I have never met Will Smith, but I would like to just so that I could pump that hand — the hand that connected with Chris Rock’s cheek at the Oscars; the slap that was seen around the world.

That hand connecting with that unsuspecting cheek should start us on a happy back-to-the-future journey.

I would rather the striker had been a woman. Slapping men’s faces has a long and honorable tradition in female defense of rectitude.

We need to reinstall the periodic slapping of the male face as a part of the interaction between men and women so there are fewer instances of #MeToo. Once there has been a slap, there can be no later debate about who allowed what. An open-handed blow to the over-eager male face is declarative: Cut it out now. It is the unique female form of defense without having to take up judo, kickboxing or succumbing to unwanted advances. Slapping the pushy male face is, or was, instinctive.

A crisp slap of the face puts a definite and embarrassed end to “inappropriate touching.” A face slap is so articulate, so incontrovertible, so absolute and so very effective. It doesn’t ever get confused with “consensual,” “maybe” or “perhaps.”

Had a few more faces been slapped, there would be fewer TV personalities sitting out their lives in early retirement because they said they thought there was mutual consent. Had the face of one governor been slapped, he would have restrained his unlicensed hands from roving where they shouldn’t have, and he would still have a job. No equivocation or doubt; no he-said, she-said. A slap is a notable event, never forgotten by the deliverer or the receiver.

Neither the slapper nor the slapped quickly forgets the inside of the female hand swiftly connecting with the outside of the male face. It hurts the male ego far more than it stings the offending cheek or the delivering palm.

Question: Did she slap your face? How can a man answer that without a simple “yes” or “no”? A slap can’t later be confused with foreplay. You weren’t desired is an unambiguous statement implicit in the face slap. Once thus discouraged, further advance is not allowable, or is the beginning of #MeToo territory.

What happened to face slapping? Why did it go the way of couches in women’s restrooms and nose-powdering, as in “I have to powder my nose.” Such a delightful euphemism. Somewhere in the women’s movement some useful things got lost.

The last time, as I remember, when a face slap echoed around the world was when Vivien Leigh, playing Scarlett O’Hara in the movie “Gone With the Wind,” brought an open palm against the astounded cheek of Clark Gable, playing Rhett Butler.

When a woman delivers the unambiguous slap to the face of an over-eager man, she has an opportunity to accompany it with a solid verbal rebuke; to  append a testy codicil. How about one of these: “What kind of women do you usually go out with?” “How dare you, lover boy?” “I told you, keep your hands to yourself.” Or a withering, “What do you think you’re doing?” That should deflate the aspiring Don Juan and send the putative lover back to computer dating.

You are probably wondering how often this writer’s face has been slapped? Only once, in quite a different circumstance and for quite a different offense. It was a shock, an ego-crusher, and I have an indelible memory of it.

Despite the current imbroglio between Will Smith and Chris Rock, the face slap remains uniquely a woman’s prerogative and a man’s shame. Whack!

Joe Biden at war and Joe Biden at peace aren’t the same person. When it comes to the Russia-Ukraine war and energy policy, the U.S. president is severely conflicted.

Central to Biden’s strategy has been to cut off Russia’s huge revenues from exporting natural gas to Europe. He has unambiguously declared that the shortfall Europe will have in natural gas supplies from Russia will, in time, be remedied with other sources, especially with liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports from the United States.

So far so good. But Biden has always favored the environmental vision of the left wing of his own party and its implacable resistance to all forms of carbon-based fossil fuels because of their contribution to global warming.

Europe imports one-third of the natural gas it needs for electric generation, heating, and other domestic uses by pipeline from Russia. Particularly vulnerable is Germany, which depends on half of its gas imports from Russia: a dependency which it has happily allowed to grow year after year.

That was worsened when Germany turned its back on nuclear, aided by its influential Greens, after Japan’s Fukushima disaster in 2011.

Charlie Riedl, executive director of the Center for LNG at the Natural Gas Supply Association, said on the PBS program “White House Chronicle,” it will take several years to boost U.S. LNG exports to Europe and will need substantial infrastructure investment.

The United States has six operating export LNG terminals and a seventh nearly ready to enter operation. Europe has 26 main receiving terminals and eight smaller ones. Each new U.S. terminal has a price tag of around $20 billion, Riedl confirmed. Similarly, tankers must be available and gas exporters, like Qatar, are increasing their tanker fleets.

The impediments to building new natural gas infrastructure in the United States are formidable. On the same broadcast, Sheila Hollis, acting executive director of the U.S. Energy Association, a non-partisan, non-lobbying group that embraces all energy, explained, “I don’t think there is any easy way to make anything happen of this magnitude in the country, regardless of what infrastructure you’re building, or which industry’s infrastructure.

She went on to say, “I do think it will remain an ongoing saga of slogging your way through the morass of regulations, both state and federal of every conceivable variety, and the strong opposition that comes from entities like financing communities and universities that may have a particular interest in reducing CO2; and because of the magnitude, it is one that will be lit on in the regulatory setting, in the judicial setting, and in the legislative setting, both state and federal, because that is the nature of the beast.”

Moreover, Hollis said, there are environmental justice sensitivities: “Who gets the work? Where will the facilities be sited? And there will be extreme attention to environmental issues at the facilities and the pipelines.”

Biden is caught between his own plans to cut fossil fuel use in electric supply in the nation and his commitment to Europe that the United States will be a reliable supplier of fuel for their electricity needs over the long haul.

Commitment is important to the gas industry which is whipsawed between demands for natural gas and attempts to limit its use by obstructing development. New natural gas infrastructure will need to operate over several decades to recover investment — at odds with the Biden plan to reduce fossil fuel generation in the United States by 2030 and get to net-zero by 2050.

A bright spot: The industry is confident that sometime in the future, carbon can be removed from natural gas at the time of combustion. This technology is called carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) and envisages getting the carbon out of the combustion effluent before it goes into the air. It can then be used as a building material and for future gas and oil well stimulation.

According to USEA’s Hollis, the Department of Energy is working with its national laboratories and is making solid progress in perfecting the technology. Energy aficionados believe increasingly that a breakthrough is at hand.

If that is so, then Biden can shush his environmental critics and approach the future with more confidence, giving gas companies and utilities the durable assurances they need.

Meanwhile, Biden is bullish on future gas in Europe and bearish on gas in the United States. As in the Johnny Mercer song, “something’s gotta give.”

The Ukrainian diaspora is upon the world. Of the millions who are dispossessed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it is wishful thinking that on some glorious day they will all go home. In reality, the world will have to accommodate them. They can’t all stay in Poland and Romania.

One by one, the countries of Europe falteringly are stepping up to their moral and humanitarian duty. Most countries say they will take some Ukrainian refugees. The Biden administration, without clarity, has indicated that some refugees will be welcomed. What the administration is hoping is that these will be glommed onto existing Ukrainian communities in several cities.

This might be a mistake. The cities with large Ukrainian communities are New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Detroit, Cleveland and Indianapolis. In all these cities, housing is expensive and in very short supply; and there are many social problems for those at the bottom, where refugees traditionally find themselves.

Now comes an extraordinary proposal for refugee resettlement from an attorney, Christopher Smith, who practices in Macon, Georgia. He is also the honorary consul there for Denmark, but he tells me his proposal is in no way a reflection of that office and is entirely his own as a private citizen.

Smith’s sweeping and enticing proposal is that refugees from Ukraine should be settled, with federal and state assistance and with the participation of local government, not in crowded cities but in American counties that have been losing population for decades. “Those include counties here in south Georgia,” Smith told me by telephone.

You may think, from anecdotal reporting, that there is a major move from cities to the country, spurred by COVID. But Smith tells me that movement is small and doesn’t reverse the decades-long trend of county depopulation.

My own observation of this COVID-induced trend is that it applies to places like New York and Boston, where the outward movement has been to garden locales where virtual commuting can be accomplished. For example, people who have moved from Boston and New York to Rhode Island and Connecticut, and from Los Angeles to smaller outposts, or north to Washington and Oregon.

Smith said in a position paper: “There are 3,143 counties in the United States. From 2010 to 2020, approximately 1,660 (53 percent) of American counties lost population. Here in Georgia, 67 (42 percent) of 159 counties saw a reduction in population during that time span. Most but not all American counties that lost population during this 10-year period are located in rural areas.”

While counties tend to have a higher apartment and rental home vacancy rate and a lower cost of living than the national average, many of these communities have job shortages, Smith said.

“Logic would suggest that these communities would be an ideal location to host Ukrainian refugees,” he said.

The thing that struck me about Smith’s proposal is how thoroughly he has researched it. He hasn’t just sprouted an idea, he has worked out a plan and enshrined it in a draft act of Congress, which lays out the federal, state and county responsibilities and the issuance of work permits and residence certificates — and, of course, the all-important issue of funding. He has sent it to his congressman, Austin Scott, a Republican.

Smith told me that it is worth noting that Scandinavians were encouraged to populate the Midwest — as anyone who listened to “Prairie Home Companion” on NPR knows.

I don’t know whether America’s wheat farmers need help, but certainly there will be pressure to grow more wheat. The chances that wheat will be sown in the middle of Russia’s war on Ukraine are unlikely. Ukraine is a huge wheat producer. Canada brought in Ukrainian immigrants in the 1890s to help boost wheat production. It was a great success.

It seems to me that Smith’s well-conceived proposal has merit and deserves attention. It has the prima facie merit of helping a part of America that needs help, and giving succor to the most desperate of people, those uprooted by war.

The barbarity of the Russian assault on Ukraine is neither mitigated by the ineptitude of the Russian army nor can hearts be uplifted by the bravery of the Ukrainians. Murder on a colossal scale is taking place in plain sight on television day after day.

At this writing, there are 3.5 million refugees and thousands of civilian casualties reported. This is killing, killing, killing without respite. The Russian economy is destroyed, and the consequence of this bloody slaughter is affecting the world economy.

Even pusillanimous nations like India and Brazil feel the hot breath of the crazed organ grinder Vladimir Putin and his Russian bear.

The invasion of Ukraine was folly and a criminal act, but its continuation has become pure and sustained evil.

Some in the U.S. commentariat have suggested with amazing thought gymnastics that all this is because of the expansion of NATO. But if NATO hadn’t expanded after the fall of the Berlin Wall, then Russia wouldn’t have felt threatened and wouldn’t have invaded Ukraine. Nonsense. 

Russia has felt threatened in Europe since the days of the tsar. If NATO hadn’t expanded to include the Baltic nations of Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia, Russian troops would be billeted there right now.

Had Ukraine joined NATO, the United States wouldn’t be paying the price at the pump and Europe wouldn’t be shivering out the last days of winter, wondering how it will get through the coming months without enough fuel to produce electricity.

Security is the abiding fault line in Russia’s thinking about the West. Sure, St. Petersburg is close to the rest of Europe and could be overrun. And Moscow isn’t so far from European neighbors that it couldn’t be reached easily by an invader: Napoleon got there, and Hitler could have if he had been a better strategist. But most of Russia with its 11 time zones is geographically out of reach. That makes it hard to swallow the security argument.

Putin wants to restore Imperial Russia and the empire that reached even farther under communism — which makes him a diabolical romanticist. He wants to restore Russian hegemony over its former states: Ukraine first.

Larry O’Donnell, the MSNBC host, correctly postulated that for NATO, or the United States alone, to intervene to help Ukraine, nuclear war could result; war not just in Europe but also between the United States and Russia — the very thing that dominated the world from 1945 to the fall of the Soviet Union.

O’Donnell’s argument reveals the impotence that comes with nuclear weapons and sets up this question: Can we never challenge Russia, China or any other country with a substantial nuclear arsenal and the ability to deliver its weapons into the United States and Europe?

If that is so, does it inoculate Russia from invading the Baltic states?

We know the reality that lurks behind China’s ambitions for Taiwan. Is that more inevitable than ever? President George W. Bush said we would do “whatever it takes to defend Taiwan.” That is very unlikely now, if it ever was.

It isn’t that the reality of the international scene has changed so much as it has come into a clear and harsh light. However, one thing has changed: The slaughter, the unspeakable suffering in Ukraine will change the attitude of a generation to Russia in Europe. Russia will be a pariah, not a partner.

The United States fears war with Russia, but Russia, much weaker in every way, must fear war with NATO and the United States.

On a visit to Moscow, toward the end of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, I heard a four-star Russian general say, “Never again.” But the Ukraine invasion is again. Will Russia and other aggressors be deterred long after the last of the dead are buried in Ukraine, and long after the last body bag has gone back to Russia? Maybe for a generation, which is about how long it will take to rebuild the global economy after the Russian invasion of Ukraine has run its ghastly course.

Wildfires aren’t just for summer anymore. In the West and Southwest, the fire season will begin earlier this year and last longer.

If you live in a western state, take heed: That adorable cottage of yours in the woods may be consumed in flames. Small towns may feel the heat of nature’s wrath. The threat and consequences are real.

The drought that began two decades ago continues; it just gets a bit worse each year.

That is the collective view of a group of western utility executives and an eminent long-range weather forecaster who participated in a virtual press briefing which I organized and moderated for the United States Energy Association.

The prognosis of a long, hot fire season beginning in spring and extending into fall was delivered by Paul Pastelok who leads the team of long-range forecast scientists at AccuWeather.

He said, “We feel with confidence that the drought will cover a large section of the western U.S. and will extend out into the Plains, similar to the trend we saw in 2018. The Northern Plains, Four Corners region, are going to experience some pretty extreme drought but for a shorter period of time.”

The good news, if there is any, is that the authorities – yes, them — are working on mitigation in wide-ranging cooperation between the Electricity Subsection Coordinating Council (ESCC), the influential but little-known, CEO-led utility organization which liaises with government departments on cybersecurity and other issues.

In this instance, the cooperating departments include the Department of Energy and some of its national laboratories; the Agriculture Department’s Forest Service; the Department of Transportation; the Department of Homeland Security’s Federal Emergency Management Agency; and the Federal Aviation Administration.

Maria Pope, president and CEO of Portland General Electric, said she would like the FAA to expedite its regulations for drones, which are used to surveil utility lines and will be on the front lines.

But the brunt of the fire onslaught will be borne by communities and their fighters with help, where possible, from the states. Think the National Guard.

The ESCC has a wildfire working subcommittee which is headed by Pope, a star in business circles and a key figure in wildfire management. Not only does she head a utility that has been in the eye of the storm but earlier in her career, she was an executive in the forest products industry. She knows the forest as a benefactor and a malefactor.

For utilities, the issues are multiple. Many wildfires start with trees in high winds landing on power lines that arc and spark when they hit the ground.

If the forest floor is tinder dry, the result is known. Last year a late-season fire, on Dec. 30, started in the Boulder area and destroyed 1,000 homes. The cause of the fire hasn’t been identified positively.

After the threat to life and property has subsided, and the fires have either burned out or been extinguished, the painful inquests begin with accusations often directed against the power companies because they are large and visible and can be sued.

But fires start in many ways. There is, indeed, the issue of arcing and sparking from utility lines. But there is also, as Pastelok noted, lighting and hundreds of activities that can go wrong from burning refuse to picnic fires and, sadly, arson.

Technology is increasingly important in identifying the root cause and mitigation of fires. This includes data management coming from smart meters; better line surveillance with drones and sensors; and instant communications, so that if a line fails, it can be de-energized instantly, maybe in one second.

Ruth Marks, who manages distribution for the Denver-based Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, said “problem trees” – dying or dead trees near a power line — need to be identified and harvested. She also said the fire season now lasts the whole year, from January to December. Sobering.

Natural gas has been getting short shrift in the U.S. energy debate. It deserves better. Much better.

It has been battered by environmentalists who oppose exploration and the pipelines to get it to market. They are attempting to evict natural gas and force utilities into reliance on intermittent renewables.

But events in Europe may cause a rethink about natural gas, both as a transition fuel in the United States and a foreign policy tool.

Even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, natural gas was in short supply in Europe after a summer of wind drought caused European utilities to scramble for natural gas – prices went up 400 percent. Russia added to the crisis by reducing volumes flowing through the Ukrainian system that serves much of Europe.

Fear of Russian weaponization of natural gas has been an ever-present reality. Now Europe trembles, especially Germany, which has just closed its last three nuclear plants and has relied on renewables and natural gas from Russia.

In the United States, the danger is that natural gas may be pushed aside prematurely in favor of renewables, leaving the electric grid destabilized and vulnerable to severe weather. The grid is less stable today than it was 20 years ago, according to experts I speak to regularly. Environmental mandates are taking a toll, and natural gas is being pushed out before there are stable renewables and utility-scale storage.

A new assessment of natural gas is needed. Its value to the United States to counter Russia now and in the future isn’t in doubt. The United States is the world’s largest natural gas producer, and liquefied natural gas is needed as a diplomatic tool.

Domestically, though, it needs a defined place in the electricity evolution. It is an option too valuable to be elbowed out by well-meaning but not well-informed arguments.

In electricity production, natural gas is the least polluting of the three fossil fuels. It emits half the carbon dioxide of coal and heavy oil used to make electricity. Also, it doesn’t have the other pollutants which make coal so devastating to the environment. Progress is being made countering methane leaks, a serious problem.

When burned in a combined-cycle plant, favored by utilities for more than just peaking, natural gas reaches an efficiency of around 64 percent. That is a remarkably high rate of fuel to electricity. Coal-fired plants have an efficiency of about 40 percent.

Back in the 1970s, a combination of price controls and regulation served to dry up the amount of natural gas coming to market. The newly formed Department of Energy added to the sense of an end by declaring that gas was “a depleted resource.” The conventional wisdom was that it was too precious for most uses and especially for making electricity.

In 1978, Congress passed the Power Plant and Industrial Fuel Use Act. It was a prohibiting measure and went after what Congress thought were wasteful uses of natural gas such as ornamental flames and pilot lights in gas stoves. And it prohibited the burning of natural gas to make electricity.

Known simply as the “Fuel Use Act,” it was draconian. There was even a debate about whether the Eternal Flame at Arlington National Cemetery would have to be extinguished.

In 1985, deregulation began to increase the natural gas supply and two years later, the Fuel Use Act was repealed.

But the big break, the great game-changer, was fracking — first used in the late 1980s. It was developed by George Mitchell and his Mitchell Energy company with help from the DOE. Together with horizontal drilling, it would change everything quickly.

Natural gas became cheap and plentiful and the utilities, using turbines developed from aircraft jet engines, began to switch off coal and to question the cost of building nuclear plants. A new dawn had broken.

Now that happy day is in the past and utilities must make the case for gas turbine capacity to back up their alternative energy operations and as an efficient form of energy storage. Also, if hydrogen is to be the fuel of the future, it will need to use the natural gas infrastructure.

It takes years to learn to fashion something out of a block of stone. You may think you have talent, but it isn’t intuitive. You have to study stone carving, take up the mallet and chisel, waste a lot of rock, and gradually turn from novice to craftsman.

Likewise, you won’t learn the delights of English literature in a week. It takes time.

All of this can be accomplished in one extraordinary place: the American College of the Building Arts in Charleston, S.C. — a jewel of the South with its many antebellum mansions and buildings, making it a place of living history.

The college offers a full liberal arts curriculum plus a specialization in one of six building arts: Classical architecture, blacksmithing, timber framing, carpentry, plaster, and stone cutting. It owes its existence to Hugo, the Category 4 hurricane which slammed into Charleston and much of the southeast coast in 1989. Many of Charleston’s treasured homes and buildings were damaged.

Then came the second heartbreak: There was a dearth of craft workers who could put Charleston, like Humpy Dumpty, back together again. The shortage was so acute that it took more than 10 years to restore the city to what it had been pre-Hugo.

The civic pride of the city asserted itself. A group of shocked citizens vowed they wouldn’t go through that again. They would train fine artisans right there in Charleston. But they didn’t want just a trade school; they wanted a seat of learning and restoration to be part of that learning.

They didn’t want to turn out graduates who felt that they had to go through life entering through the back door. No. These would be graduates with a robust degree in liberal arts, as comfortable reading Shakespeare as helping restore a European cathedral built in his day.

So, the American College of the Building Arts was born in 1999, and it is flourishing and growing. By college size standards, it is minuscule: 120 graduates this year. But in terms of educational creativity, it is huge. It shines a light that shows the way to a new concept of education: students learning a trade they enjoy, that is highly marketable, and also getting the benefits of four years of liberal arts education.

In April 2018, I visited the college to film an episode of “White House Chronicle” on PBS and was captivated. I had never seen anything like it. A slight, young woman working at a 2,000-degree forge, making a beautiful piece of decorative ironwork, inspired by one in a French cathedral;  a woman, who had a previous career in the Coast Guard, carving stone, with an ambition to work on the National Cathedral in Washington; and a gifted, African American man, a former Marine who had traveled the world, working with big timbers in the framing shop.

Because I have an interest in words, I sat in on a literature course wondering secretly whether it was, perhaps, a bit cursory. It wasn’t. The former Marine timber framing student said the literature course, taught by Wade Razzi, who has a doctorate degree from Oxford, was his favorite, and among the authors he loved was Charles Dickens.

A friend’s daughter was attracted to the college after learning about it from my television episode. He credits the college with having done wonders for her. She is a star stone carver there, likely headed to work on Liverpool Cathedral.

The college is a beacon for these reasons:

• It gives its students a sense of purpose they might not have found otherwise: The reward of making something special and durable.
• The college accepts men and women, although Razzi told me women were often the stars. Twenty-five percent of the students are women, and they lead in valedictorians. Five percent are veterans.
• About one-third of the students, within five years of graduating, start their own contracting businesses. This is so prevalent that the college has added accounting courses so that the young entrepreneurs can keep books.
• The college must teach one language, and that is Spanish. In a recent episode of “White House Chronicle” on the college, Razzi said Spanish is taught because it is essential in the building trades, where many workers are from Latin America.

One of the college’s biggest challenges is recruiting faculty Razzi, who also serves as chief academic officer, said in that TV episode. Many faculty members come from Europe to teach arcane-in-America trades such as decorative plaster, stone carving, and blacksmithing.

Arcane but in great demand from Newport, R.I.’s mansions – called cottages — to Washington’s National Cathedral and the Capitol, to memorial gardens. Artisans are in demand and artisans with liberal arts credentials are something special: Roundly skilled and roundly educated.

The country has the Biden blues bad, and that ain’t good.

Joe Biden, 46th president of the United States, has pushed all the buttons that were supposed to be the right ones and they have produced no result or the wrong result.

Domestically, things have been bad enough. He hasn’t convinced anyone that he has a viable border policy and his point person on the issue, Vice President Kamala Harris, has no ideas and an aversion to being reminded that she is the policy chief of the border.

His stimulus package, so timely at the time, now appears to have overstimulated the economy, leading to the worst inflation since the 1970s.

Congress frustrates the president routinely. The man who spent 36 years in Congress is unable to find consensus. To the shame of the Democrats, the Guantanamo Bay prison remains open.

Crime is rampant, cities are again unsafe. The administration has been silent, pointing up a sustained ideas drought.

Abroad, things have been worse and more consequential. As vice president, Biden prided himself on his foreign policy nous. But as president, he seems to be a study in foreign policy infelicity. Doing the right thing at the wrong time is his special talent.

The speedy, ill-considered withdrawal from Afghanistan is emblematic of the Biden blunders. It led one to wonder what he is told in those daily briefings? What was he told that led him to believe that he should build on Donald Trump’s foolish negotiation with the Taliban? Biden seized that misbegotten idea and executed it.

Similarly, when a column of asylum seekers was making its way up South America from as far as Chile, didn’t the daily briefings mention this; explain that this appeared to be well-financed. If he weren’t told, what action did he take to make sure there wouldn’t be such failures going forward?

Biden persuaded Germany not to certify the Nord Stream 2 pipeline under the Baltic Sea, taking natural gas from Russia directly to Germany.

That Germany has willingly climbed between the sheets with the Russian Bear wasn’t Biden’s fault, but Nord Stream 2 was a long time in planning and construction. It all got going during the Obama years when Biden was being thought of as the vice president who understood foreign policy.

That was the time to dissuade Germany, not when it is complete and threatens to drive a wedge between Germany and NATO. Friends don’t let friends date the bear. They warn them off.

Now comes the Winter Olympics in China. Taking your marbles and going home isn’t a good strategy. The game goes on and you are out of it, as with Biden’s diplomatic boycott of the games.

That led not to a better deal for the Uighurs, but to the world being treated to innumerable images of Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin together — images that suggested they represent a new Axis that can dismember the world as they wish.

Those images are more damaging than any agreements the two caudillos concluded; they cement the sense that the West is defenseless against dictators.

In his administration, Biden’s propensity to do the right thing and get the wrong result is demonstrated in his relationship with Harris. He has worked hard to elevate her to a status she isn’t earning for herself. The administration now bills itself as the Biden-Harris administration. It was never the Obama-Biden administration.

Biden’s cabinet is filled with the right people for a charity event: good people who are likable and bland to a fault. The exceptions are Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo. Sadly, neither is in a position where they can redirect the ship of state or even nudge it back on course. If you don’t have the mettle yourself and lack the needed cunning, hire it.

It has become second nature. You hear that bad weather is coming and rush to the store to stock up on bottled water, canned and other non-perishable foods. You check your flashlight batteries.

For a few days, we are all survivalists. Why? Because we are resigned to the idea that bad weather equates with a loss of electrical power.

What happens is the fortunate have emergency generators hooked up to their freestanding houses. The rest of us just hope for the best, but with real fear of days without heat.

It happened most severely in Texas in February 2021; during Winter Storm Uri, which lasted five days, 250 people died. Recently, during the Blizzard of 2022, 100,000 people in Massachusetts endured bitter cold nights when the electricity failed. There were more power failures in the most recent ice storm.

There are 3,000 electric utilities in the United States. Sixty large ones, like Consolidated Edison, NextEra Energy, Pacific Gas and Electric, and the Tennessee Valley Authority, supply 70 percent of the nation’s electricity. Nonetheless, the rest are critical in their communities.

All utilities, large and small, have much in common: They are all under pressure to replace coal and natural gas generation with renewables, which means solar and wind. No new, big hydro is planned, and nuclear is losing market share as plants go out of service because they are too expensive to operate.

The word the utilities like to use is resilience. It means they will do their best to keep the lights on and to restore power as fast as possible if they fail due to bad weather. When those events threaten, the utilities spring into action, dispatching crews to each other’s trouble spots as though they were ordering up the cavalry. The utilities have become very proactive, but if storms are severe, it often isn’t enough.

Now, besides more frequent severe weather events, utilities are facing the possibility of destabilization on another front, due to switching to renewables before new storage and battery technology is available or deployed.

The first step to avoid new instability — and it is a critical one — is to add transmission. This would move electricity from where it is generated in wind corridors and sun-drenched states to where the demand is, often in a different time zone.

Duane Highley, president and CEO of Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, which serves four states in the West from its base in Westminster, Colorado, says new west-east and east-west transmission is critical to take the power from the resource-rich Intermountain states to the population centers in the East and to California.

“Most existing transmission lines run north to south. They aren’t getting the renewables to the load centers,” Highley says.

Echoing this theme, Alice Moy-Gonzalez, senior vice president of strategic development at Anterix, a communications company providing broadband private networks that make the grid more secure and efficient, sees pressure on the grid from renewables and from new customer demands (such as electrical vehicles) as electrification spreads throughout society.

“The use of advanced secure communications to monitor all of these resources and coordinate their operation will be key to maintaining reliability and optimization as we modernize the grid,” Moy-Gonzalez says.

Better communications are one step in the way forward, but new lines are at the heart of the solution.

The Biden administration, as part of its infrastructure plan, has singled out the grid for special attention under the rubric “Build a Better Grid.” It has also earmarked $20 billion of already appropriated funds to get the ball rolling.

Industry lobbyists in Washington say they have the outlines of the Department of Energy plan, but details are slow to emerge. Considered particularly critical is the administration’s commitment to ease and coordinate siting obstacles with the states and affected communities.

Utilities are challenged to increase the resilience of the grid they have and to expand it before it becomes more unstable.

Clint Vince, who heads the U.S. energy practice at Dentons, the world’s largest law firm, says, “We aren’t going to reach the growth in renewables needed to address climate without exponential growth in major interstate transmission. And sadly, we won’t succeed with that goal on our current trajectory. We will need significant federal intervention because collaboration among the states simply hasn’t been working within the timeframe needed.”

Better keep the flashlights handy.