The big story isn’t in Washington. It’s out West. It’s the drought.

After the fires have gone out (there are 80), the crops have failed, the herds have been culled, and the home lawns and gardens have shriveled up, the re-engineering of the West will have to begin. Many things will have to change. Technology will be asked to handle some changes.

The West must innovate both socially and technologically because you can’t move nearly 80 million people to greener lands.

There are no easy fixes for the drought that has eight Western states – Montana, Idaho, Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico — by the throat. This is a calamity with a capital C, but the enormity of the problems has hardly dawned in the East — even when the smoke from the western fires reaches all the way to New York City.

The problem here, I am sorry to say, is my fellow denizens in the Fourth Estate. There is a national disaster that may progress to a national tragedy with people losing their farms, businesses, and homes, and yet — especially on the networks — politics is all.

What is happening in the West is analogous to what happened during the Arab oil embargo, the effects of which have lasted more than two decades. The crisis had been building – there was a gasoline shortage in the summer of 1973 before the embargo – and it didn’t end until fracking technology liberated hydrocarbons in tight formations.

The West has been struggling with its water issues since the 1940s. Some mighty civil engineering work with canals and dams has helped alleviate them, or at least has postponed the reckoning.

That day of reckoning is now at hand: Eight states, and possibly more, will have to make major adjustments — not just to get through this summer, but for years and years. The jig is up; there is no quick fix.

All the water impoundments are below their historic low levels and the summer is far from over. The West’s megadrought, which began in 2000, hasn’t run its course, according to experts. The rains won’t come miraculously next year; the crucial snowpack that sustains the whole region with fresh water and hydropower, may not come either.

Revolutionary changes will be needed, especially in California. Farmers will have to look at the ways the Israelis have reduced water use through drip-feed irrigation and drought-resistant crops. They may have to stop growing thirsty crops like alfalfa.

Wastewater will have to be recycled, used again and again; first for farms and gardens and later, as the filtering technology improves, in homes. Orange County is already a leader here.

New, covered aqueducts will have to be built to convey more efficiently the limited supplies from the rivers that sustain much of the West, the Colorado and the Columbia.

Finally, there is desalination. Everyone talks about it as though it is a mature technology ready to be hooked up, bought off the shelf, so to speak. Alas, it isn’t so.

The primary technology for desalination, used in places like the Arabian Gulf, is reverse osmosis: Seawater is driven through membranes and the potable water is captured, leaving all kinds of impurities in the rejected water, as well as the salt. This brine can’t be returned to the ocean: It forms destructive plumes that kill all life, including that on the seafloor.

So, to make a dent in the water needs of California, there would have to be a major desalination industry with new ways of dispersing the brine. Further, the desalination process consumes a lot of electrical energy, something that California doesn’t have, especially when there is sparse snowpack.

California dreamin’ will need to be of a new lifestyle. This story is California big.

It wasn’t an especially sunny day last Sunday but, in my home, there was light aplenty and lightness, too.

The joy came not from the normal charges and countercharges on Sunday morning television. Instead, it was the flight into near space of Richard Branson, the show-off billionaire tycoon, aboard his own Virgin Galactic spaceship.

It was thrilling and yet, in terms of space flight, it was old hat. Not much happened there. But it was “a great get” and it aired on many news channels.

In talk show parlance a “get” is a hard-to-secure guest, and a “great get” is someone much sought after, like a political figure in controversial circumstances or simply a celebrity in convoluted love trouble.

The Branson show on Sunday was, to my mind, a “great get.”

I would submit that what made the highly televised event so compelling wasn’t that we saw Branson, swashbuckling business adventurer and balloon pilot, go weightless for a few minutes, but that we saw what engineering genius, which is well-funded, can do.

The back story is instructive, too. It is that in an ideal situation, the government pioneers a technology but private industry exploits and brings it to good fruition. Space technology has belonged to government, but it is booming now that the entrepreneurs have taken it up. It is technology transfer working. It is what has driven the continuing technological revolution.

Sure, Branson’s flight was an advertisement for himself, a show mounted by a P.T. Barnum-like impresario. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t something of a tonic for the world, so beset by negative news. It was thrilling, transcendental, and a shared adventure.

Branson made his first fortune selling record albums by mail order and then in Virgin record shops: Linda Gasparello, the journalist and my wife, says Branson went from rock to rocket. The name Virgin, now often associated with about 400 companies which he controls, dates back to that early period when an employee said that Branson and his staff were virgins in business. He liked it and it stuck, and he is virginal no more.

Branson’s great triumph may have been his battle with British Airways to establish Virgin Atlantic Airways. British Airways left no dirty trick untried to hobble the startup, but Branson weaponized public sentiment to win the day. I have a handwritten letter from Branson telling me that although he would love to attend a conference I was organizing, he was too busy doing deals to come. Writing a personal letter said something about the man.

The passengers-in-space race is enhanced by the fun narrative that there are three billionaires — Branson, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, and Elon Musk of Tesla — competing to commercialize space travel. Bezos is planning to lift off in his personally funded spacecraft on July 20. Musk — who is furthest ahead in the commercialization of space, of which passenger flight will be only a part — changed the storyline breakfasting with Branson before his flight. (I wouldn’t want to eat before such a flight. Strapped into his seat, I thought Branson looked a little green but dry.)

As a former private pilot, I have always thought there is a spiritual dimension to flight, any kind of flight, in that it has been the dream of humans — since Homo erectus first set eyes on birds — to fly. We, the favored, live in a time when not only can we fly, but we can also go into space or watch others go there.

To me, the great moment Sunday was the mothership letting the space plane go and the powering up of its jet. This was demanding, dangerous, and invigorating.

The star flying across the sky was neither Branson nor his money but superb, brilliant engineering, buttressed by the great designs of men like Burt Rutan whose talent is everywhere on display in advanced aircraft.

Aviation has its own de facto hymn. It is “High Flight” by the British-American Spitfire pilot John Gillespie Magee, who joined the Royal Canadian Air Force because the United States hasn’t yet entered the war, and who was killed in a mid-air collision over Britain in 1941. The poem begins, “Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth/And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings” and it ends with these lines, “And, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod/The high untrespassed sanctity of space./Put out my hand and touched the face of God.”

Thanks to Richard Branson, space traveler, I slipped the surly bonds of political talk last Sunday morning and soared.

Millions of Americans appear to be echoing the words of the Johnny Paycheck song “Take This Job and Shove It.” This is a sentiment that is changing the work scene, the way we work, and the future of work.

The workers of America are shuffling the deck in a way that has never happened before. It is accentuating an acute labor shortage.

I receive lists of job openings every day and the common denominator seems to be that you must show up at a place of business. Among the big and seemingly frantic employers are FedEx, Walmart, and Amazon. Warehouse workers and delivery drivers are the most sought-after employees.

To overcome the labor shortage, wages are rising and adding to the rising inflation — although what part of that rise is labor cost isn’t clear. Other factors are pandemic-induced supply chain disruptions, a tightening of food flow from California and other Western states, and the acute housing shortage. The economy is rebalancing; and so are workers, reassessing their lives and making changes.

There has been a severe shortage of skilled workers for a long time. It has been felt almost everywhere from construction to electric line workers. It is just worse now, exacerbated by immigration restrictions and workers who have joined the reshuffle.

During the lockdown, millions of individuals have assessed what they do and, apparently, found it wanting.

America’s workforce isn’t returning to the jobs that they held before the lockdown. Some are trying new things; others are demanding changes in the workplace. There is a demand for more remote working. The rat race is running short of willing rats.

Commuting seems to be the one big no-no. People in the major work hubs like New York, Washington, Chicago, and San Francisco have sampled the joys and the failings of working from home, and commuting has lost.

I know people who used to spend four or five hours every day getting to work and back home in all these cities. Sitting in a traffic jam is neither creative nor the best use of human life, these people are now saying.

In the movie “Network,” Peter Finch bellows, “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” That is the new sentiment towards rigid travel and rigid work schedules. Working from home has taken people up the hill and shown them the valley, and they have liked the valley.

Other workers, particularly at the lower end of the work scale, have wondered whether they wouldn’t be happier doing something else now that they have had time to ponder. A friend of mine’s daughter who was a professional waiter in Florida now works for a printer. She has found she gets a more dependable income, better hours, and that incalculable: a happier work environment.

I love small business, and I believe it to be the essential force for innovation and job creation. But it is also where petty boss-tyrants flourish. Lousy, egomaniacal employers aren’t hard to find, especially in the restaurant business.

When I worked as a waiter in New York, between journalism jobs, I knew waiters who dreamed of the great restaurant where the tips are generous and, above all, the “patron is nice.” Unseen, there is a lot of cussing and pressure in any restaurant and job security is unknown.

Enforced downtime has caused many to wonder whether they are even in the right line of work; whether the money, prestige, or social recognition that may have gone with their old job was worth it.

For others, the gig economy has beckoned, where the employer has been cut out. Particularly, this is true of young people in communications and related work. Geeks are a hot item and can contract directly. But others, from landscape gardeners to plumbers, are going gig. The downside is there are no benefits, from Social Security deductions to pensions and health care. Society is lagging in recognizing this new arena of work.

Peculiarly, we aren’t at full employment. Unemployment is hovering around 5.9 percent and has gone up slightly as the summer has progressed. This raises the question of how many of the formerly employed are now in the gig economy, skewing the figures.

We are in what is, in effect, a post-war recovery. Traditionally, that is a time for social readjustment, for old bonds to be loosed, and for new energy to be released. Is it time to sack the boss?

In this, the Information Age, truth was supposed to be the great product of the times. Spread at the speed of light, and majestically transparent, the world of irrefutable truth was supposed to be available at the click of a key.

The internet was to be like “Guinness World Records,” conceived by Sir Hugh Beaver, managing director of the Guinness Brewery, when he missed a shot while bird hunting in Ireland in 1951. This resulted in an argument between him and his hosts about the fastest game bird in Europe, the golden plover (which he missed) or the red grouse. The idea for a reference book which would settle that sort of thing was born — and which could help promote Guinness and settle barroom disputes.

The first edition was published as “The Guinness Book of Records” in 1955 and was an instant bestseller. You might have thought there was a thirst for truth as well as beer.

Despite the Supreme Court’s repeated rejection of any suggestion that the presidential election of 2020 was fraudulent and that it wasn’t won by Joe Biden, the Republican governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, has called a rare special session of the Texas legislature to pass a restrictive voting package that will likely include the power for the legislature to overturn any election result it deems fraudulent.

This is happening across Republican-controlled states. They are ready to fix something big that isn’t broken.

Abbott has called the special session because the Texas legislature — thanks to the Democrats denying him quorum in a parliamentary procedure — didn’t get what amounts to a rollback of democracy in the regular session. Second time lucky.

What these Republicans are doing is equivalent to forcing men to wear blinders so they don’t stare at naked women on our streets, even though there are no naked women on our streets. Better be sure.

Behind all this refutation of truth is the Big Lie. It is promoted, cherished, and burnished by former President Donald Trump and those who swallowed his brand of fact-free ideology. The Big Lie is with us and will cast its shadow of pernicious doubt over future elections down through time. The loser will cry fraud and state lawmakers will, under the new scheme of things, be entitled to overturn election results, violating the will of the people to serve their own political goals.

Mark Twain wrote a short essay in 1880 entitled “On the Decay of the Art of Lying.” If Twain were alive today, he might be tempted to retitle his work “The Ascent of the Art of Lying.”

The extraordinary thing about the Big Lie is its blatancy; the fact that it has been found untrue by the courts and by every investigation, yet it rolls on like the Mississippi, unyielding to fact, unimpeded by truth.

The Big Lie is an avalanche of political desire over democratic fact. It introduces corrosive doubt where there is no justification. It is a virus in the body politic that may go dormant but won’t be eradicated. The host body, democracy, is weakened and the infection can flare at any time, triggered by political ambition.

Historically, there have been primary sources of information and tertiary sources of doubt or refutation. For example, some believed the oil companies were sitting on a gasoline substitute that would convert water to fuel. That is a falsehood that has been spread since the internal combustion engine created a need for gasoline. It was believed by a few conspiracy theorists and laughed off by most people.

When the fax machine came into being in the mid-1970s, there were those who thought that the Saudi Arabian regime would fall because information about liberal society was getting into the country. Instead, Saudi conservatism hardened and there was no great liberalization. Today Saudis are online and there is no uprising, no government in exile, no large expatriate community seeking change. Truth hasn’t overwhelmed belief.

It is an awful truism that people believe what they want to believe, even if that requires the suppression of logic and the overthrow of fact. Gradually all facts become suspect, and the lie fights hand to hand with the truth.

As newspaper people joke, “Don’t let the facts stand in the way of a good story.” Democracy isn’t a good story; it is the great story of human governance. And it is being subverted by lies.

Going to the border and harrumphing won’t solve the very real immigration problem, which pits our humanity against our sovereign entitlement to say what kind of people we are.

We are not alone in this struggle.

The world is on the move. Untold millions of people who live south of our border with Mexico want to move north. Equally untold millions who live in Africa would like to move to Europe; and millions in eastern Europe want to live in western Europe.

From the Indian subcontinent, millions would like to move to Europe, specifically to Britain. Millions of East Asians have their eyes set on Australia.

Within these geographic areas, people also are on the move. Millions from Venezuela have flooded their neighboring countries. Likewise in Africa, where war and famine are ever-present, people try and walk to a marginally better future in another country. In the Middle East, Jordan and Lebanon are flooded with refugees first from Palestine, then from Iraq and Syria.

As The Economist pointed out recently, a slum in Spain is incalculably superior to a slum in Kenya.

The drivers for migration are poverty, violence, crop failure, and political collapse. And persecution, ethnic and religious; for example, the Rohingya in Myanmar have sought refuge in Bangladesh.

The goal of the migrant is the same worldwide: A better, safer life.

The political price paid by the stable democracies continues to be huge. It played a role in Donald Trump’s election as president and will play a role in the next presidential election, whether Trump runs or not. It was the great driver for Brexit and Britain’s seeming self-harming. It has driven the move of Hungary, under Viktor Orban, to autocracy.

It is hard to stop people who have nothing to lose from crossing a frontier if they can. But they aren’t the only migrants. Some, a small number, are opportunists. These are the migrants who overstay student visas, manipulate qualifications for residence, and willfully circumvent the law or contract so-called green card marriages.

But they aren’t what the border crisis is about — any more than it is what the overloaded boats crossing the Mediterranean Sea is about. It is the physical manifestation of desperation.

Because the migration problem is so complex – human problems are almost by definition complex— it isn’t a matter of resolution so much as management. We want, for example, immigrants with high-tech skills, but we are worried about the impact of millions of desperate peasants walking across the deserts.

Now a new driver of migration has opened: global warming. The heat and drought hitting the U.S. West Coast is also hitting Central America and will affect livability.

Adding to the complexity of the immigration conundrum is the labor shortage. Construction depends on immigrant labor, farming on contract labor, and slaughterhouses and chicken processors can’t stay open without immigrants to do the unappealing work.

One small step forward would be a sensible work permit.

It seems to me that the wall — Trump’s wall – isn’t a bad thing. It is a declaration, a symbol. It won’t deter desperate people and it won’t end smuggling. The latter is going to get worse with drones and even autonomous aircraft that can bring their lethal cargoes deep into the United States.

While there is an insatiable market for drugs here, smuggling will continue and even increase. And while that is so, lawlessness south of the border will accelerate.

Sadly, despite Vice President Kamala Harris’s statements, we aren’t going to repair the countries to our south overnight. But we might look to repairing our drug policy, seeing if that can be adjusted to take the profit out of the trade. Except for the gradual, local legalization of marijuana, we haven’t contemplated drug management, short of prohibition, in a century. A new look is due.

There is no single policy that is going to solve the human misery south of the border which drives so many to risk their lives or, through love, to send their children north.

Therefore immigration policy will never be a total, sweeping thing, but rather an ad hoc affair: We need some immigrants, we don’t want others; we have big hearts, but we fear immigration that is unchecked.

We fear the political, cultural, and social change immigrants will bring, especially if they are of a common language and background. Pain in Central America is political torture in the United States.

Kamala Harris shone in the Senate when she was asking questions in hearings. That is where the idea that she might have presidential possibilities flourished. Democrats, observing her surefootedness, were led to think, “Here is the next Barack Obama.”

But the shine is off Harris and the tarnish is setting in.

When Harris ran for president, the only evidence of that hearing-room confidence was when she attacked front-runner Joe Biden in the Democratic debates. She implied he was the proprietor of old ideas and hinted that he wasn’t up to date on matters of race.

So, it was extraordinary that Biden chose Harris to be his running mate. There were other strong contenders among those who had sought the Democratic nomination, and many more who hadn’t run for president. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) is the one who should have been chosen: a tough, well-qualified woman of her times.

Biden, in choosing Harris, heard the music of diversity which has been turned up of late. He felt the need to make history and to show that he was in accord with the values of today.

But he must have had some dealings with Harris when he was vice president; observed her in action in the Senate and heard about the difficulty she had organizing her small Senate staff. He must have done the political equivalent of due diligence. And he must have been cognizant of the damage Sarah Palin did to John McCain’s candidacy in 2008.

Whereas Obama appeared not to think of himself as being of color, Harris clings to it. Her journey intrigues her; Obama’s didn’t intrigue him. He traveled it with purpose and dignity.

Now it must worry the president to learn, as the rest of us have, that Harris seems to have no ideas. Her public remarks are flip at worst and off-the-shelf liberal at best.

What does she see as the future for America? This isn’t laid out or even discernable. We need to know her vision because she is vice president to an old man – the metaphorical heartbeat away.

Harris and Biden have chosen to believe that solidarity at the top is an important message, hence the frequent references in White House announcements to the “Biden-Harris Administration.” In public, Harris is often at Biden’s side. But she often seems to be standing there as his girl Friday, not as the second-in-command.

In his well-reported piece in The Atlantic, Edward-Isaac Dovere hunted for the real Harris and didn’t appear to find her. He notes that she asks good, hard questions, like a good prosecutor, but as she dodges reporters, they aren’t able to ask good, hard questions of her.

It isn’t a given Democrats will back Harris if Biden turns out to be a one-term president which given his age, 78, is a reasonable supposition. But ditching her would be hard because it might cost the party its progressive wing and keeping her might cost them as dearly in the center.

Republicans are salivating at the thought of running against Harris. She is the bright sun in their darkening sky.

The immigration assignment seems to have been thrust on Harris. It is unlikely she sought it. She doesn’t appear to have grasped it with relish. Save for brief visits to Guatemala and Mexico, she has done and said little.

Harris is finally looking at the chaos on the border herself. She needs to present a better idea than championing what amounts to nation-building in Central America. That has been tried and tried again and failed.

She isn’t going to solve the pain inherent in the immigration challenge, but it is a wonderful opportunity for her to give us her view of America, and what we might expect from a President Harris. Another assignment that could be thrust upon her.

The severe drought gripping the Western states looks set to reach into all lives in the nation and into every pocket.

The unbearable heat for those living in the West, with record-high temperatures stretching from Wyoming to the Mexican border and from the Pacific to the Mississippi, will impact the rest of the country as well.

Scientists have classified this monstrous baking as a megadrought. There hasn’t been regular rain or mountain snow in the West for more than 20 years.

To call it a scorcher is to underestimate a catastrophe that has the possibility of reaching near-biblical proportions. This is big and there is no quick fix. None.

The drought means epic disruptions, merciless rearrangement.

First, of course, there is no water, which means much economic activity may slow or cease. Farmers won’t be able to grow crops or raise livestock. Food prices that are already high from the pandemic’s disruptions will go even higher.

The electricity supply will be strained and may be curtailed because of reduced hydroelectric production. The 13 Western states get more than 22 percent of their electricity from hydropower dams, located mostly in Washington, according to the National Hydropower Association.

In today’s world, farmers depend on electricity to water crops and livestock, milk cows, dry grain, and freeze produce.

The first measurable disruption of the summer will be from breakdowns in the California food supply chain. Prices in supermarkets will reflect the impact of the drought on California, which acts as the nation’s truck farm. If you eat it, it grows in California, but only when there is water for irrigation.

The rivers of the West are running dry. The reserves of water in the great dams on the major rivers, especially the Columbia and the Colorado, which act as the lifelines of much of the West, are way below normal.

Manufactured goods from Western states will be affected if power shortages are extended and widespread. Wildfires will abound and have already started their annual scourge.

In quality-of-life terms, electricity shortages will be particularly brutal for the people living in areas served by the grid in the West, known as the Western Interconnection. Without air conditioning, many people will feel like they have taken up residence in hell. Lives will be lost.

The historical move of Americans from the Northeast to the South and Southwest will be in question, if not reversed.

Droughts aren’t ended because it rains. It takes years of sustained precipitation, ideally falling gently, to restore that which the heat has taken away.

According to those who keep track of these things, the West isn’t the only part of the country suffering drought. Most states are reporting reduced rainfall, including the traditional soggy regions of New England.

No one can predict when the Great Western Drought will break, but political fights breaking out over the distribution of what water remains, followed by litigation, are foreseeable.

Living through drought is a uniquely joyless experience as clear blue skies change from being emblematic of nature’s bounty to being the cruelest of deceptions, the smiling face of betrayal.

Science can come to the rescue, as it did in the record speed with which COVID-19 vaccines were developed. But usually, it takes a long time, as with fracking which changed energy shortage to energy abundance. That took decades.

Finally, beware of brave talk about desalination. That takes a lot of energy and, if it is to be done at a meaningful scale, a giant new environmental problem results: What to do with millions of tons of salt?

We used to worry about climate change in Africa, an electrical engineer in San Francisco told me, but now we have to worry about it in California. Actually, everywhere.

After the long, dark night of the pandemic, many are predicting a rosy dawn followed by a bright summer day. The feeling is that we, the people, have borne the battle and can now celebrate the victory.

But recoveries are tricky, and this recovery will be trickier than most because we are coming out of hibernation into a place changed radically from the one where we began our COVID-19-avoidance slumber. We isolated in one world and are reconnecting in another.

Enthusiasm flows from a sense of accumulated demand and already evident brisk economic activity.

There is a labor shortage despite unemployment at 5.8 percent. I have been following job offerings across the country (I review dozens at a time) and this would appear to be a good time to get a new job or change up. Employers are sounding desperate; they are paying more and being accommodating.

Unfortunately, tight labor markets and rising house prices are often a harbinger of inflation to come.

Yet there are some wondrous possibilities. On the plus side, we are awakening into a new world of technology-driven change.

In transportation, the surge in electric vehicles is here to stay. Ford’s announcement that next year it will offer an all-electric F-150 pickup truck is significant. It breaks down technical barriers and, significantly, it also breaks down social ones.

Working men and farmers who have been dubious about electric vehicles, regarding them as being only for effete liberals, now can embrace the electric vehicle revolution. The electric F-150 will be a milepost in the electrification of transportation and socially changing attitudes.

New materials, like graphene nanotubes and new ways of production using additive manufacturing, known commonly as 3D printing, will change the factory floor as well as add to the possibility of on-site production and the deployment of new, small factories.

Interconnectivity, sped by 5G, and the massive deployment of sensors will have its impact from the checkout at the grocery store to medical diagnosis, much of it done remotely as part of the swing to telemedicine.

Already, Domino’s Pizza is testing autonomous delivery vehicles in Houston. Like those ubiquitous scooters in cities, this will spread on the ground — and in the air, as drones get into the game.

COVID-19 has stimulated not just medical research but also a general interest in research which will in turn promote more public funding. The vaccine successes reestablished a certain level of confidence in medical science.

But there are old-economy realities ahead.

Real estate is in boom and bust simultaneously. The future of office towers is uncertain, and the future of shopping centers is precarious. The possibility of home buyers finding affordable houses is remote. Want to start married life living in a tent pitched in an abandoned department store?

A surge of homelessness is expected to follow the ending of the moratorium on evictions. Tens of thousands may be evicted as they haven’t paid rent for a year and won’t be able to do so. An equal number will be sitting in the dark as utilities finally start disconnecting for unpaid bills. One utility, CPS Energy in San Antonio, Texas, has $105 million in uncollected bills. Multiply that across the country.

The federal government has, as it were, shot its wad, in stimulus and can’t be expected to step in and help renters with their back rent or electricity customers with their accumulated bills.

There is another disrupter on the horizon. It is drought, the worst recorded, which is drying up California and much of the West.

Expect reduced food production, affecting the whole country with higher prices, a terrible wildfire season, and even a shortage of electricity as dams across the West (including Grand Coulee on the Columbia River and Hoover on the Colorado River) will cut electricity output due to low water.

The mighty Colorado — the life force for so much in the West, including farming and electricity production — is running seriously low and will continue to decline as summer progresses. Hardship in the West will be felt in the North, South and East.

A new Dust Bowl? Technology hasn’t yet learned to make rain.

Normally, a trial involving a nuclear power plant would garner national attention.

But there has been a significant struggle underway over an unfinished nuclear power plant in Hollywood, Ala., and nary a word of it has caught national media attention. Even in the area affected by this trial, served by the giant Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), coverage has been modest. The importance of new green energy hasn’t been raised, which is the back story here.

The bench trial (before a single judge) which opened in Huntsville, Ala. on May 16 and concluded three days later involves the two units of TVA’s Bellefonte nuclear plant.

TVA started construction on the plant in 1975, then suspended it. Later TVA revived construction, and finally mothballed the plant in 2o15.

A year later, TVA declared the plant surplus to its needs and put it up for sale. This attracted just three bidders and a purpose-specific company, Nuclear Development LLC, won. It was the high bidder at just $111 million. Two lower bidders both planned to cannibalize the plant and ship parts to other plants, some abroad.

TVA accepted the Nuclear Development bid without reservation, or none was expressed. According to Nuclear Development, the company went ahead inventorying the plant and doing customary due diligence prior to the deal closing after two years.

When the deal was to close in November 2018, TVA asked first for a two-week extension and then scrapped the deal, claiming the purchaser had failed to get the necessary licenses transferred from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, as required by the Atomic Energy Act. The judge has already affirmed this much in a pre-trial opinion.

TVA told me in a statement, “Nuclear Development had two years to obtain the necessary Nuclear Regulatory Commission approval to transfer Bellefonte’s NRC-issued construction permits. Nuclear Development failed to obtain NRC approval before closing, making it illegal for TVA to close the sale.”

Bill McCollum, president of Nuclear Development, told me that the license issue wasn’t raised in the time from the sale in 2016 to the abrupt change of heart on the verge of signing in November 2018. NRC hasn’t been a party to the trial and neither has any other federal agency. After the cancellation, Nuclear Development immediately sued for breach of contract.

The dispute is important in the national context with the Biden administration straining to end carbon emissions from electricity generation and the two units of Bellefonte representing between them 2,700 megawatts of clean green power.

There is some controversy over the state of completion of the plant, but Unit 1 is put at 88 percent by the purchaser and Unit 2 at around 58 percent.

McCollum knows the plant: A career nuclear engineer, he was the chief operating officer at TVA until he retired in 2011. Previously, he served for 33 years in the highly respected Duke Energy nuclear program.

Nuclear Development is owned by Franklin Haney of Chattanooga and his family, who have amassed a fortune in real estate development in Tennessee and around Washington, D.C.

Creative financing has been Haney’s specialty, and he had devised a plan to finish the Bellefonte plant using private funding and federal tax credits and loan guarantees. He first shared this possible plan with TVA in 2013 — so it has been long-germinating.

Haney had worked with TVA on creative financing for another nuclear project. He was a known quantity to TVA.

Purchaser sources believe that TVA pulled back when it realized that Nuclear Development wanted to sell its electricity output from Bellefonte to the City of Memphis, TVA’s largest customer, at a discount. Otherwise, it could have made the sale contingent on the license transfers.

At a time when clean air is a national priority, it seems the litigation in Alabama is more than a commercial dispute. It is an environmental one. After all, TVA is a federal independent agency, and the NRC is a federal independent commission. Couldn’t they have worked out the licensing problem before it came to legal fisticuffs?

In my years of writing about TVA, it has always been a nuclear champion and keenly aware of its social responsibility, having been born in the New Deal.