It’s hard for me to believe that Donald Trump is president. Really hard. Equally hard for me to believe that Bernie Sanders is the Democratic front-runner, especially after the Las Vegas debate.

I can take Sanders’s passion, although it’s so consuming it gets to be frightening. I can take his calling himself a democratic socialist, although I don’t know to what extent his form of socialism pits him against capitalism. Enough, I fear.

Some of what Sanders had to say in Las Vegas was downright risible, or has been tried and failed, or, worse, would set in place a series of negative dynamics, damaging the country in many ways without bringing about any of the gains he wishes to achieve. Listening to him, I think, “This donkey wants his feedbag.”

In his way, Sanders is as committed to conspiracy theories as is Trump. Sanders sees vast, secretive forces in fossil fuel companies, lobbyists, bankers and billionaires as being united in a scheme to keep the rest of us poor and ill-served by government.

Here are three of his big fallacies:

1. Companies would be better if they were partly owned by the workers. This is real socialism and it hasn’t worked when it’s been tried.

Sanders would be well-advised to read up on the history of the cooperative movement in Britain. The very first casualty would be innovation because worker governance isn’t risk-taking.

I say this having been very familiar with the British coop movement and having headed a trade union local, the Newspaper Guild, in Washington. Collective decision making is not creative, risk-taking or forward-looking.

2. The technology of fracking to extract oil and natural gas from tight rock formations should be stopped in order to combat global warming. That would deal the economy a body blow while doing nothing for global warming.

Carbon emissions from fossil fuels are coming down, and on the horizon is the technology of carbon capture, utilization and storage and other technological fixes for carbon emissions.

Technology has enabled fracking and technology, not cessation, will clean up emissions.

3. The current health care mess should be replaced root-and-branch by a national health system. That we need a stabilizing public option in health care is more apparent daily. But health reform needs to be introduced like good medicine, prudently with the dosage corrected in relation to the progress of the patient.

Sanders’s approach to most issues can be summed up by what author H.G. Wells, a socialist, said of playwright G.B. Shaw’s ideas. He said the trouble with Shaw, also a socialist, was that Shaw wanted to cut down the trees to erect metal sunshades. Quite so.

In Las Vegas, Sanders was out to cut down every tree he could see. These included what is part of the American Dream: Anyone with pluck and hard work can improve their situation, and maybe grow rich.

Sanders’s assault of Mike Bloomberg was that Bloomberg didn’t accept some mythical belief that money is inherently bad and that those who’ve made a lot of it are evil and constantly conspiring to keep the rest of us in penury — at least those who earn up to the Senate salary of $174,000 a year.

The long-term evil of money isn’t in the generation that makes it, but in the families that will inherit it down through the generations, creating an oligarchy the likes of which we haven’t seen since the fall of the serf-exploiting Russian nobility.

Someone should take Sanders on one side and tell him about failed experiments in worker ownership, the value of evolution over revolution, and that every American would like to be rich.

We are an optimistic people. And in today’s world, there’s the rub.

By nature, we are sure that the extremes of any given time will be corrected as the political climate changes and elections bring in new players. The great ship of state will always get back on an even keel and the excesses, or omissions, of one administration will be corrected in the next.

Maybe not this time.

The norms uprooted by President Donald Trump are possibly too many not to have left lasting damage to this Republic.

Consider just some of his transgressions:

— We have abandoned our place as the beacon of decency and the values enshrined in that.

— America’s good name has gone up in smoke, as with the Paris climate agreement and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear forces treaty.

— The president has meddled in our judicial system by intimidating prosecutors and seeking to influence judges.

— The president has blown on the coals of prejudice and sanctioned racial antagonism.

But above all, Trump has tested the constitutional limits of presidential power and found that it can be expanded exponentially. He has expanded executive privilege to absolute power.

Trump has done this with the help of the pusillanimous members of the Senate and the oh-so-malleable Attorney General Bill Barr — his new Roy Cohn.

The most pernicious of Trump’s enablers, the eminence grise behind the curtain, gets little attention. He is Rupert Murdoch, a man who has done a lot of good and incalculable harm.

The liberal media rails — indeed enjoys — railing against Fox News but has little to say about the 88-year-old proprietor who, with a single stroke, could silence Sean Hannity and tame Tucker Carlson (whom I know and like).

But Murdoch remains aloof and silent. The power of Fox is not its editorial slant but that it forms a malignant circle of harm. It is Trump’s daily source of news, endorsement, prejudice and even names for revenge.

There are two conservative networks, OAN and Newsmax. But neither has the flare that Fox has as a broadcast outlet, nor acts as the eyes and ears and adviser to the president.

I am an admirer of Murdoch in many ways. But like a president, maybe he should get a lot of scrutiny.

Murdoch’s newspapers in Australia, where they dominate, have rejected climate change, and possibly played a role in the country not being prepared for the terrible wildfires.

In Britain, he has stirred feeling against the European Union for decades. His Sun, the largest circulation paper, is Fox News in print and was probably the template for Fox having campaigned ceaselessly and vulgarly against Europe.

After long years of watching Murdoch in Britain and here, I know the damage he can do and why he should be named. I must say, though, that Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal is a fine newspaper, better than before he bought it.

The Democrats, to my mind, present a sorry resistance. None of their presidential candidates has delivered a speech of vision, capturing the popular imagination.

Democrats search the news for the latest Trumpian transgressions and get a kind of comfort by seeing, by their lights, how terrible he is. But there is none of the old confidence that the president will be trounced in the next election and the ship of state will right itself because it always does.

Maybe it will list more.

How different President Trump’s State of the Union speech would’ve been had he included something like this: “At the White House, we are overjoyed at the arrival of a new friend and counselor, Lancelot, a stray from a Washington animal shelter.”

He could, of course, have gone on about what a joy the dog would be to his 13-year-old son Barron; how the boy could learn about perfect love, forgiving adoration, uncritical companionship and eternal job approval — things otherwise missing from the political upbringing and life in Washington.

But Trump didn’t. He didn’t care about all the wonders that enter a human life when four feet come through the door, intent on forever residence.

Barron won’t know those wonders. And the president won’t get the one-issue dog voters.

Trump has said that he’s too busy to have a dog. Well, having watched presidential dogs from Richard Nixon’s King Timahoe, an Irish Setter, to the hypoallergenic Portuguese Water Dogs favored by the Obamas, I can attest there’s help aplenty at the White House for a dog.

They needn’t inhibit an arduous golf schedule. They’re always the darlings of the media, the Secret Service and pro-pet Cabinet members and dignitaries. Queen Elizabeth used to get though meetings with people she had nothing in common with otherwise with a few words about her Welsh Corgis.

Trump’s doglessness is, in my view, a cold heart problem. How he could’ve warmed his self-aggrandizing State of the Union speech with a line or two about a dog. Dogs are so humbling: It’s hard to be pompous when cleaning up after a puppy accident.

Clearly Trump’s love of Trump is so complete there’s no room for a bundle of furry joy in his heart, filled as it is with self-regard.

In our house, Valentine’s Day is Dog Day. My wife Linda Gasparello says Feb. 14 is the birthday of all dogs with no known day of birth. Love, you see.

It all began because one Valentine’s Day, I gave her a shelter dog of uncertain age and parentage. She had some German Shepherd in her, definitely some Airedale terrier, and a pinch of this and dash of that.

What she had was a deep commitment to taking over running the house and stable — and disciplining our Siberian Husky. Her love and loyalty were total: Even when she was old and arthritis had slowed her, as it does so many dogs, she would drag herself up the staircase to sleep in our bedroom.

We named her Valentine, although the shelter workers in Leesburg, Va., told me the family who turned her in named her Gal. She was no gal. She was a dame, made to preside.

Of the many dogs we’ve had, I believe Valentine was the cleverest. She thought and she worried. The cure for her anxieties was routine and order; things in their places and activities at given times, like going on a hack or hosting a dinner party.

Whenever she would hear Linda speaking on our PBS program “White House Chronicle,” turned on in the living room, and speaking at the same time in the kitchen, she was distraught: This couldn’t be. She ran to Linda in the kitchen to be assured and back into the living room to be unassured, and back again into the kitchen, deeply upset that someone could be in two places at the same time.

To go through life without a dog, a Valentine of your own, is to miss one of the great dimensions of love: that between dog and owner, although it’s debatable who owns whom. Valentine owned us.

So, The Donald has no dog and the White House is, in that sense, incompletely furnished. No great bounding down the driveway to meet visitors coming through the Northwest Gate (where reporters enter too), no conversation starter with heads of state, and no care for the Dogs Come First voters.

Of course, there are those, like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who hope that come November, Trump will need a dog: a comfort dog.

Hydrogen as a clean fuel is back with a new mission and better ways of producing it.

Jan Vrins, a partner in Guidehouse (formerly Navigant), a leading consulting firm, says hydrogen is a critical component in the carbon-free future of electricity. He told a press event at the National Press Club in Washington that the role of hydrogen as a storage medium as well as a clean fuel will be vital going forward.

Vrins, who heads a team of 800 consultants and researchers at Guidehouse, told reporters that Europe is ahead of the United States in the new uses of hydrogen and in offshore wind development as a hydrogen source. The two are linked, he said, and hydrogen will grow in importance in the United States.

In the bleak days of energy shortage in the 1970s and 1980s, hydrogen was hailed as a magical transportation fuel. Cars would zip around with nary a polluting vapor, except for a drip of water from the tailpipe.

But this white knight never quite got into the saddle. Hydrogen wasn’t easily handled, wasn’t easily produced and wasn’t economically competitive.

Now hydrogen is back as a carbon-free fuel — a means of sopping up excess generation from wind and solar, when production from those exceeds needs, and as an alternative source of energy storage besides batteries.

In theory, hydrogen may yet make it in transportation via fuel cells. But that puts it in competition with electric vehicles for new infrastructure.

Unlike the 197os and 198os, today there is natural gas aplenty for producing hydrogen. Vrins calls this a “bridge” until hydrogen from water takes over.

Hydrogen doesn’t have the same properties as natural gas, and these must be accounted for in designing its use. It has greater volume than an equivalent amount of natural gas and it’s very volatile. But it can make electricity through fuel cells or burning.

Hydrogen isn’t found free in nature, although it’s the world’s most plentiful element — water is made of hydrogen and oxygen. To get hydrogen, coal or natural gas must be steam-reformed, or it can be extracted from water with electrolysis — a development that isn’t missed on companies like Siemens which makes electrolyzer units. Siemens is a leader in a field that is fast attracting engineering companies.

Hydrogen needs special handling and must be engineered into a system. It can’t be treated as being a one-for-one exchange with natural gas at the turbine intake. It has a lower energy density which means it must be stored under pressure in most instances.

Adam Forni, a hydrogen researcher at Guidehouse with an extensive background in natural gas and hydrogen, told me the emphasis today is on reforming natural gas and desulfurizing it in the process with carbon capture, use and storage (CCUS) technology. This gas is known as “blue hydrogen,” as opposed to gas from electrolysis which is known as “green hydrogen.”

Green hydrogen is the long-term goal of Guidehouse’s Vrins and his team. It makes alternative energy more efficient.

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power has announced  it will convert an 1,800-megawatt coal-fired power plant located in Utah to 800 megawatts of all hydrogen. Initially, the plant will burn 70 percent blue hydrogen and will convert to 100 percent green hydrogen by 2045.

But even blue hydrogen with CCUS is a clean fuel, emitting no carbon. Natural gas when burned emits about half the carbon of coal; blue and green hydrogen, zero.

At the Washington press event, Vrins said hydrogen will help in the creation of microgrids which are the coming thing as utilities reorganize themselves. He said natural gas could be piped to the site and then reformed into hydrogen or, better yet, green hydrogen could be made on-site with the surplus electricity from windmills and solar installations.

Vrins sees a future when the grid or microgrid doesn’t need all the power being produced it can be diverted to electrolyzing water and making hydrogen, thus acting as an energy storage medium with greater versatility than batteries. Batteries draw down quickly, whereas hydrogen can be stored in quantity and used over time, as natural gas is today.

Hydrogen is one of the tools as utilities go green. It’s back all right.

He is an unlikely person to have reinvented foreign aid. But, in his way, that is what Barry Worthington has done. He is the executive director of the U.S. Energy Association, and he has brought hope to troubled energy companies around the globe, first in Eastern Europe and now in Africa, South Asia and Latin America.

Thirty-one years ago, when Worthington came to Washington to assume the role of USEA executive director, he was young and had not traveled widely. Now he is perhaps the most traveled man I know. A member of his staff says, “He is the globe-trottingest.”

Worthington makes at least 30 trips a year — most are overseas. He has been known to fly to a distant capital, say Beijing, hold a meeting and fly back the same day.

But Washington influence and globalism were not on the horizon when Worthington, his bride, Louise, and young son Barry, now an award-winning filmmaker, (daughter Kelly was yet to arrive) first moved to Washington.

This most-American of men, educated at Penn State and the University of Houston, looked for a career in the electric utility industry, where he was hired as a junior executive by Houston Lighting and Power. He had embarked on a quintessentially American career.

Then he was offered a job at the nonprofit Thomas and Alva Edison Foundation. “I took it because it was twice the pay and we were young and broke,” he told me.

The foundation was foundering, and he accepted an offer to head USEA. It was not, on the face of it, an auspicious move.

USEA, the U.S. branch of the World Energy Council, was in dire straits itself. It had made good money on the World Energy Conference, held in Detroit in 1974. But USEA, supported by a modest dues structure, was headed for oblivion when that conference money was exhausted. In fact, the association was down to Worthington and a secretary.

“It had expenses of $250,000 and revenues of $200,000,” Worthington told me over lunch at the National Press Club in Washington. Last year its revenues were $9.4 million, and membership dues account for only 3 percent. “It was our best year yet,” he said.

USEA does not lobby and supports all fuels as an information source and a clearinghouse, and a place where diverse energy interests meet. It runs five major conferences a year and 40 informational briefings.

Worthington looked for new revenue sources, and the unlikely saviour he found was the U.S. Agency for International Development.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, the United States wanted to help the former Soviet satellites. But the usual aid, handed out for bridges and roads, did not fit the situation. Expertise was required, very specialized expertise, and Worthington’s members had it, particularly in the electric field.

The ticket, the Worthington solution, was to pair American utilities with Eastern European ones and show them “best practices.” The first challenge Worthington said was to get them off power at 48.6 cycles and to boost their output to the European standard.

“Frankly, it was an ethnicity play,” Worthington said.

He explained that he was able to find U.S. companies who had engineers who were either from the Eastern European countries or were first-generation Americans. Houston Lighting and Power, for example, had not one but two émigré senior engineers from Czechoslovakia, now the Czech Republic.

The cost to the U.S. companies is minor and the sense of helping and being part of history is major. USEA costs — management and out-of-pocket — are borne by USAID. To the agency that is a pittance to pay for an incontrovertible success.

These partnerships have been an eye-opener to all involved in foreign aid and the idea is spreading. Latest to seek help from Worthington and his 25-person team is the U.S. Department of Energy, realizing it is better to give away skill than money. Skill sticks, money evaporates. The proof of that is the Worthington formula, still spreading useful skills in everything from dispatching electricity to designing rates.

In a town of strivers, Worthington plays in a mellow tone. He dresses modestly, makes conversational speeches and, in my experience, ruffles no one. An unpretentious man who wanted to work in an electric company has left his footprint on the world — USEA has executed more than 80 partnerships.

When tensions got white-hot between the United States and Iran over the assassination of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, it was widely believed the U.S. electric utilities would bear the brunt of Iranian reprisals. The nation’s electric industry leaders spent anxious hours wondering where, when and how bad?

It did not happen, but the alarm was well-founded. It followed mounting concerns flagged last December by the National Infrastructure Advisory Council and followed by an equally alarming report this month from Dragos, a leading cybersecurity consultancy that issues a threat assessment annually.

The Dragos report predicts a possible multi-pronged attack, striking at vulnerabilities in the utilities including those in the supply chain. Dragos identifies threats from attacker groups Magnallium and Xenotime. These have, according to Dragos, migrated from attacking oil and gas installations to electric utilities. It does not name countries.

Dragos states that the complete energy infrastructure is under attack and that the attacks are getting more sophisticated. A group identified by Dragos last year, Parasite, has been focusing on remote connectivity and virtual private networks as points of entry.

It is easy to read these warnings, and another by the Congressional Research Service, as announcing inevitable gloom. But a lot of people in and out of government are now centered on the cybersecurity problem. These include the departments, of Energy, Defense, Homeland Security and the intelligence agencies that prepare the counterattack capability.

As attacks get more sophisticated and penetrating, so too do the defenses and the ability of the targets to “lock out” invaders. Defenses can also include hardening systems that are not involved in electricity production and distribution — communications, for example.

Morgan O’Brien is a legend in the telecommunications industry. He was the co-founder of Nextel, the company that gave the world cellphones. He now works in the utility space: His mission is to harden communications by providing private broadband networks that are independent of everything — including the internet — and will survive most disasters, natural and man-made.

O’Brien is president and CEO of Anterix, which offers secure broadband via the 900 MHz spectrum that it has acquired. He told me, “People do not have to use imagination to understand what may happen to them in the event of a wide-scale power outage. Who can forget watching the collapse of civilization within a day or two of Hurricane Katrina?”

The good news, according to O’Brien, “is that progressive utilities and regulators are preparing for the worst by redesigning the architecture of the electric grid to pinpoint grid failures and in near real-time reroute power to isolate the failure, thus curtailing cascading power shutdowns.”

The magic number for O’Brien is 1.4 seconds. That is how long he says it would take the electric utility to learn of a failure using one of his company’s private networks. So, if a power line fails, in almost real time the utility will know. Remediation or isolation can begin.

Most security is directed at protecting and isolating industrial controller systems, the computer-driven programmable devices that are at the heart of all industrial installations including utilities. But there are other vulnerabilities, not all to do with cyberattack.

The New York Times reported graphically last October on the failure of communications at Pacific Gas and Electric, the giant San Francisco-based utility beset by wildfires. Everything went wrong and the company lost its ability to tell its customers, including nursing homes and other essential users, when it was cutting off the power. Even the state emergency services could not reach the utility control room, while, to quote the Times, “chaos unspooled outside.”

How vulnerable is the grid? While no one will quantify the threat, everyone I have talked to says it is there and very real. Fixing and it keeping it ahead is part of the new need for an ever-evolving  infrastructure.

But as O’Brien says, “For sure, the grid is under attack daily by bad cyber-activists and is routinely hammered by weather phenomena. The doomsday scenario is plenty scary, but I’ll put my money on American technology and determination to keep the lights on.”

The enemy is out there in a hostile world, but the battlements are manned by old and new forces.

The mayors of the two greatest cities in the world, New York and London, combined on Jan. 6 to endorse folly. New York’s Bill de Blasio and London’s Sadiq Khan issued a combined call for all cities to follow their example and divest pension funds in fossil fuel companies.

The plan is to force an end the burning of fossil fuels by pulling their pension funds out of fossil fuel company investments. In another context, this was known as a starve-the-beast strategy.

In reality it was cheap politics: an example of what the British like to refer to as “signaling virtue.”

Putting pressure on the oil and gas companies who are the targets of their worships somehow is meant to force them to do what? To pack up, shutdown and “say ‘uncle’!”, leaving us without gasoline for cars, diesel for trucks or natural gas for electric generation, to say nothing of heating our homes and making meals?

The big woolly idea behind this and much of the Green New Deal, on which the mayors based their pronouncements, is that by punishing the oil and gas companies, they speed the arrival of carbon-free electricity and transportation. Their worships should work on congestion, affordable housing, homelessness and the other innumerable ills that plague cities, not the least New York and London.

As for de Blasio, he could do something efficacious for cleaning the air. He could fight to save the Indian Point nuclear plant up the Hudson River, which has provided more than 20 percent of New York City’s electric power for decades with nary a smidgen of carbon being produced. Now it is to close and not a squeak from the clean-air mayor. Also, he could have spoken for other regional nuclear plants that have been closed in an untimely fashion.

Like many supporters of the Green New Deal, the two mayors are correctly worried about global warming. Their low-lying cities with tidal rivers are likely to suffer irreversible flooding within the decade. But they are closed-minded about the measures that can be taken to reverse global warming. They want clean electricity, but only if it is made in ways that are approved by the left of their parties — the Democrats for de Blasio and Labor for Khan. They want only politically correct, clean air.

The mayors want electricity that is produced from the wind or the sun. In their dreams, to misquote Annie Oakley in the musical, they have the sun in the morning and the wind at night. If only. The wind blows irregularly and the sun, well we know when that shines.

Politicians are out of their depths and dangerous when they prescribe a solution not a destination. If a government, say that of the City of New York, declares it wants more and more of the electricity generated in the city to be carbon-free, it should stick to that goal. It should not tell the market – and the industry — which kinds of carbon-free electricity meet the goal.

The goal should be the aim, not the plays that will get the ball there.

Nuclear plants in the United States are failing because after deregulation of the electric utility industry in the 1990s, a market was established in which the lowest-priced electricity was always to be favored – neither social value nor consideration for the fact that this would favor a carbon fuel, natural gas, over highly regulated nuclear plants was considered.

The mayors did not mention — as those who decide that the fossil companies are to blame are wont to do — that there are technologies on the horizon to capture carbon before it gets into the air. This is known as carbon capture use and storage (CCUS).

Oddly a rah-rah, American Petroleum Institute event, which API does every January in Washington, staged after the mayors’ announcement, under the rubric of “America’s Energy Future,” didn’t play up carbon capture use and storage, although oil companies are leaders in the field. Instead, API dwelled on the virtues of oil and gas in everything thing from job growth to entrepreneurship to quality of life.

Science brought us the fracking boom, cheap solar cells, efficient windmills and it should be given a chance to solve the carbon problem, both with clean nuclear and with much cleaner fossil. The rest is posturing, even as we have just finished the hottest decade on history.

The worshipful mayors of New York and London should be panicked about saving their cities, not signaling their liberal credentials.

What does it matter if a U.S. ambassador runs afoul of the administration in a piddling African country where the inhabitants suffer chronic poverty and bad government?

It so happens it matters a lot.

Here is the story: One of our most experienced ambassadors, Daniel Lewis Foote, with a distinguished diplomatic career, often in hot spots like Afghanistan, Iraq and Haiti, criticized the administration and the justice system of Zambia, a landlocked country in Southern Africa, for sentencing a gay couple to prison for 15 years for having sex. Zambians, who are committed Christians with a fundamentalist slant, were approving. Foote said he was horrified.

The president of Zambia, Edgar Lungu, joined the fray. Homosexuality, he told a British interviewer, was unbiblical and unchristian. Foote, who felt he had been badly treated as a diplomat since his arrival in 2017, was having difficulty in meeting with Lungu despite the $500 million a year the United States gives Zambia in debt-free assistance.

Then Foote, who also had been seething, apparently, over blatant corruption by Lungu and his family, published on the internet a strong indictment of the Lungu administration.

That was too much for the Zambians.

The government made the dispute with the United States public and stirred up the people. Lungu said Foote had to go and, amazingly, the State Department agreed without struggle and Foote was ordered back to Washington.

In his statement, Foote had laid out the situation clearly, “My job as U.S. ambassador is to promote the interests, values and ideals of the United States. Zambia is one of the largest per capita recipients of assistance in the world, at $500 million each year. In these countries where we contribute resources, this includes partnering in areas of mutual interest and holding the recipient government accountable for its responsibilities under this partnership.”

Lungu’s response to Foote’s statement was clear, too, “We do not want him here.”

And the State Department conveniently obliged, even while regretting that the government in Lusaka, Zambia’s capital, had effectively declared Foote “persona non grata.”

The effect across Africa and in other small nations may be to embolden them to silence ambassadors. Lungu has kicked sand in the eyes of the mighty United States and we have run. American values will not be on the table.

Tibor Nagy, the assistant secretary of state for Africa, tweeted lamely, “Dismayed by the Zambian government’s decision requiring our Ambassador Daniel Foote’s departure from the country.”

Yes, there is room for dismay; and it is dismay with the way this issue has been handled in Washington. A stellar career ambassador appointed by President Donald Trump has been pushed out of his post by a government that has been dependent on foreign aid both in cash and advice. Foote also pointed out in his statement that the “American people have provided more than $4 billion in HIV/AIDS support in the last 15 years. Working closely with the Ministry of Health, we currently have well over 1 million Zambians on life-changing antiretroviral medicine, touching close to half of the families in the country.”

If things had gotten too sticky for Foote to continue in Lusaka, he could have been reassigned and a new ambassador appointed. One way or another, he should not have been put in the position of leaving at the behest of Lungu, who is trying to drive Zambia back toward the kind of authoritarian government that has bedeviled it since independence from Britain in 1964.

During the height of the Cold War, Zambia had some strategic importance to the United States as a major producer of copper. Since then the economic fortunes of Zambia have risen and fallen with the copper price and attempts to diversify the economy have faltered. Tourism, dependent largely on the Victoria Falls and recreation on the world’s largest water impoundment, the Kariba Dam, called Lake Kariba, is faltering because of persistent drought leading to historical low flows in the Zambezi River.

Over the years Zambia has done better than, say, neighbor Zimbabwe, where bad government has destroyed the once-prosperous country and reduced it to a kind of subsistence existence without so much as a national currency. Zambia has never been as rich as Zimbabwe was at its independence in 1980, but it has managed somehow to survive.

In his statement, Foote saluted the warmth and friendliness of the Zambian people. In my experience, he is right. I lived in Zambia for a while many years ago and the people were tops. As a very young journalist, I interviewed Zambia’s first president, Kenneth Kaunda, when he was a young independence leader. He is now 95.

Kaunda, too, was to have his problems with diplomats. He curbed the press, but he loved press conferences and he ordered the diplomatic corps to show up and ask friendly questions. That did not go too well either.

In engineering there are credible and incredible failures. Nuclear power plants were designed against what was believed to be a “maximum credible accident.” Then came Fukushima, incredible.

In early December, a report from the National Infrastructure Advisory Council (NIAC) raised the possibility that a huge electric failure, the result of a concerted cyberattack or other event, could knock out electric supply in large swathes of the country for an extended period, weeks even months. A failure with consequences which would have been beyond thinkable before the computer age.

The report, which comes from an advisory council whose mission is to inform the president, has a weight that a think-tank study, for example, would not have. Here, it is the voice of the energy establishment speaking.

I found in reading this report and talking to people in the industry and in academia, it is easy to predict the end of social order as we know it.

It is a painful mind game to try to think how long families could survive without electricity. First off, you would be hot or cold, every appliance in the home would not work. Even if you have a generator, in short order the fuel, natural gas or gasoline, would be gone. How much non-perishable food do you have? I suspect most families would be going hungry after a few days. I would. Cell phones would run down and stay down, and the networks would collapse.

We would be reduced to living like animals without the skills that are inherent to animals. In bad scenarios, families with guns would outlast families without – for a few days.

Survivalists would be proven right as they hung on, maybe for a few months, hunting for fresh food, hoping for clean water, and living off the non-perishable food they have stockpiled. Rumor would dominate as communications failed.

Electric utilities live in a world in which their realities are changing. Wildfires in California and Australia have pointed to a new liability for the companies: accidental ignition through falling lines, likely to get more serious as weather gets more aberrant and droughts become the normal in a time of climate change. That, together with cyberattack, puts them in a place of vulnerability they never anticipated.

Utilities are proud of their expertise – and justifiably so — in responding to short-term outages, even major ones. They rush crews to the scene, and with military zeal get the lines up and the power flowing.

Then came Puerto Rico after hurricanes Irma and Maria, which gave an inkling of what happens when the grid fails: total devastation and maybe as many as 2,975 lives lost.

The NIAC report cites Puerto Rico and emphasizes cascading, blackouts as the grid begins to fail. As it is, utilities fend off daily cyberattacks, and every executive I have interviewed has emphasized that cyberattack is “what keeps me awake at night” – as Jacqueline Sargent, general manager and CEO of Austin Energy, told me recently.

The utility industry, often keen to be reassuring, was part of the preparation of the NIAC report. Scott Aaronson, point man in the industry’s trade organization the Edison Electric Institute, was  involved in the report and has been raising the alarm in interviews since its release.

A new seriousness in the federal government, particularly in the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Energy and the Pentagon, shows that the threat is real and credible. The White House has said nothing.

Changes not dictated by cyberattack defense, but which might aid it, are on the way. Small entities known as microgrids are cropping up. Think of the old utility model with central power stations as a city. The new one is a series of microgrids, more like villages, loosely connected and isolatable, and depending on local generation from solar and wind.

Also, the technology of defense against cyberattack is growing; there is a large cyber-defense industry. It is an escalating battle in which the defenses improve as the threat multiplies, a kind of cold war with weaponized computers.

In the new year, the invisible enemy will be engaged more than ever. But who knows what is enough? In the NIAC report, insiders have sounded the alarm about their own defenses. That is serious, credible.

 

 

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Photo: Lower Manhattan following Power Outage as a result of Hurricane Sandy.