“This is not your father’s Oldsmobile,” said the car ad tag line. Well, this is not your father’s electric utility.

The traditional electric utility is a simple ABC construct: The electricity is generated in one place (A) and sent down a wire (B) to the customer (C). In today’s electric world, power is generated from many sources and wires carry the current to and from diverse points, switching in fractions of seconds.

Renewables — wind and solar — are driving the changes in the electric utility industry, but so are new and different demands on the utilities from customers, and new operating environments which include aberrant weather, wildfires, and cyberattacks.

To cope with this more difficult environment utilities are digitizing: They are rapidly becoming connected. “The future utility will be driven by data analytics plus communications,” says Joe Weiss, a leading electric industry consultant in cybersecurity, particularly relating to programmable controllers and transformers.

This future depends on broadband, which can carry vast amounts of data almost instantly, allowing the data to be analyzed and acted on in something close to real-time.

Anterix, a Woodland Park, N.J.-based company, has just announced the formation of an extraordinary collaborative grouping — which it calls an “ecosystem” — of 37 high-tech companies to help the utilities with their broadband transition. This ecosystem includes ABB, Cisco, GE, Ericsson, and Motorola, and is a de facto brain trust which will assist the utilities’ move into the digital future — turning them into what some are already calling “virtual utilities.”

That, to my mind, is an exaggeration. But the value of data and data management is not.

Data is being called the new oil and not without cause. It contains a treasure chest of information which, when unlocked, can reform utility practices, and can help prepare for emergencies.

Arshad Mansoor, president of the Electric Power Research Institute, says data can help the utilities “wring more” out of the existing infrastructure. That is more power from everywhere — from big central stations to dams to wind turbines and solar arrays. Also, data will be the cornerstone of smart city planning.

Anterix, a relatively small but visionary firm, has licenses for a substantial amount of critical 900-megahertz spectrum. It is offering this to the utilities as the platform for private broadband networks. Already two important utilities, Ameren and San Diego Gas & Electric, have signed up. Separately, experimental licenses have been issued for 11 test sites, ranging from the giant and influential New York Power Authority to Texas State University.

The companies in this ecosystem will advise, competitively design, and build out these networks, which will use the current standard LTE (4G) technology.

Every utility CEO I have questioned tells me that what keeps them awake nights is cybersecurity. That worry is heightened after the attacks on SolarWinds and the Colonial Pipeline. Private networks offer secure communications, totally free of other networks and the internet, which is appealing to the utilities as they continue to bolster against cyberattacks.

As for physical protection, Rob Schwartz, president and CEO of Anterix, says with a private network and a full deployment of sensors throughout the utility’s system, if a line breaks, the utility’s control center will know about it before the broken line hits the ground and it can be instantly de-energized, avoiding fires and danger to the public.

Around utilities these days “resilience” is a watchword. Private communications networks can be an important part of resilience, says Schwartz.

It isn’t like it was in dad’s day. We didn’t use the word ecosystem then, let alone apply it to strengthening utilities.

The restaurants are back. Bravo! Across the country, restaurants are open or beginning to open. Cheers!

But there is something amiss. Something unexpected and as-yet-unexplained is going on: There is a national shortage of restaurant workers.

During the lockdown, I was among many who lamented the fate of those who prepped, cooked, served, and cleaned up, enduring bad hours, difficult conditions, and uncertain earnings.

However, there have always been those who want to work in restaurants. For some, like college students, it is a way of earning on the journey to somewhere else. For others, and there are many, it is because they love the ethos of restaurant life: its people intensity, and its real-time energy and urgency.

And for those who link ambition with acumen, restaurant work has always fostered the possibility of, as I have heard waiters say, “a place of my own.” Chez Moi beckons to those who would sell foie gras, as well as those who would sell hot dogs.

For unabashed entrepreneurs, it is probably impossible to beat restaurateurs. The chance of self-employment, to my mind, is the great motivation of the free-spirited. A food truck is a start and may be enough.

We knew the pandemic would change things. But to change employment in the restaurant industry, even a reduced one? That isn’t only a puzzle, but also a hint of how the pandemic has altered things.

There are those in Congress and the statehouses who hold that restaurant workers are lolling at home because they would rather collect unemployment benefits. I doubt that there are hundreds of thousands of Americans who are so lazy, so work-averse that they would rather stay home — after more than a year of staying home — than returning to their restaurant jobs.

Something else is happening.

Horizons have changed, new jobs have been found, and the grueling but satisfying work of restaurants has given over to something else. After the plague, a new dawn.

The country is resetting, and lives are being reset, too. A waitress I know of in Florida found work in a print shop. She prefers the regular pay there to the uncertain income from waitressing. That is a reset in her life.

As we go forward, as the pandemic is less dominant in our lives, we are going to experience changes — some anticipated, some surprising like the restaurant labor shortage.

We don’t know whether the full complement of workers will go back to their offices; we don’t know how schools will deal with the lost year, and we don’t know whether the mini migration from town to country that has been a feature of the last year is a trend to stay or a product of panic.

What we do know and rejoice in is that we can go back to being restaurant patrons. In brief travels around New England, Washington, D.C., and Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., I found people are eating out with joy.

Restaurants are milestones of life. It is in them we celebrate birthdays and anniversaries, advance romance, or simply eat something that we wouldn’t get at home.

But that isn’t all. Restaurants, however modest, are destinations. During this long pandemic, we have missed having a destination.

Restaurants in all societies are part of the fabric of how we live. Eating out is woven into our lives, whether it is a humble hamburger or a great ethnic food feast. The first step in the American Dream for many immigrant families is to start a restaurant, to employ the social capital that they brought with them: their cuisine.

Bon appétit! We need restaurants because, in their great variety, they add spice to our lives, especially after the long lockdown.

In case you don’t know, it is, the White House has announced, Older Americans Month.

They say, in the newspaper game, “Write what you know.” I find I know about being “older.” That sounds just a bit kinder than the bald “old.”

Chalmers M. Roberts wrote a wonderful book, “How Did I Get Here So Fast?: Rhetorical Questions and Available Answers from a Long and Happy Life.” Quite so.

I was the youngest at everything for a long time. I didn’t go to college, so I got a head start in journalism. Leaving school at 16 wasn’t then considered a life sentence of being second-rate. In those days and that place, Southern Rhodesia, a college education was a rarity; and people who had one were regarded as wise, even if they were stupid, as they frequently were.

There was a different social dynamic in London, where I launched myself on the legendary Fleet Street four years later. Few had been to college and those who had were regarded in the popular press not with reverence, as they had been in Africa, but with hostility. I was even hired at the BBC.

When a very nice man, Roger Wood, became editor of The Daily Express, there was consternation. He was a university graduate and, to make matters worse, from Oxford. The end of our hallowed way of life (phony expenses claims, heavy drinking, and bad food) was at hand. En masse, the denizens of the newspaper world went to the pubs to mutter darkly about the imminent collapse of civilization. Change often is greeted with the sense that civilization is over.

Years later, I told Wood about the near insurrection his appointment to the popular London newspaper’s editorship had caused. He was surprised. The discontent had never reached the editor’s office.

In my next stop, New York, I was told, “No degree, no work.” At least not in television, and not at The New York Times. All three television networks wouldn’t grant me an interview even though I had been a scriptwriter at the BBC.

Perplexingly, The New York Times told me I could be an editor, but I could never hope to write in the newspaper because of my lack of a college degree. Go figure! You can’t write here, but you can fiddle with what others have written.

Despite this gaping hole in my past, I’ve managed and even pocketed an honorary degree along the way. I’ve lectured at a trove of universities, from Harvard and MIT to the University of Southern Mississippi. While, I think, for science there is no substitute for college, for the rest I’m less convinced.

These days, a heavy burden is put on people who don’t get at least two years of a college education, and an even heavier one on those who leave high school. Here, the language is indicative of the social stigma: You don’t “leave high school,” you “drop out.” That implies at a young age, a life going south, headed for repetitive failure.

The social pressure for an orthodox education is immense. The Biden administration, in its endless good intent, may be adding to the pressure on those who, for many reasons, took a different route in their lives. The role of the universities isn’t blameless. They have a predatory streak. They are as money-hungry as any corporation, shaking down the alumni and justifying it with moral superiority.

Treating formal education as the foundation of a social class is pernicious and destructive at all levels.

I used to fly light aircraft with a brilliant pilot — the best I have ever known. But despite skills and knowledge far above average, he was precluded from getting hired by the airlines: He didn’t finish college. Instead, he went off to fly airplanes.

A scientist of real ability, a friend of mine, who climbed high in Big Pharma was sidelined not because she was a woman, but because she didn’t have a doctorate, only a masters. So she became an administrator.

Governments are right to emphasize learning. However, they need to demand thoroughness and excellence in primary and secondary schools. Our public schools are a disgrace and damage children long before they decide whether they want to continue to college.

Now that I am an “older American,” I wouldn’t deprive anyone of a joyful life, as I have had, by limiting their opportunities with rigid orthodoxy about college. The university mission should be learning not class branding. I was lucky. I dodged the branding industry, known as college.

When we look back on the convulsion that is going to reset America — the great technology-driven revolution that will extend to nearly every corner of American life — it may be named for President Joe Biden, but it won’t be his revolution. It is innovation’s revolution. He will help finance it and smooth it out, but it is already happening and is accelerating.

Biden’s typically soft speech to Congress (no stemwinder he) was a wish list of things dear to him, but also an acknowledgment of what already is in motion.

Technology is rampant and government’s role should be to provide partnership and, above all, standards, according to two savants of the tech world, Jeffrey DeCoux, chairman of the Autonomy Institute, and Morgan O’Brien, a visionary in U.S. wireless telecommunications, now executive chairman of Anterix, a company providing private broadband wireless networks to utilities. Above all, they said in an interview with me for the PBS program “White House Chronicle,” standards for the new technology are essential.

Partial interconnection with different appliances, from road sweepers to drone delivery vehicles speaking only to identical devices, will be self-defeating. The internet without international standards would have failed.

Biden is set to preside over the greatest industrial leap forward since steam provided shaft horsepower to make factories a reality. If Congress allows, the Biden administration will finance much of the upgrading of the old infrastructure. It also will be called upon to be part of the new infrastructure, the technological one. That will be expensive; both DeCoux and O’Brien warned that it will take huge sums of money to build out complete 5G broadband networks, which will carry the load of interconnectivity.

For the nation to leap forward, these networks need to bring 5G broadband to every corner of it, O’Brien said. It can’t be allowed to serve only those places where population density makes it profitable, like cities.

In his speech to Congress, Biden laid out a revolutionary abstract for the future of the nation. The human side of the Biden infrastructure plan — things like daycare, free community college, better health care, prescription drug pricing — is the true Biden agenda.

The technology revolution is seen by the president not for what it is, a resetting of everything in America, but rather as a way to job creation. It will create jobs, but that isn’t the driving force. The driver is and has been innovation: science helping people. That, in turn, will bring about a surge of productivity and prosperity, and with that, new jobs, quality jobs – robots will soon be flipping hamburgers and painting houses.

This other agenda, the one that will make the fundamental difference between the nation of today and the nation of tomorrow, is the technological revolution. The evolutionary forces for this upheaval have been gathering since the microprocessor started things moving in the 1970s.

At the core of the coming changes is interconnectivity. That is what will craft the future. Cars on highways will be connected with each other through thousands of sensors, and these will speed traffic and enhance safety both for those with drivers and new autonomous ones. Likewise, drones will deliver many goods and they will need to be interconnected and have superior flight management. Every aspect of endeavor will be involved, from managing railroads to increasing electricity resilience and the productivity of the electric infrastructure.

In an interview on the Digital Roundtable, a webinar from Texas State University, this week, Arshad Mansoor, president of the Electric Power Research Institute, said improved interconnectivity could increase available electricity from dams and power plants often without new construction. He explained that interconnectivity wouldn’t only be essential to managing diverse generating sources, like wind and solar, but also in wringing more out of the whole system.

Technology has gotten us through the pandemic. Most obviously in the huge speed at which vaccines were developed, but also in our ability to meet virtually and the effectiveness of online ordering and delivery.

By nature, and by record, Biden is a get-along-go-along politician, a zephyr, as we heard in his address to Congress. But history looks as though it will cast him as a transformative president, a notable leader presiding over great winds of change.

“Why not?” Those words make up one of the most powerful rhetorical questions in the English language.

Ersel Evans, the late nuclear visionary and my great friend, was famous for tackling difficult problems by saying, “Why not?” When he retired, his staff at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site presented him with a video of many circumstances where he dealt with a challenge and a new course of action with his signature phrase.

Why not is often the necessary question to overhaul orthodoxy when orthodoxy has become rigid and exclusionary. Dr. Ronald Pinkel, the first medical director and CEO of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, confronted childhood leukemia in 1962, then considered a painful end to a short life. At that time five drugs were given sequentially to children with leukemia, and they sometimes prolonged life.

Pinkel’s solution: Why not administer all five drugs at the same time? Orthodoxy said each of these drugs was a powerful poison and might kill the child. His answer was that doctors knew the child would die anyway, so why not try something radical? It worked and using a drug “cocktail” is the basis of treating many diseases nowadays, from AIDS to childhood cancers.

Medicine is often the victim of its orthodoxies. Once procedures and approaches are established, it is hard to divert practitioners from these courses of action.

Take COVID-19. It is now treated with antiviral drugs and steroids. Patients with severe pneumonia — for that is what develops — are put on ventilators and given oxygen. That is a long and expensive procedure that leaves a trail of damage to the lungs, heart, and possibly to the immune system.

But there is a wondrous way of treating the inflammation, which is the killer with COVID-19 pneumonia. It is low-dose radiation therapy (LDRT) — about one-eightieth of the dose for cancer, according to Dr. James S. Welsh, a radiation oncologist at Loyola University Medical Center and the Edward Hines, Jr. Veterans Affairs Hospital, and a former president of the American College of Radiation Oncology. A devout proponent of LDRT, Welsh thinks it is only preconceived concerns about radiation and a fear of it that keeps this valuable therapy from saving lives.

He, along with Jerry Cuttler, a veteran Canadian nuclear scientist, point to a time 70 years ago when viral pneumonia was routinely cured with LDRT. There is a trove of cohort information about the effectiveness of this treatment. It can be accessed on the web. Go look it up.

India is currently facing one of the greatest health crises any country has seen in modern times. COVID-19 may yet rival the plagues of old in its lethality in India.

So why not try low-dose radiation to save the lives of those lucky enough to make it to an Indian hospital? If administered in time, research shows it arrests the cytokine storm, which is the inflammation that kills COVID-19 patients.

The treatment is known in India. I have read a study on the use of low-dose radiation to treat COVID-19 patients in India, conducted last year by Dr. Kanika Sood Sharma of Dharamshila Narayana Superspecialty Hospital in Delhi and her research team. The study involved 10 patients with moderate-to-severe COVID-19 who were treated with low-dose radiation. “All patients completed the prescribed treatment. Nine patients had a complete clinical recovery, mostly within 3-7 days. One patient, who was a known hypertensive, showed clinical deterioration and died 24 days after LDRT,” Dr. Sharma said in the study, which was released last August.

The results of this small study are incredibly encouraging, especially if considered with other studies and with the history of using low-dose radiation to treat pneumonia before antibiotics supplanted it.

If India would just grasp this technology (most hospitals can use their existing radiation equipment), they might save hundreds to many thousands of lives.

Cuttler and others believe that using low-dose radiation to treat COVID-19 could lead the way to its use as a treatment for arthritis and Alzheimer’s. Why not? It works, Cuttler says.

One of the great challenges for countries seeking global investment is to be able to assure that their legal systems are transparent, reliable, and free from political influence.

Kazakhstan, an ambitious Central Asian country, has risen to this challenge with the Astana International Financial Center (AIFC).

Established in July 2018, the AIFC, based in Kazakhstan’s capital Nur-Sultan, imported a gold-plated, civil legal system for litigation and dispute resolution. It installed English law, which is the preferred governing law for business transactions worldwide.

These courts may sit in the capital Nur-Sultan, previously named Astana, but they were established entirely under the administration of Lord Harry Woolf, the retired chief justice of England and Wales. The courts are now directed by its Chief Justice Lord Jonathan Mance, former deputy president of the Supreme Court in the United Kingdom, and 10 other English judges. This is a big step forward for an ex-Soviet republic where the USSR used to send millions of political prisoners to some of the more notorious Gulag camps.

Kazakhstan has embraced English law as a source of reliable and reputable jurisprudence for its financial center and enshrined its applicability in a constitutional amendment. The court has also embraced English as the only language to be used by it. Elsewhere in Kazakhstan, Kazakh and Russian are the official languages.

In conceiving the idea of a financial center, the country wanted to make it user-friendly and to attract investment from neighbors China, Russia, the Caucasus, Uzbekistan, Iran, Turkey, and further afield from Europe, the Middle East, Singapore, and the United States. It wants the neighborhood business and that of the world.

The strategy is working. AIFC has attracted 750 firms from 53 countries, and its recently established stock exchange has had 61 issues.

Kazakh officials tell me that they wish to play on the country’s unique location as a traditional crossroads of Europe and Asia. Kazakhstan is the ninth-largest country in the world but has a population of about 18 million. It is landlocked, lying right on the path of the ancient Silk Road and the modern Chinese Belt and Road initiative.

The AIFC is a building block in Kazakhstan’s aspiration to be one of the world’s leading nations by 2050. It offers investors a tax holiday – from corporate taxes for the income received from providing financial and other services, as well as from capital gains — until 2066.

Kazakhstan is located in a potentially turbulent area bordering Russia, China, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan, and lying close to Turkey and Iran. But that also is an asset when seeking to build a financial center. These are the very neighbors who seek financial services.

An additional strength for the AIFC is it has a substantial stake in the world of Muslim finance. This requires a separate set of skills and practices and the AIFC has them. Trillions of dollars are involved.

Kazakhstan is constitutionally secular. Islam is the majority religion of Kazakhstan and practiced in moderation. Other religions are experiencing freedom of worship. I know this from having interviewed both the chief rabbi and the Roman Catholic archbishop a few years ago.

Financial centers appeal to global money managers for various reasons. That may be because of currency advantages, tax favorability, low political risk, sanctions avoidance, and new direct investment opportunities.

Transparent, predictable, and effective dispute resolution is one of the main points of attraction as Hong Kong (in the past), Singapore, and, of course, London and The Hague have demonstrated.

The AIFC is also playing a key role in promoting foreign investment in Kazakhstan, according to Kairat Kelimbetov, AIFC governor and chairman of the Agency for Strategic Planning and Reforms. He is a veteran senior economic policymaker in the country.

Kazakhstan’s thrust to be a major player in international finance comes at a time of realignment, with the traditional financial centers of New York, London, Frankfurt, and Hong Kong surrendering to new international realities, like Brexit and Western sanctions on Russia and Iran.

Since independence in 1991, Kazakhstan has relied on its extensive oil and gas fields in the Caspian Sea region for its prominence and wealth. However, like many fossil fuel-rich countries, it is hedging against a declining role for hydrocarbons in the future and is pushing financing, green energy, and new technologies. Kazakhstan, sitting astride the Eurasian Steppe, has one of the world’s greatest wind resources.

And English law is bringing the winds of fortune to Kazakhstan.

The knowledge that the National Institutes of Health will be spending $1.15 billion on Long COVID was music to the ears of people who suffer from Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, also called Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and often linked in the acronym ME/CFS.

Long COVID is affecting people who had the virus, had seemingly recovered from it, but are having symptoms which appear to be similar or identical to those afflicting ME/CFS sufferers.

For decades, funding for research on ME/CFS – which I have called “a disease hidden in plain sight” — has been starved at the NIH. Much of the research has been funded privately, often by small contributions from the patient community. Now, concomitantly, there may be some real money and greater hope.

ME/CFS symptoms are horrific: collapse after exercise, brain fog, pain in the head and joints, light and sound intolerance, sleep that doesn’t refresh. Some patients are bedridden for days, others for life.

I became interested in ME/CFS about 11 years ago. In addition to writing about the disease, I have created and maintain a YouTube channel, ME/CFS Alert, which is up to 125 episodes. I have been in many sick rooms and the suffering of the sick and their caregivers — if they are lucky enough to have any — is awful to see.

But the disease, terrible as it is, is hard to diagnose. There are no known diagnostic biomarkers — in blood or urine or tissue — and it isn’t part of medical school curricula, which makes finding a doctor hard for patients. An American patient sees an average of 12 doctors before getting diagnosed.

Dr. Nina Muirhead, an Oxford-educated, British surgeon and ME/CFS patient, told me in the latest ME/CFS Alert episode that although she is in the medical profession, she saw 13 doctors before finding one who understood her problem.

Enter the psychiatrists. For decades an influential few of these, led by Britain’s Sir Simon Wessely and Michael Sharpe, have been trying to persuade the British National Health Service and insurance companies that this very real disease is psychosomatic. In other words, that it is a mental illness.

These theories of “It’s all in your head” have been renounced and found wanting by a myriad of experts and millions of patients around the world. Even the prestigious Institute of Medicine in the United States has come through on the patients’ side.

But psychiatry just doesn’t give up. The latest salvo, published as an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, criticizes the government for spending money on Long COVID and vigorously asserts ME/CFS as a mental illness. It comes from Dr. Jeremy Devine, a resident psychiatrist at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.

Dr. Devine also leveled ad hominem attacks on two organizations for supporting patients: Body Politic, an online group supporting Long COVID patients and others, and the Solve ME/CFS Initiative. I don’t know anything about the former group, but I know a lot about the latter. The Los Angeles-based Solve ME/CFS Initiative is newly headed by Oved Amitay who had a long and distinguished career as research scientist, working on therapies and medicines for orphan diseases.

The Solve ME/CFS Initiative is one of a number of devoted patient advocacy and research funding groups which have taken up the job of research when the government has not. They are organizations like the Open Medicine Foundation, run by the tireless and dedicated Linda Tannenbaum and #MEAction Network, founded by Jennifer Brea who made a compelling movie, “Unrest,” about her suffering from the disease down through the years. Devine said of Solve ME/CFS, “the organization is fundamentally resistant to the idea that chronic fatigue is a symptom of an underlying mental health issue.”

I have no idea what led Devine to attack those who suffer and organizations which speak for them, but I wonder if like me he has visited sick rooms or talked to some of the great researcher-physicians like Dr. David Systrom at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Harvard Medical School, Dr. Ronald Tompkins at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Harvard Medical School, or Dr. Nancy Klimas at the Institute for Neuro Immune Medicine at Nova Southeastern University?

People afflicted with ME/CFS write to me daily with stories of horror, of being too sick to work and, often, too sick to want to live. They suffer every hour of every day and are burdened with the greatest burden of all: to have lost hope. A well-funded NIH research effort on Long COVID, extending to ME/CFS, will bring hope to millions here and abroad.

Glance up and around and you’ll know the horizon is changing. From Canada to South Africa, Brazil to China, windmills and solar panels are telling a story of change.

In the United States, the landscape is collecting a kind of 21^st-century raiment. Wind farms, solar farms, and just stray windmills and solar panels on roofs are signaling something big and different.

When they were making “Tom Jones” in 1963, the very funny film based on the Henry Fielding classic, the big problem was finding English villages which dated from the 18^th century and still looked it. The filmmakers found plenty of appropriate villages, but all the skylines were despoiled with television aerials. No filmmaker today can avoid windmills and solar panels, and computer graphics will have to come to the rescue for period dramas.

Alexander Mirtchev, a respected member of the Washington foreign policy establishment and vice chairman of the Atlantic Council, in a new book based on a study he conducted for the Wilson Center, names this changed horizon for what it is: a megatrend. In doing this Mirtchev joins other megatrend energy spotters of the past, including environmentalist Amory Lovins and economist Daniel Yergin. Mirtchev’s book is titled “The Prologue: The Alternative Energy Megatrend in the Age of Great Power Competition.”

Energy has been shaping society and the relationship between nations since humans switched from burning wood to coal. The next step after that was the Industrial Revolution, ushering in what might be called “the first megatrend.”

Mirtchev builds on how energy supply changes relationships and looks to a future where the balance of power could be upended, and energy production could affect neighbors in new ways. For example, I have noted, the Irish are unhappy about British nuclear activity across the Irish Sea. There also is tension along the border between Austria and Slovakia: the Slovaks favor a nuclear future, and the Austrians are into wind and opposed to any nuclear power. As a result, windmills line the Austrian side of this central European border.

Mirtchev’s book is a serious work by a serious scholar which pulls together the impact of alternative energy on national security, the interplay between great powers, and the changing landscape between great powers and a few lesser ones. It is wonderfully free of the idealistic tropes about alternative energy as a morally superior force.

There also are changes within countries. Recently, I wrote about how Houston — the holy of holies of the oil industry — is seeking to rebrand the oil capital as a tech mecca as well as holding onto its oil and gas status as those decline.

If you look at the world, you can see how President Joe Biden can stand up to Saudi Arabia in a way that other presidents couldn’t do. Saudi oil reserves don’t mean what they once did. They aren’t as essential to the future of the world as they once were. There is more oil around and the trend is away from oil. Historic coal exporters like Poland, Australia, South Africa, and the United States are losing their markets.

Other losses, including U.S. technological dominance in energy technology, are more subtle. For example, although jubilation over solar and wind is widely felt in the United States by environmentalists, it should be tempered by the fact that solar cells and wind turbines are being provided by China. China has seized manufacturing dominance in alternative energy, endangering national security for dependent countries.

Mirtchev’s arguments have found powerful endorsements. A number of big-name, international security thinkers have come forward to endorse the concept of a realignment caused by the megatrend of alternative energy. These range from Henry Kissinger to a who’s who of foreign policy stalwarts here and in Europe.

James L. Jones, retired Marine general and President Barack Obama’s national security advisor, said, summing up thoughts expressed by a full panoply of experts, “ ‘The Prologue’ offers a valuable new framework for international strategic action.”

Retired Adm. James G. Stavridis, an executive of the Carlyle Group and other enterprises, said the book is “a masterpiece of original thought, and it should be must-reading in universities and war colleges.”

Who would have thought of the wind and sun as players in the rivalry between nations or that they would spearhead a megatrend?

It is underway. It has huge momentum, and it will change everything we do — work, leisure, health care, education, use of resources — and, as a bonus, how the world sees us.

It is the Great American Reset, where things will be irreversibly changed. It is a seminal reset that will shape the decades to come, just as the New Deal and World War II shoved the clock forward.

The reset is being driven in part by COVID-19, but in larger part by technology and the digitization of America. Technology is at the gates, no, through the gates, and it is beginning to upend the old in the way that the steam engine in its day began innovations that would change life completely.

Driving this overhaul of human endeavor will be the digitization of everything from the kitchen broom to the electric utilities and the delivery of their vital product. Knitting them together will be communications from 5G to exclusive private networks.

President Joe Biden’s infrastructure proposals could speed and smooth the innovation revolution, facilitate the digital revolution, and make it fairer and more balanced. Biden’s plan will fix the legacy world of infrastructure: roads, bridges, canals, ports, airports, and railroads. It will beef up the movement of goods and services, supply chains, and their security, even as those goods and services are changing profoundly.

But if Biden’s plan fails, the Great American Reset will still happen. It will just be less fair and more uneven — as in not providing broadband quickly to all.

Technology has an imperative, and there is so much technology coming to market that the market will embrace it, nonetheless.

Think driverless cars, but also think telemedicine, carbon capture and utilization, aerial taxis, drone deliveries, and 3D-printed body parts. Add new materials like graphene and nanomanufacturing, and an awesome future awaits.

We have seen just the tip of digitization and have been reminded of how pervasive it is by the current chip shortage, which is slowing automobile production lines and thousands of manufactures. But you might say, “You ain’t seen nothing yet.” The future belongs to chips and sensors: small soldiers in mighty armies.

Accompanying digitization is electrification. Our cars, trucks, trains, and even aircraft and ships are headed that way. Better storage is the one frontier that must be conquered before the army of change pours through the breach in a great reshaping of everything.

Central to the future — to the smart city, the smart railroad, the smart highway, and the smart airport — is the electric supply.

The whole reset future of digitization and sensor-facilitated mobility depends on electricity — and not just the availability of electricity going forward, but also the resilience of supply. It also needs to be carbon-free and have low environmental impact.

An overhaul of the electric industry’s infrastructure, increasing its resilience, is an imperative underpinning the reset.

The Texas blackouts were a brutal wake-up call. Job one is to look into hardening the entire electric supply system from informational technology to operational technology, from storm resistance to solar flare resistance (see Carrington Event), from catastrophic physical failure to failure induced by hostile players.

The electric grid needs survivability, but so do the data flows which will dominate the virtual utility of the future. It also needs a failsafe ability to isolate trouble in nanoseconds and, essentially, break itself into less vulnerable, defensive mini-grids.

Securing the grid is akin to national security. Indeed, it is national security.

Electricity is the one indispensable in the future: The future of the great reset.

Klaus Schwab, the genius behind the World Economic Forum, called this year from his virtual Davos conference for a global reset to tackle poverty and apply technology and business acumen to the human problems of the world. We are on the cusp of going it alone.

In the end, the route to social mobilization is jobs. The Great American Reset will throw these off in an unimaginable profusion, as did the arrival of the steam engine a little over 300 years ago.

A world commodities rebalancing is underway, and China is in a position of dominance. Take lithium, where China is a major processor and battery manufacturer; cobalt, where China has dominated the supply chains; and rare earths, where China has an almost total monopoly. Taken together, these three commodities are key to the future of alternative energy, electric vehicles, mobile phones, and even headphones.

Having stated that he was “fervently Sinophile,” British Prime Minister Boris Johnson in the House of Commons recently described lithium deposits in England’s rugged southwestern county of Cornwall as “the Klondike” of lithium. Johnson is known for his grandiloquence, but he knows about the importance of lithium in the age of the lithium-ion battery, and a big lithium mine will open in Cornwall in 2026.

This kind of economic activity points to the re-evaluation and rebalancing of the world’s vital, non-agricultural commodities, reflecting the need for new raw materials for national survival as the demands of technology have changed.

The rare earth elements — there are 17 of them but only four are in demand — are the great multipliers of the modern electronic age. I have seen how this works with the equivalent of a refrigerator magnet. A traditional magnet has a slight pull toward the metal surface. Try it with a magnet that has been enhanced with one of the rare earths, neodymium, and you will find the attraction to the metal of the refrigerator so strong that the magnet will fly out of your hand — and it will take a muscular tug to remove it.

Enhanced magnetism is what makes wind turbines economically feasible. Wind turbines wouldn’t produce enough electricity to make them economical without that multiplier.

The problem is that 95 percent of the rare earths now mined and processed come from China.

This gives the Chinese the ability to choke off the West’s economies while the struggle to produce the vital elements elsewhere (and they are well distributed throughout the Earth’s crust) is mounted.

David Zaikin, a Ukrainian-born Canadian citizen working in London, knows as much about the world resource line-up and China’s influence as anyone. He is the CEO of Key Elements Group, and an alumnus and founder of the Mining Club at the London Business School.

“China is out there and is trying to win every race globally. The West must do everything it can to subvert its efforts and find alternative nations to work with,” Zaikin says.

“The good news is that there are friendly nations like Canada, Australia, and India that are naturally very rich in rare earths. They are well-positioned to bridge the gap in potential rare earths shortages, or in the event those are weaponized by the PRC,” he says, “The bad news is that it takes a long time to begin commercial production, and the right time to start was yesterday.”

The Mountain Pass mine, which lies in the Mojave Desert in California, is in production after a hiatus. But that doesn’t mean much in terms of our Chinese dependence. The production from California is shipped to China for processing and then shipped back to the United States. The mine has also been financed by the Chinese.

The inhibition to mining for rare earths, as John Kutsch, executive director of the Thorium Energy Alliance, explains, is thorium, which isn’t a rare earth element, but which is found in conjunction with rare earths, especially in the United States.

Thorium is a fertile nuclear material and is classified as such by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the International Atomic Energy Agency, so miners have to account for it, and it has to be stored and disposed of as nuclear waste.

Until a national thorium bank is established, as supported by Kutsch and his group, we will be looking elsewhere.

Zaikin says, “As the West pursues green policies and becomes more independent of imported oil, it will reduce the influence that the GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council] and other oil-producing nations have on domestic and international policies.”

He adds, “However, by moving from oil into renewable energy, the West increasingly finds itself at the mercy of China. This is why it is crucial that the West includes nuclear power in its green vision of the future, in order to avoid the weaponization of energy by hostile powers.”