always broke through.

Unlike many in the star business, Jim didn’t yearn, that I could discern, to emulate his predecessor, Larry King, becoming a television star. Like many, if not most, broadcasters, he loved radio. It is flexible, mobile and not slaved to technology and big crews.

That isn’t to say Jim didn’t enjoy doing television, but he was a radio man, having started in it, like many, when he was in high school — in his case, in his native Missouri. He found his footing in Washington, where he did some television and a lot of radio before taking over the late-night slot that uniquely fitted him.

Jim seemed supremely happy in the wee hours. So were his listeners from coast to coast who enjoyed his camaraderie, humor, wisdom and masterful interviewing.

The one talent that great commercial broadcasters must have is the skill in “hitting time” to accommodate syndicated radio advertising. Jim seamlessly guided his interviews to a full stop without the interviewees knowing they had been diverted to silence. It takes skill to do that. It also takes skill — and the love of craft — to be fresh night after night; and skill to elicit gems of truth and wisdom from reluctant subjects.

Jim had those talents, but I shall remember especially his talent for friendship. He has signed off but won’t be forgotten by those who knew him and shared the time of stars in the sky with a true star of the microphone.

Filed Under: King's Commentaries

Veterans Who Have Borne the Battle Suffer the Peace in Isolation

U.S. Army veteran saluting during a Veterans Day parade

November 13, 2022 by Llewellyn King Leave a Comment

For those who serve in the military, that is the ultimate bonding time: Camaraderie beyond imagining and sharing beyond compare. Laughing, fearing, hurting, hoping, and, sometimes, dying together. A time when the future is just a day ahead, a command away and if in combat, a time when death can arrive in an instant.

When men and women survive in the military, their greatest struggle lies ahead: Reentering civilian life.

Coming home, demobilized, set adrift in a sea of indifference, the veteran is separated from the ties that bind, in a world of alien values, mixed signals, and terrible, inescapable, nightmarish loneliness. This is compounded by the stresses of finding accommodation, work, and a purposeful life.

Our returning veterans are committing suicide at a greater rate than at any other time in our history. In recognition of Veterans Day, I talked with Frank Larkin, who works to connect Americans, especially those who have worn or are wearing the uniform, with veterans through a simple call and to help vets navigate their lives after service.

Larkin is a former Navy SEAL, a former U.S. Senate sergeant at arms, a former U.S. Secret Service agent, and he has worn the uniform of two police departments. But mostly, he is the grieving father of Ryan, a Navy SEAL who saw duty in Iraq and Afghanistan and who took his own life five years ago.

“I couldn’t save my own son,” he told me in an emotional moment during the interview I did with him on “White House Chronicle” on PBS.

Currently, Larkin is chief operating officer of the Troops First Foundation and chairman of the Warrior Call Initiative.

Larkin said “isolation” is the biggest pressure on former troops. They are cut off from the world they know – which he called “their tribe” — and plunged into one they don’t know, alone with their memories. These can amount to what Larkin calls “moral damage,” things that they have done and seen in the battle space which they can’t share with the civilian world. Things that have changed them.

Larkin said of his own son, “He came back changed. I could see it, but I couldn’t reach him, nor could my wife who is a medical professional.”

There are physical injuries as well. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is the best known, but there are others. For example, Larkin said, today’s weaponry may be damaging troops, especially in training. Blast waves and repeated recoil shaking may be causing Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), which is different from the brain injury suffered by football players. With TBI, there are minute tears in the brain which can’t be detected with normal brain scans.

These blast or shock waves from high-velocity weapons are a constant in training. Larkin noted that when a soldier fires a Carl Gustav shoulder-mounted rocket launcher, “It’s like getting your head blown off.”

After World War II, there were ticker tape parades. Every warrior was a hero. Everyone had served or knew someone who had served. The war had been a common shared experience. Most men and a lot of women had “done their bit” in the parlance of the Greatest Generation.

That began to change with Korea, and especially with Vietnam; returning troops weren’t celebrated and those wars weren’t a matter of national pride.

Then the draft ended, Larkin reminded me, and going to war ceased to be a shared experience. It became a discrete occupation, although U.S. troops have been at war or in harm’s way for two decades now. But without the draft, it is out of mind, out of sight, out of caring. Many of us don’t know a single veteran in these days of the volunteer army. We respect them in absentia, sometimes just on Veterans Day.

If all isn’t well with mental health out there in the battle space of civilian life, it isn’t well inside the military either. Suicide among serving men and women, is at record highs too.

More veterans have died from suicide than died in Vietnam combat, Larkin said. His initiative, Warrior Call, advocates that a simple phone call can save a life. “‘How are you doing? I’m thinking about you, buddy,’ is all you have to do,” Larkin said.

Veterans Day has become about sales and discounts, less and less about those who have borne and battle and now must bear the aftermath, often in terrible isolation.

Filed Under: King's Commentaries Tagged With: isolation, loneliness, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, PTSD, suicide, TBI, Traumatic Brain Injury, Troops First Foundation, U.S. military, Veterans Day, Warrior Call Initiative

The Sites of Death — New Ones Are Being Minted Every Day

November 5, 2022 by Llewellyn King Leave a Comment

ERETRIA, Greece — The sites of horror — the places where mass murder happened — are seared into my memory. Holocaust sites like the Warsaw Ghetto and Auschwitz, or Kigali, where the Hutus butchered the Tutus, or the Falls Road in Belfast, where many died over the decades of strife.

A new one has just been fixed firmly in my memory: Distomo.

These sites of slaughter trigger the sense of how fragile human society is — and such slaughter is taking place this day, this hour, this minute in Ukraine.

I am not enthralled by history per se. My lens is mainly confined to what happened in my lifetime, whether as a small child during World War II or the years since. That way, I know that it can and will happen again and again.

The horrors of the past aren’t confined to the past. They leak into the present as new bleak chapters on human conduct are written.

I say this because I have just visited Distomo, where barbarity reached a crescendo on June 10, 1944. There, for two hours, the Waffen-SS killed villagers with machine guns, bayonets and with any weapon at hand. They killed the unborn, infants and older children, women and men. They beheaded the village priest.

If they paused, it was to rape.

The Association of European Journalists, the 60-year-old organization with sections spread across Europe, had invited me to its annual congress in central Greece. After two busloads of delegates had visited the Oracle at Delphi, we stopped at Distomo: a trip from the celestial to the bestial.

My mind is set afire with questions at these World War II sites. If I had been a young Jew swept up by the Nazis, would I have been killed in a camp? If I had been a young German guard, would I have participated in the killing, and how much enthusiasm would I have brought to the work?

I wonder how the young men who did the butchery at Distomo lived with themselves afterward. Did they dream of bayonetting pregnant women, of old people begging to be killed instead of their spouses, children and grandchildren?

In the end, few were spared — only those who were left for dead. Conservative estimates are that 238 people died in the massacre.

My journalistic colleagues and I went from the foibles of the Greek gods of antiquity to the horrors of humans in the 20th century. 

I was just a child during World War II, but I feel especially connected because this and other Nazi atrocities happened in my lifetime.

When I visited Auschwitz and saw the hair, the shoes, the toys and other jetsam of children, my thought wasn’t that it could have been me, but that those could have been my friends, my playmates, and every Jew I have been close to, and there have been many.

At the Distomo museum, they show a graphic film with eyewitness accounts of those who survived, those who bore witness, like the woman who describes scooping the brains back into her dead toddler’s head and carrying him home — but her house, and nearly all those in the village, was burned by the SS. That is what she did and lived to tell — to tell of that butchered child. She said in the film that she couldn’t forgive. Who with that memory could?

The young men who carried out the Distomo killings, under their 26-year-old leader, SS-Hauptsturmfurer Fritz Lautenbach, did so in reprisal for attacks on German troops.

After visiting many killing fields — and I don’t seek them out — I wonder what I would have done? Would I have followed orders? Would I, in seconds, persuade myself that what I was doing was right?

What would I do if I were on the Russian frontlines in Ukraine today? There is savagery equal to Distomo going on right now in wars in many places, carried out by people just like us.


Photo: Skulls of some of the villagers in Distomo, Greece, who were massacred by the Nazis on June 10, 1944. Linda Gasparello

Filed Under: King's Commentaries

Developers and Utilities, Spare That Farm!

October 29, 2022 by Llewellyn King Leave a Comment

In nearly every city in the United States, and many around the world, bulldozers are busy making dreams come true: Leveling land for a single-family home on a lot.

Who doesn’t want a lovely home with a nice bit of land on some tree-lined street? It is the American Dream manifested in bricks and mortar.

Trouble is dreams can morph into nightmares. A growing nightmare across the nation is the incursion of homes onto farmland – land that will be out of production essentially forever.

All around Washington, I watched year after year for decades lovely farms in adjacent Maryland and Virginia being turned into suburbs — sometimes 70 and more miles from the city center.

It has been a simple tradeoff: There has been a relentless demand for single-family homes and builders see farms, usually family-owned, as ripe fruit ready for picking. When age is an issue, they almost always sell. Farming is a tough, 365-days-a-year undertaking, and a fat check at the end of a farming career is irresistible.

No villains here, but there are consequences. Mark Twain said, “Buy land, they aren’t making it anymore.” Sadly, Twain didn’t take his own advice and instead invested in the tech world of the day: He lost a fortune in a company that was trying to perfect the typewriter.

Farmers are special to me. They are the real renaissance men and women. They know a lot about a lot, from being able to gauge the pH levels of soil on their tongues to how to birth a calf, repair a tractor, or raise a barn.

They also know a thing or two about how the government works and filling out forms. They are regulated but have no guaranteed rate of return. They are as subject to the weather over their own land as floods around the world.

Businesses talk about being rewarded for taking a risk. Farmers take a risk with every seed they plant — and the returns aren’t guaranteed.

But, as Gail Chaddock, host, and producer of “No Farms, No Future,” a podcast of the American Farmland Trust, said, “You can’t blame the farmers, and you can’t blame the developers. But the land we’ll need for food production in the future is being taken.”

What is happening is the irreversible destruction of millions of acres of prime farmland every year. A reverence for farmland needs to enter the culture, she said.

No longer, however, is it just developers buying up farms. Farmland is now being sought by another kind of developer: renewable energy companies. They are buying it for large solar arrays. They also contract with farmers to install windmills which, while not taking so much land out of agricultural use, cumulatively take a lot.

But it is solar farms that are the real problem. Britain is thinking of legislating to prohibit the use of agricultural land for energy production. Other countries are waking to the realization that a field of shining solar collectors is not the same as a field of waving wheat or even lowly cabbages.

As over time we exported our manufacturing, we also have exported our food production. What was once raised on truck farms around the cities is now raised in neighboring Canada and Mexico, or as far away as Chile and South Africa.

There is no compelling reason to cover huge acreages with solar panels. Roofs, rights of way, and urban parking lots could be pressed into service. Railroad tracks cry out for a solar canopy.

Just because energy or housing is a higher economic use for land today doesn’t mean that it won’t have a higher future value, feeding future generations.

Filed Under: King's Commentaries

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