The horror of the Texas electricity catastrophe should chill the whole country. Nothing strikes at the survivability of a modern society more than the failure of its power supply, maybe nothing at all.

When the power supply fails, the failure of human life is not far behind. Yet, at a time when we should expect a united front to help Texas and other affected Southern states, petty and unbecoming point-scoring is in full swing.

The power supply collapse in Texas was caused by extreme and aberrant cold weather, freezing the electric generators. The system wasn’t designed to withstand what occurred — and what may occur elsewhere in a time of new and terrifying instability in the world’s weather systems.

Coal plants froze, gas lines froze, a nuclear plant froze, solar panels froze, wind turbines froze, and Texans faced their greatest crisis in generations: terrible cold without heat and without water in some locations.

Lives were lost from freezing to death and from carbon monoxide poisoning as people struggled to create warmth by running cars, charcoal grills, and backup generators in confined spaces, and from the inability, with ice-packed roads, to get to hospitals or even to a warming center.

Others will die because they crowded together for warmth and inadvertently spread or got the COVID-19 virus.

The situation for livestock is one of suffering and death. Horses, pigs, cattle, and chickens aren’t getting fed or watered. Death abounds as farmers despair.

The sad response to tragedy has been to blame. Blame the wind turbines, blame the individual power companies, blame the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) which manages the Texas grid, and blame the Texas grid itself.

Texas prides itself on having a self-contained grid with little major interconnection to the national grid. This is political. Texas didn’t want to be subject to the Federal Power Commission and its successor agency the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). It opted to be independent; it kept its electricity out of interstate commerce.

What that has meant in this crisis is that there is no way for other states to ship power to Texas, even if there is power to spare.

Now that the terrible price of electric failure is painted in awful detail before the nation, the Biden administration should act quickly to find out what has happened and to what extent the rest of the nation is vulnerable.

Vulnerable not only to weather that has gone wild, but also to other dangers to the grid, like the ever-present cybersecurity threat. And vulnerable to the related but separate threat to operating systems from spyware buried in Chinese bulk power systems, which make up most of the big grid installations, like transformers and turbines. Ignored voices have been sounding this alarm. They need to be heard.

The Texas crisis unfolded at a time when the U.S. electric industry has been under strain as it seeks to decarbonize and to accommodate more wind and solar energy, and as it searches for technologies to store electricity, like batteries with long drawdown times and hydrogen made when there is surplus supply.

The utilities are also being digitized, data-driven in every way, from sensors that tell second by second the condition of generating units, like an individual wind turbine, to a sophisticated use of private wireless broadband networks which can report within two seconds a line failure and de-energize it, to early warning of incipient failures in the system. Microgrids, which tie together alternative energy sources in mini-networks, also need to be data-managed as the wind changes and the sun moves.

The people of Texas and elsewhere in the South have been forced to shelter like animals without warmth, food, and water, in abject, life-threatening misery. That is a future to be avoided for other parts of the nation.

Texans deserve more than a brainless blame game.

The Biden administration should establish a nonpolitical commission to tell us what went wrong and to make sure we are secure in our electric supply.

If it were ever doubted, life without electricity for a few weeks would mean the end of life for all but survivalists here and there.

Hold the blame, get the facts, take the action.

The electric utility industry looks a bit like a man on a ladder with one foot seeking the rung below, unsure of where it is. But find it he must.

The industry is beset with technological change as well as social and political pressures. It isn’t in crisis, but it is in dramatic transition.

It has one overriding driver: the need first to reduce, then to eliminate carbon emissions.

The utilities have been heroic in turning to wind and solar – which have also turned out to be economically advantageous. However, those efforts are challenged by the need to store electricity produced when these “alternatives” aren’t available.

General Motors is switching to making only electric vehicles after 2035. It can stop and retool. Utilities can never stop pumping out electrons; they must retool on the go.

Most of us only realize the hidden fragility of the system when storms are forecast, and the local utility tells us to buy batteries.

Feb. 11 was the 174th anniversary of Thomas Edison’s birth. No one has affected the way we live as completely as Edison, neither king, conqueror, philosopher, revolutionary, nor any other inventor.

New fuels produce new ancillary needs. Every new introduction in electricity requires the supporting technologies to change — sometimes new technologies must be invented for the supporting role.

The big pressures on the utilities are to get off fossil fuels and to increase the resilience of the system, including resilience against weather and cyberattack.

These pressures spawn other pressures, particularly how to store alternative electricity which is made when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing, often not when consumption is high.

Storage is a hot area in electric innovation. Batteries, which are front-and-center in storage, must get much better, so they can have longer drawdown times. Arshad Mansoor, president of the Electric Power Research Institute, says batteries will get much better, but not enough to take up the slack for days of bad weather. He was speaking at the virtual winter meeting of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners.

Hydrogen is a favorite to deal with days of rain, as happens in Florida and elsewhere, and wind droughts which can last more than a week in Texas, a big wind-generating center.

But hydrogen isn’t a one-for-one replacement of natural gas, the current workhorse of generating fuels. On paper, hydrogen has every virtue. In reality, it has challenges of its own: It has less than half the energy of natural gas; it is harder to handle, can explode, and can produce nitrogen oxide; and turbines have to be modified to burn it.

Even so, a plethora of utilities, including Sempra, Arizona Public Service, and NextEra Energy, are experimenting with it. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power is converting a coal plant in Utah to run completely on green hydrogen (that is hydrogen derived from the electrolysis of water not from natural gas).

San Antonio’s municipally owned energy utility, CPS Energy, buys a lot of wind power and is planning to install 900 megawatts of solar power on top of 4oo MW already deployed. That means storage is critical, and the utility has launched an ambitious global search for new-and-improved technologies. This has generated 300 responses worldwide. These, according to COO Cris Eugster, include hydrogen and batteries, but also far-out ideas like compressed air, flywheels, mineshafts for pumped storage, and liquefied air.

All of this restructuring, moving from big central plants to diverse generating and complex substitutions, requires recognition that data is now central in utilities — and data has to move instantly.

Morgan O’Brien, who co-founded the game-changing cellphone company, Nextel, and is now executive chairman of Anterix, a private broadband network provider, says, “The intermittent nature of renewable sources imposes particular requirements on grid management for speed and accuracy. Luckily, the global wireless technology, LTE, which powers our smartphones is perfectly adapted to this communications challenge.”

The speed of transition is accelerating. The electric utilities, often thought of as staid, are going to be anything but going forward: They are becoming innovation hubs.

Edison’s birthday marks a busy time for his follow-on inventors.

 

 

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Photo:
Thomas Edison’s Edison Botanic Research Corporation at Edison-Ford Winter Estates in Fort Myers, Florida

Social media has an unimagined, unequaled, uncontrollable, and unpredictable ability to mobilize groups of people for antisocial action; to take a sliver of society and turn it into a mob.

Last month this new force in society was on display, from mobilizing anti-vaxxers in Los Angeles to the U.S. Capitol riot, resulting in five deaths, to the run-up of a weak stock, GameStop, by 1,800 percent.

These events, coupled with some strains of political thought being restricted on Facebook and Twitter, along with the outright banning of tweets from Donald Trump when he was still in office, have some in Congress convinced something should be done — often the precursor to ill-conceived legislation.

Conservatives want the protections granted by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which provides Google, Facebook, and others a legal liability shield from third-party content posted on their platform, to be reformed. They believe they are disadvantaged by the liberal-leaning networks.

The hot issue of the moment in Congress is the price run-up of GameStop and other companies’ stocks. The primary platform most fingered so far is Reddit, but the active enabler was the app Robinhood which allows individuals (mostly day traders) to trade stock without commissions and in small amounts.

This Robinhood isn’t to be confused with the English folk hero, who stole from the rich to give to the poor, even though that is the intent of those who named the app. In reality, it is part of the Wall Street system and makes its money selling all those little trades to market-making firms. Its purpose is to make money, not to bring social justice to small traders.

I interviewed Sinan Aral, who studies social media at the MIT Sloan School of Management and is the author of “The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy and Our Health — and How We Must Adapt,” for “White House Chronicle,” the PBS television show which I host. He said of GameStop that it is imperative to find out what really happened. For example: When was the GameStop stock run-up taken over by big funds which stood to make huge profits, and some of which did?

Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), who chairs the House Financial Services Committee, has scheduled hearings. That is a beginning, but it certainly won’t be definitive. Congressional hearings seldom are.

Jarrod Hazelton, a Chicago-trained economist who once worked for a Connecticut hedge fund, concurred. It looks like GameStop was “the perfect storm,” he said, also on “White House Chronicle.”

Hazelton told me this never was a sudden viral event: The groundwork for the Reddit-fueled frenzy over GameStop was laid by professionals nearly a year ago.

It was social media that drove the madness, even though it was the big financial houses, like BlackRock (which reportedly made $3 billion on GameStop stock) which were the big winners. Speculation in the stock was already underway when trades took off, enabled and fed by Reddit posts and other social media shouting in essence “free lunch here.”

MIT’s Aral takes issue with the idea that crowds have a kind of folk wisdom. That idea was endorsed in a 2004 book, “The Wisdom of Crowds,” by James Surowiecki. But Aral points out that was the same year that Facebook was founded. In other words, a social media crowd isn’t the same as a fairground crowd trying to guess the weight of an ox, an example in Surowiecki’s book.

Crowds, it turns out, are wise if they are polled as individuals, but once they get on social media and have subscribed to a toxic idea, they aren’t wise. They are a single-minded mob, whether opposing vaccinations, trashing the great symbol of democracy, or running up a stock.

What is to be done about social media? Probably nothing. It is here like gun ownership or pornography. This one, too, we will have to suck up and live with.

With time we may get inured to social media and get better at discounting a lot of its disingenuous outpourings. But, from time to time, it will be harnessed for evil. Crowds are healthy, mobs not so.

In politics, any idea can be pressed into service if it fits a purpose. The one I have in mind has been snatched from its Republican originators and is now at work on the left wing of the Democratic Party.

The idea is “starve the beast.” It came from one of President Ronald Reagan’s staffers and was used to curb federal spending.

It was a central idea in the Republican Party through the Reagan years and was taken up with vigor by tax-cutting zealots. It was on the lips of those who thought the way to small government was through tax cuts, i.e., financial starvation.

Now “starve the beast’ is back in a new guise: a way to cut dependence on oil and natural gas.

This is the thought behind President Joe Biden’s decision to revoke the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline, bringing oil to the United States from Canada, even after the expenditure of billions of dollars and an infinity of studies.

It is the idea behind banning fracking and restricting leases on federal lands. Some Democrats and environmental activists believe that this blunt instrument will do the job.

But blunt instruments are unsuited to fine work.

It also is counterproductive to set out to force that which is happening in an orderly way. The Biden administration shows signs of wanting to do this, unnecessarily.

Lumping coal, oil, and gas as the same thing under the title “fossil fuel” is the first error. In descending order, coal is the most important source of pollution, and its use is falling fast. Oil continues to be the primary transportation fuel for the world. World oil production and use hovers around 100 million barrels a day — and that has been fairly steady in recent years.

In the United States, the switch to electric vehicles is well underway and in, say, 20 years, they will be dominant. Likewise, in Europe, Japan, and China. That train has left the station and is picking up steam.

Government action, like building charging stations, won’t speed it up but rather will slow it down. The market is working. Willing buyers and sellers are on hand.

Every electric vehicle is a reduction in oil demand. But the world is still a huge market for petroleum and will be for a long time. What sense is there in hobbling U.S. oil exports? There are suppliers from Saudi Arabia to Nigeria keen to take up any slack.

Natural gas is different. It is a superior fuel in that it has about half the pollutants of coal and fewer than oil. It is great for heating homes, cooking, making fertilizers and other petrochemicals. Starving the production just increases the cost to consumers.

The real target is, of course, electric utilities. They rushed to gas to get off coal. It was cheaper, cleaner, and more manageable. Also, gas could be burned in turbines that are easily installed and repaired. Boilers not needed; no steam required.

But there are greenhouse gases emitted and, worse, methane leaks at fracking sites and from faulty pipelines throughout the system. These represent a grave problem. Here the government can move in with tighter regulation. If it is fixable, fix it. But methane leaks are no reason to cripple domestic production.

The question for the beast-starvers comes from Clinton Vince, who chairs the U.S. energy practice and co-chairs the global energy practice of Dentons, the world’s largest law firm. He asks, “Is it better to sell natural gas to India and China or to let them build more coal-fired plants? Particularly if carbon-capture and sequestration technology can be improved.”

If we are to continue to reduce carbon emissions in the United States, we need to take a holistic view of energy production and consumption. Does it make sense to allow carbon-free nuclear plants to go out of service because of how we value electricity in the short term? A market adjustment, well within government purview, could save a lot of air pollution immediately.

The hydrocarbon beast doesn’t need to be starved, but a diet might be a good idea.

It was a good day. Warm in its content. Soft in its delivery. Kindly in its message. Generous in its intentions. Healing in its purpose.

Implementing the soaring hopes of President Joe Biden’s inauguration began immediately. Maybe too immediately, too fast, and with actions that were too sweeping. Biden signed 17 executive orders, which suggested an underlying philosophy of “bring it on.”

Biden doesn’t need to open hostilities on all possible fronts at once. He needs to pick his wars and shun some battles. I have a feeling that 17 battles are too many to initiate simultaneously and, possibly, some are going to be lost at a cost.

In his inaugural address, Biden did well in laying out six theaters where his administration will prosecute its wars. But some of those wars will go on for decades – maybe forever.

Big ships take a long time to turn around, no matter how many tugboats are engaged. Actions have consequences and so do intentions.

The Biden wars:

The pandemic: This is the war that Biden must win. It is the one into which he needs to pour all his efforts, his own time and talent, and to focus the national mind.

Americans are dying at a horrendous pace. He has promised 100 million vaccine doses in the first 100 days. If that effort falters, for whatever reason, it will stain the Biden presidency. It is job one and transcends everything.

The environment: It will remain a work in progress. Rejoining the Paris Agreement on Climate Change is a diplomatic and political move, not an environmental one. It will help with the Biden goal of better international standing. It will make many in the environmental movement feel better, but it won’t pull carbon out of the air.

There have been dramatic reductions in the amount of carbon the United States puts into the air since 2005. Biden is in danger of picking up too much of the environmentalists’ old narrative.

The environmental movement can get it very wrong and maybe has again in pushing the world too fast towards wind and solar. These aren’t perfect solutions.

The amount of carbon put into the air by electric generation in the United States is partly due to the hostility toward new dams and particularly toward nuclear power. These were features of the environmental narrative in the 1970s and 1980s.

Simple solutions seldom resolve complex problems.

Personally, I have a feeling that we are going breakneck with solar and wind; making windmills and solar panels is environmentally challenging, as will be disposing of them after their useful life is over.

Canceling the Keystone XL Pipeline — after nearly two decades of litigation, diplomatic and environmental review in Canada and the United States — would seem to be a concession to a constituency rather than sound policy with virtuous effect.

Biden has identified three other theaters where he plans to wage war: growing income inequality, racism, and the attack on truth and democracy.

Income inequality is escalating because new technologies are concentrating wealth, workers have lost their union voice, and our broken schools are turning out broken people, who will start at the bottom and stay there. Racial inequality ditto. Many inner-city schools are that in name more than function.

If there was one big omission from Biden’s agenda of things he is prepared to go to war for, it was education. Most of the social inequalities he listed have an educational aspect. Primary and secondary schools are not turning out students ready for the world of work. Too many universities are social-promoting students who should have been held back in high school.

More are going to college when they should get a practical education in a marketable skill. People with skills like carpentry, stone cutting, plastering, electrical and iron work are more likely to start their own businesses than those with, say, journalism or sociology degrees.

Biden’s continuing challenge will be how to handle the left wing of his party, stirred up by the followers of Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. They haven’t gone away and are expecting their spoils from the election.

The president’s battle for truth will be how we accommodate the new carrier technologies of social media with the need for veracity; how to identify lies without giving into universal censorship. That battle can’t be won until the new dynamics of a technological society are understood.

Go slow and carry a big purpose.

H.L. Mencken, journalist and essayist, wrote in 1940, “Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.”

Twenty years later, the same thought was reprised by A.J. Liebling of The New Yorker.

Today, these thoughts can be revived to apply, on a scale inconceivable in 1940 or 1960, to Big Tech, and to the small number of men who control it.

These men — Jack Dorsey of Twitter, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, and Sundar Pichai of Alphabet Inc., and its subsidiary Google — operate what, in another time, would be known as “common carriers.” Common carriers are, as the term implies, companies which distribute anything from news to parcels to gasoline. They are a means of distributing ideas, news, goods, and services.

Think of the old Western Union, the railroads, the pipeline companies, or the telephone companies. Their business was carriage, and they were recognized and regulated in law as such: common carriers.

The controversial Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act recognizes the common carrier nature of Big Tech internet companies by exempting them from libel responsibility. It specifically stated that they shouldn’t be treated as publishers. Conservatives want 230 repealed, but that would only make the companies reluctant to carry anything controversial, hurting free speech.

I think the possible repeal of 230 should be part of a large examination of the inadvertently acquired but vast power of the internet-based social media companies. It should be part of a large discussion embracing all the issues of free speech on social media which could include beefed-up libel statutes — possibly some form of the equal-time rule which kept network owners from exploiting their power for political purposes in days when there were only three networks.

President Donald Trump deserves censure, which he has gotten: He has been impeached for incitement to insurrection. I take second place to no one in my towering dislike of him, but I am shaken at the ability of Silicon Valley to censor a political figure, let alone a president.

That Silicon Valley should shut out the voice of the president isn’t the issue. It is that a common carrier can dictate the content, even if it is content from a rogue president.

This exercise of censor authority should alarm all free-speech advocates. It is power that exceeds anything ever seen in media.

The heads of Twitter, Facebook and Alphabet are more powerful by incalculable multiples than were Joseph Pulitzer, William Randolph Hearst and Henry Luce, or is Rupert Murdoch. They can subtract any voice from any debate if they so choose. That is a bell that tolls for all. They have the power to silence any voice by closing an account.

When Edward Murrow talked about the awesome power of television, he was right for that time. But now technology has added a multiplier of atomic proportions via the internet.

The internet-based social media giants didn’t seek power. They are, in that sense, blameless. They pursued technology, then money, and these led them to their awesome power. What they have done, though, is to use their wealth to buy startups which offer competition.

Big Tech has used its financial clout to maintain its de facto monopolies. Yet unlike the newspaper proprietors of old or Murdoch’s multimedia, international endeavors today, they didn’t pursue their dreams to get political power. They were carried along on the wave of new technologies.

It may not be wrong that Twitter, Facebook, and others have shut down Trump’s account when they did, at a time of crisis, but what if these companies get politically activated in the future?

We already live in the age of the cancellation culture with its attempt to edit history. If that is extended to free speech on the internet, even with good intentions, everything begins to wobble.

The tech giants are simply too big for comfort. They have already weakened the general media by scooping up most of the advertising dollars. Will the freedom of speech belong to those who own the algorithms?

Cry, the beloved building.

I have been lucky and have walked the halls of the Houses of Parliament in London, visited the Elysée Palace in Paris, the Bundestag in Berlin, and the Kremlin in Moscow.

But it is the Capitol, the building on a hill in Washington, that fills me with awe but it isn’t awesome or frightening, and doesn’t exalt in power.

The Capitol is at once romantic, imposing and egalitarian. Ever since I first set foot on Capitol Hill, the building has been for me, an immigrant, the elegant expression of everything that is best about America: open, accessible and shared.

Until terrorism changed things, anyone could walk into the Capitol without security checks. Taxis could draw up and let you out under the arches that designate the Senate or House entrances.

It hurt me in profound ways to see a mob, inspired by the rogue president and his lickspittle enablers, trash that hallowed place; try to lay waste to the temple of American tolerance, freedom, excellence and uniqueness; to treat it as an impediment to their coup, to their lies-fed catechism of overthrow.

To see any great building desecrated is painful, but to see it happen to the Capitol is to witness heresy against democracy, against Americanism, against our better angels and highest aspirations.

When Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris was engulfed in flames, I realized the building was a prayer: the elegant stone, wood and plaster embodiment of man’s search for God. By that measure, the Capitol is the embodiment of man’s search for fairer government.

As a reporter, the first thing you notice about the Capitol when you go there is how open it is once you have gotten through the metal detectors at the entrances. You walk the halls, ride the elevators and the little trains that run between the Capitol and the House and Senate office buildings, and eat in the cafeterias. The members have privileges, like their own entrances, reserved elevators and reserved train seats. But you can see legislators in the corridors and snack bars, conferring with aides, and often those who are there to get help or to lobby for a cause.

The work of government is at its most accessible to outsiders in the Capitol. Although there are tours, it is still best to roam the building alone, from the tunnels in the basement (where you end up when you take the elevator or stairs and go down too far) to the glory of the Rotunda. The tiled floors, paneling, frescoes, paintings and statuary are all art of the voice of the people, cobbled into a great building.

There are secret places in the Capitol, too. I once had lunch with Sen. Bennett Johnston (D-La.), chairman of the Senate Energy Committee, and The Wall Street Journal’s Paul Gigot in a dining room assigned just to the chairman of that committee — one that neither of us guests even suspected existed. The old Joint Committee on Atomic Energy had a near-secret set of offices accessible through a discreet elevator, unmarked and looking as though it might carry freight instead of nuclear secrets.

But mostly the work of the Congress, which is carried on in the Capitol and its adjacent office buildings, is surprisingly open, accessible and, in that, democratic.

My fervent hope is that freedom, which has been somewhat eroded over the years with new layers of security, isn’t further eroded after the Jan. 6 assault.

Looking forward, maybe the horror of government by the Great Lie will be held at bay. While we will never see an end to politicians’ fibs, we can hope that politicians will be called out for them, won’t have them respected as an alternative truth, which is the ignominious and extraordinary achievement of the Trump administration.

Trump laid the fire before the election, declaring there would be fraud, perhaps certain that he would lose. He lit it on Jan. 6.

The mob that stormed the Capitol isn’t to blame. The blame rests with those who have assaulted the truth over the past four years.

Blame Trump and castigate his enablers, from the talking heads of television to members of Congress like Republican senators Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley and Marco Rubio. They don’t deserve to sit under the Capitol dome. That is for those who care about America. It is a noble mantle.

When it comes to invention, we ain’t seen nothing yet.

The chances are good, and getting better, that in the coming year and the years after it, our world will essentially reinvent itself. That revolution already is underway but, as with most progress, there are political challenges.

Congress needs restraint in dealing with the technological revolution and not to dust off old, antitrust tapes. With the surging inventiveness we are seeing today across the creative spectrum — inventiveness which has given us Amazon, Tesla, Uber, Zoom, 3D printing and, in short order, a COVID-19 vaccine — you may wonder why the government is using antitrust statutes to try and break up two tech giants.

Conservatives think big social media companies are unfair to them. Liberals worry about the financial power of the Big Tech companies: The five largest have a market value of over $7 trillion.

The Justice Department has filed an antitrust suit against Google, and the Federal Trade Commission has filed one against Facebook.

The only tools it has are outdated, anti-competition statutes — some passed over a century ago. Sometime in the future, it may be desirable to disassemble Big Tech companies, but not when they are bringing forward new technologies and whole new concepts like autonomous vehicles and drone deliveries.

These need to happen without government shaking up the creators.

Antitrust laws on the books don’t address the internet age when global monopoly is often an unintended result of success; hugely different from Standard Oil seeking to have absolute control over kerosene.

Policy, though, may want to examine the role of Big Tech in relation to startups: the proven engines of change. When today’s tech giants were in their infancy, it was the beginning of the age of the startup as the driver of change. It went like this: invent, get venture-capital financing, prove the product in the market, and go public. The initial public offering (IPO) was the financial goal.

But the presence of behemoths in Silicon Valley has changed the trajectory for new companies. Rather than hoping for a pot of gold from an IPO, today’s startups are designed to be sold to a big company. Venture capitalists demand that the whole shape of a startup isn’t aimed to public acceptance but rather to whether Google, Apple or Amazon will buy that startup.

The evidence is that acquisitions are doing well in the Big Techs, but that doesn’t mean that they won’t be stifled in time. Conglomerates have a checkered past.

Big companies have a lifespan which begins with white-hot creativity, followed by growth, followed by a leveling of creativity, and the emergence of efficiency and profitability as goals which eclipse creativity. Professional managers take over from the innovators who created the enterprises; risk-taking is expunged from the corporate culture.

That is when government should look at the Big-Tech powerhouses and see whether it is in the national interest to break them up.

Not on the old antitrust grounds, but because they may have become negative forces in the innovation firmament; because whether they are still creative or whether they are just drawing rents on previous creations or acquisitions, they will still be hoovering up engineering talents that might well be better employed in a smaller, more entrepreneurial endeavors or, ideally, as part of a startup.

The issue is simple: While the big companies are still creating, adding to the tech revolution which is reshaping the world, they should be left to do what they are doing well, from creating autonomous, over-the-road trucks to easing city life with smart-city innovation.

The time to move against Big Tech is when it ceases to be an engine of innovation.

Innovation needs an unruly frontier. We have had that, and it should be protected both from government interference and corporate timidity.

Happy and innovative New Year! Hard to believe in this time of plague, but much is changing for the better.

I reckon there are two Christmases: the one we celebrate on Dec. 25, and the one that happens when something goes terribly right in our lives.

Those rare but wonderful days of pure golden joy when something has gone too right to have been anticipated, when you hoot and holler, jump up and down for joy, and run around your house or office or down the street.

Well, I know when my Christmas next year will come. I can’t tell you the day or hang out decorations or send invitations to the party, at least not yet.

But it is coming, that second Christmas, and it is going to be big, like the end of World War II or the moon landing or when the Super Bowl was won by your team.

I can just remember the end of World War II, when Hitler was defeated — Victory Europe — and the huge public celebration with lots of kissing and hugging and embracing strangers.

For me it was quite innocent and I wish it had all happened, especially the kissing, 10 years later, but you take what you can get when you can. Even at age 5, I realized this was big stuff. That day in Cape Town, I saw the handsomest sailor in the world in his dress uniform, my dad, and I celebrated his survival.

The first time I got published in an adult newspaper as a contributor, that was unscheduled Christmas, and I ran around in an intoxication of joy, as excited as it is possible to be. I thought I had scaled the ramparts and would never come down. I came down. But the celebration was fantastic, a Christmas for sure.

Sometimes it becomes us to think of Christmas past, not those of Dickens’s Scrooge, but those things that happened. Perhaps it was the day when Cupid’s arrow found its mark, and you knew your life was changed for the better when you didn’t expect it — or felt you didn’t deserve it.

This is a somber Christmas in 2020. But there will be a day of joy in the not too far-off future.

That will be when it is clear that COVID-19 will no longer be on its killing spree; when we will have had our jabs, restrained our human contact, worn our masks and celebrated Christmas in a tender but reduced way, thinking on the meaning, on the happiness we have and not what we are postponing. Likewise, New Year’s will be subdued but as anticipatory as ever.

There won’t be just one day, alas, when we ring the bells, blow horns, and hug strangers. But there will be a day sometime next year when we can believe that the wicked witch is dead, that the virus is vanquished, and that life may return to what will be a new normal but nonetheless so welcome.

I wish it were all to happen on the same day, but it won’t. However, I think a day, one day, should be designated when it is clear that COVID-19, like polio, is in the rear-view mirror.

I yearn for that day: when I can go out to dinner, when I can see the faces of the noble clerks in the supermarket, embrace those who have borne the battle, manning the ambulances, the hospitals, and the nursing homes. A day when we remember those we have lost and celebrate those we have.

I would suggest we have a new national day of remembrance: VV Day, for Victory Virus. Happy, safe holidays to you.

President-elect Joe Biden’s decision to nominate Jennifer Granholm — former governor of Michigan, lawyer, politician and television host — to be the next secretary of energy is curious.

The idea circulating is that her primary assignment, in Biden’s mind, will be to speed Detroit’s development of electric vehicles.

That is hardly the job Granholm will find confronting her when she heads to the 7th floor of the Forrestal Building, a bare-and-square concrete structure across from the romantic Smithsonian Castle on Independence Avenue in Washington.

Secretary of energy is one of the most demanding assignments in the government. The Department of Energy is a vast archipelago of scientific, defense, diplomatic and cybersecurity responsibilities. Granholm’s biggest concern, in fact, won’t be energy but defense.

The DOE, nicknamed the Little Pentagon, is responsible for maintaining, upgrading and ensuring the working order of the nation’s nuclear weapons. A critical launch telephone will go with her everywhere. That is where much of the department’s $30 billion or so budget goes.

The energy secretary is responsible for the largest scientific organization on earth: the 17 national laboratories operated by the department. They aren’t only responsible for the nuclear weapons program but also for a huge, disparate portfolio of scientific inquiry, from better materials to fill potholes to carbon capture, storage and utilization; and from small modular reactors for electricity to nuclear power for space exploration.

The national labs are vital in cybersecurity, particularly to assure the integrity of the electric grid and the security of things like Chinese-made transformers and other heavy equipment.

The DOE has the responsibility for detecting nuclear explosions abroad, measuring carbon in the atmosphere, making wind turbines more efficient, and developing the nuclear power plants that drive aircraft carriers and submarines. The department makes weapons materials, like tritium, and supervises the enrichment of uranium.

DOE scientists are looking into the very nature of physical matter. They have worked on mapping the human genome and aided nano-engineering development.

Wise secretaries of energy have realized that not only are the national laboratories a tremendous national asset but they can also be the secretary’s shock troops, ready to do what they are asked — not always the way with career bureaucrats. Their directors are wired into congressional delegations, including California with Lawrence Livermore; Illinois with Argonne; New Mexico with Los Alamos and Sandia; Tennessee with Oak Ridge; South Carolina with Savannah River.

Verifying the START nuclear weapons treaty with Russia falls to the DOE as will, possibly, renegotiating it. Another job would be being part of any future negotiations with Iran over its nuclear materials. Likewise, the energy secretary would be involved if serious negotiations are started with North Korea.

An ever-present headache for Granholm will be the long-term management of nuclear waste from the civilian program as public opposition to the Yucca Mountain site in Nevada is adamant. Also, she will be responsible for vast quantities of weapons-grade plutonium in various sites, but notably at the Pantex site in Texas and the Savannah River site in South Carolina before it is mixed with an inert substance for burial in Carlsbad, New Mexico.

Then there are little things like the strategic petroleum reserve, the future of fracking, reducing methane emissions throughout the natural gas system, and bringing on hydrogen as a utility and transportation fuel.

DOE has been charged with facilitating natural gas and oil exports. Now those are subject to the objections of environmentalists.

Smart secretaries have built good relationships early with various Senate and House committees that have oversight of DOE.

James Schlesinger, the first secretary of energy, led the new department with a knowledge of energy from his time as chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, a knowledge of diplomatic nuclear strategy from his time as director of the CIA, and a knowledge of defense from his time as secretary of defense.

The only other star that has shone as brightly from the Forrestal Building was President Barack Obama’s energy secretary Ernie Moniz, a nuclear scientist from MIT who essentially took over the nuclear negotiations with Iran: He and Iranian negotiator Ali Akbar Salehi, a fellow MIT graduate, hammered out the agreement, which was a work of art, a pas de deux, by two truly informed nuclear aficionados.

Compared to the awesome reach of DOE in other vital areas, electric cars seem of little consequence, especially as Elon Musk with Tesla already has scaled that mountain, and all the car companies are scrambling up behind him.