In the ’70s and ’80s, black was gold. Coal was king.

Coal in tandem with nuclear were to be the white knights of the United States, as we struggled with the Arab oil embargo, price-gouging by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, and declining oil production at home.

In 1977, the fledgling Department of Energy declared natural gas a “depleted” resource. Today, it battles with solar for cost advantage. The technology of fracking changed everything. Never forget technology’s possible revolutionary impact.

Solar and wind — today’s energy darlings — were struggling as the National Laboratories sought to make them workable. Solar was thought to have its future in mirrors concentrating heat on “power towers.” Wind was regarded with skepticism; even the shape of the towers and blades was in flux.

Everything that moved would be electrified. Nuclear would be used to make electricity. Coal would be burned as a utility and industrial fuel, and it would be gasified and liquified for transportation and other uses.

Environmentalists were pushing coal as an alternative to nuclear, which they were convinced was dangerous: In the United States it has cost no lives, but gas and oil in various ways have taken their toll.

Coal and nuclear were bright stars in a dark sky.

In 1974, at the White House, Donald Rice, who later ran the Rand Corporation, speculated in an interview with me on whether there might be oil and gas in the Southern Hemisphere, then considered unlikely and now, with production in South America and South Africa, a game-changer. Beware of the conventional wisdom.

All of this came flooding back at an extraordinary summit on global energy horizons convened in Washington recently by Dentons, the world’s largest law firm with offices in 79 countries. By pulling in lawyers from Uzbekistan to London, Dentons’ summit was able to fit America’s energy transformation into the global reality.

Richard Newell, president of Resources for the Future, laid out a picture that is sobering. He said that by 2040, the world would be pumping more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than today, notwithstanding dramatic actions to curb burning fossil fuels in North America, Europe and China. The problem is the growth in demand for electricity in what is being called the “Global East,” where new coal plants are coming online in China, India and Indonesia among other countries. This despite all deploying solar and wind, and India and China having aggressive nuclear growth plans. The electricity need in the region is great and fuel solution is fossil, mostly coal.

Enter Ernest Moniz. The former secretary of energy who now heads his own think tank, Energy Futures Initiative, is a passionate backer of carbon capture use and storage. Moniz, also an adviser to Dentons, is laying out a whole scenario of “carbon capture from air” that is persuasive. It is part of his newly unveiled “Green Real Deal.”

Having chaired two carbon capture conferences, I have wondered why the technology, which gets more sophisticated all the time, has not been embraced by coal producers with vigor. They have been cooler than the utilities who somewhat favor the technology.

Clinton Vince, chair of Dentons’ U.S. Energy practice and co-chair of the firm’s global Energy sector, reminded the summit of the global importance of nuclear, now shunned in the United States for cost reasons. He sees nuclear as vital to climate goals around the world.

Unlike the ’70s and early ’80s, there is no shortage of energy. The challenges are in how clean it can get; how it can be stored, if it is electricity; and how fast technology can change the energy equation — as it has over the last four decades — to save the climate without restricting economic growth.

The commodity that is in truly short supply is time.

The Democrats on the left of the party, exemplified by Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris, are running away with the health care debate.

The problem for those who, like myself, want to see health care extended and rationalized is that the real goals of reform have been abandoned for “universal health care” as an ideological and political goal; add a political prejudice against corporations and the idea of the most health care for all of the people gets lost, as it did  in the debates.

There should be only two goals in health care reform: bring down the cost and see that everyone is covered.

We in the United States have the costliest medicine on earth. We also have the spottiest and most risible coverage. We spend over 18 percent of our Gross Domestic Product on health care, nearly twice the cost of health care in other advanced countries like Britain, France, Germany and Holland. That is a huge cost, making us a less-competitive country. It comes not from medicine but rather from inefficient management.

We are a nation that venerates its business culture, but in health care, as it stands, we are protecting inefficiency as though it were a system. There are better ways, short of upending the whole structure, as Warren, Sanders and Harris would like to do, of fixing the system.

Serious reform is seriously needed.

Children’s National Hospital in Washington, for example, I am told, employs 150 people just to deal with the insurance companies, negotiating payments, securing permission for procedures and protesting disallowances. Presumably, there are as many people in the insurance companies on the other side of these transactions.

None of this huge personnel deployment is delivering health care or serving medicine. They are engaged in health care’s equivalent of a souk — bargaining care for money. It should change because it is enormously wasteful, let alone because it fails in its mission: delivering care to the sick.

Remember the old military saw: We had to destroy the town to save it.

In full bay at the Democratic debates in Detroit, Warren, Sanders and Harris were in competition both to junk all private health insurance and to trash the companies that provide it.

I have spent three decades studying health care delivery. While I am an unalloyed admirer of the National Health System in the United Kingdom, it is not for the United States. Not now.

I know the NHS: It has treated my family well since its inception and, briefly, myself. But I do not think we can trash what we have here root and branch and install a duplicate NHS. We have too much that would have to be changed; too large a new bureaucracy would have to be created.

I am in favor, though, of the government as a payer of last resort for those who cannot get coverage and those for whom treatment is too expensive for the insurer.

We need to regulate medicine and to take the uncertainty out of it. That uncertainty extends from patients who never know when they will be sideswiped by an out-of-network procedure and routine providers, to the hospitals that need to know what they will be paid. Coverage should be guaranteed, not negotiated.

I used to own a newsletter publishing and conference company in Washington. I provided health insurance, which cost me in well-being as well as dollars. The costs went up relentlessly and coverage was problematic. My top aide came down with a rare cancer. The treatment was fine, all paid for, but the post-treatment painkillers were not allowed. I tried to persuade the insurer — after all, we were a 20-strong group. They would not be moved. So my aide, who is French, had her sister send the medications from France, where she could get them for free as a citizen.

If we can get the horror of negotiation out of the system, care would be better, and costs would fall.

I am told the future might be based on what already is working well with Kaiser Permanente, an integrated managed care consortium that insures, provides doctors and hospitals in the package.

It is worth a look — before we start shelling the system to save it.

I, a serial supporter of minority causes, am fed up with the race card. Calling someone a racist is sliming’s cheap shot. It is a banal accusation that cannot be justified and cannot be defended against. It implies the moral deficiency of those who are accused of it.

I am not abandoning my abhorrence of people held down, held back or shuffled through a justice mill because they are of a different race or ethnicity.

Believe me, I have seen it. I have seen a bartender in Baltimore refusing to serve a black man but telling him he could take a bottle home. I have worked at a newspaper where it was debated whether a black editor could manage white editors. I have covered courts where young black offenders are marched through trials that are no more than sentencing mills; where hire-by-the-trial lawyers plead away young minority people who do not know what is happening to them besides that they are going to jail. I have seen segregated water fountains, park benches and restrooms.

Yes, I have seen it.

In South Africa during apartheid, I saw a policeman leading a prisoner with a wire tether around his neck, as you would walk a dog. In Zimbabwe, I saw then-President Robert Mugabe become obsessed with demeaning and forcing out the white population.

I heard the language of apartheid on the West Bank, where there are struggles over land. I heard a Malaysian publisher say demeaning things about the Chinese. I know of the oppression of minorities from Vietnam to those of Korean descent

who perforce live second-class lives in Japan.

I have seen how the Catholics were treated in Northern Ireland and how both sides killed each other randomly. It starts with insults and ends with bloodshed.

I have toured Auschwitz where racism was perfected into genocide and evil wrought its masterpiece.

Race-baiting, race oppression and race categorization are among the deep and pervasive threats to society and to a civil way of life.

But that does not justify the easy and destructive branding of almost anyone who disagrees with anyone else as a racist. That is cheap, shallow, damning and, as a negative, hard to disprove.

I have been there, too, and know the humiliation and impotence of being accused of something you cannot defend yourself against.

Years ago, I was going to be appointed to a vacancy on the board of the venerable National Press Club in Washington, when one board member received an anonymous phone call saying that I said racist things. I did not and I do not, but the board thought it better not to appoint me. It hurt then, decades ago, and it hurts now.

Who wants to say, “Some of my best friends are minorities” or signal their virtue to disprove the label “racist”? Like a wall poster, it is easy to put up and hard to take down.

It is time we took the race card, burned it and interred its ashes. The epithet “racist” — which can be attached as easily as sticking on a Post-it — is neither dialogue nor disputation. Worse, its careless use is turning people against people whose views they fundamentally support.

While it is in play, the race card can be produced from the political sleeve like a wild card to slime anyone who disagrees with its player.

I know House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has worked for decades for civil rights causes. Using the race card was woeful in its dishonesty.

By the same token, I believe President Donald Trump to be, in many things, a truly reprehensible man; a disgrace at many levels. But that is not a reason to use the race card. Calling someone a racist precludes bringing in the heavy artillery of facts to blow away real bigotry. In its way, it locks in prejudice.

The president standing toe to toe with four Democratic House novices of color — the Squad — shouting “racist” is not speech. It is a refuge for the verbally bankrupt. Sadly, by calling Trump a racist, the Squad fired the first fusillade.

They are bureaucracy’s equivalent of ghosts: old policies, fiats and ideas that have lost their relevance — if they ever had any — and are without a constituency, but they live on.

Take the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), a little-known, self-sustaining agency of the government, which was set up in 1971 to help American businesses invest in emerging markets. It helps with risks that are outside the purview of the Export Import Bank and facilitates the attraction of private capital to do the heavy lifting. It is considered a success and an important tool in foreign policy, so much so that in October, it will be subsumed into a new agency, the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, to work in conjunction with the U.S. Agency for International Development.

OIPC’s website says clearly that it helps U.S. manufacturers gain a foothold in new markets. It does not list exclusions from its consideration.

But it has priorities and blind spots, often inherited from the attitudes of a previous administration. A case in point is that it will not lend to help countries buy nuclear power or nuclear power equipment.

The nuclear industry, which is exercised about this impediment to sales in new markets, believes that the agency’s policies of opposing such assistance lie in ambivalence toward nuclear in parts of the Obama administration.

Normally, this would be of little consequence because OPIC cannot afford to finance a whole new nuclear power plant of the traditional type, running to billions of dollars. Its lending limits are in the hundreds of millions, but it does provide risk mitigation that enables other financing to proceed.

This is especially important because the nuclear power industry is in the throes of reinvention: Small modular reactors are the new reality. These have many designs and varied support, including the traveling wave reactor from TerraPower, a Bill Gates-funded company, and the first of these new small reactors, the NuScale, is soon to be deployed at the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory. It will sell power to a consortium of local public utilities.

The stakes are not small. Fifty companies are working on new nuclear designs, most of them small modular reactors that can be built in a factory and shipped to their deployment sites for assembly. All of them will feature designs that obviate the possibility of catastrophic accidents and will seek to minimize nuclear waste.

In short, the new reactors are aimed at the very markets that OPIC is interested in. Its mission, especially when it morphs into U.S. International Development Finance Corporation this fall, will be to counter aggressive Chinese marketing under its ubiquitous Belt and Road initiative, which seeks to vacuum up markets in Asia and Europe.

David Blee, the dynamic president of the U.S. Nuclear Industry Council, has met with OPIC officials. Blee, along with nuclear industry executives, has also had a meeting with President Trump, where the issue was raised. Trump turned to his top economic adviser Larry Kudlow and asked him to investigate. So far, OPIC has not softened its anti-nuclear stance.

Lawyers who deal in international nuclear trade tell me the damage from OPIC’s ban on taking on nuclear projects is twofold: First, specific projects are likely to go to foreign competition, and second is the fact that a major U.S. agency will not even entertain assisting in financing such projects suggests a lack of confidence in American nuclear products by the government itself.

Defense contractors have always found it is impossible to sell defense hardware abroad if that same equipment is not deployed by the Pentagon. The buyer psychology is not hard to fathom: If it is not good enough for the United States, we do not want to know about it.

Critics of the agency cannot say that it is wholly out of touch with today’s reality: It is helping to finance Ivanka Trump’s projects for women around the world. Maybe America’s nuclear entrepreneurs should look to pitching their magical new machines to the first daughter. After all, the nuclear industry is employing more and more women.

The aviation industry — from the backyard inventors to the giants like Boeing and Airbus — are all feverishly working on electric airplanes. The sparks are flying. The new age of flight has taken off.

Erik Lindbergh, grandson of national icon Charles Lindbergh, calculates that 200 firms of all sizes are working on electric aircraft, reminiscent of the early days of both flight and automobiles.

Lindbergh, an accomplished pilot, who replicated his ancestor’s Atlantic solo crossing in 2002, but in a single engine plane, is an avid electric aircraft proponent and developer.

Across the Atlantic in Lausanne, Switzerland, another aviation giant, Andre Borschberg, famous for his around-the-world flight in the solar-powered Solar Impulse in 2016, has just demonstrated an electric flight trainer, the H55, that is operational and being offered to flight schools around the world. It was rolled out at a press event last month.

The destination is always the same, but the paths differ.

The goal is to say farewell to noisy, polluting planes and to usher in environmentally acceptable ones. Even The Economist, a pro-business, pro-personal choice magazine with a global readership, has recently railed against the pollution from airliners and criticized the use of private jets and first-class travel. Aviation is estimated to add up to 5 percent to the greenhouse gas being pushed into the atmosphere. The real problem is that jets lay it down where it does the most damage: at 30,000 feet and above.

To those who live near airports whether it is in Arlington, Virginia, San Diego or London, noise is a real and constant problem.

It will be decades before large jet liners are replaced with electric propulsion, but for light aircraft and for a new kind of flying, involving what Lindbergh calls “flying cars,” the future begins now.

Lindbergh tells me he is working with a major automobile company on what will be a vertical takeoff and landing, flying car, aka airplane. Enthusiasts have dreamed about such a vehicle since the Wright Brothers.

Borschberg, with an enormous amount of firsthand knowledge about using electricity in propulsion, acquired in his spectacular around-the-world flight with co-pilot Bertrand Piccard, is using the experience gained with Solar Impulse in the H55. It is the first generation of trainer: good today, better tomorrow. It also gives suppliers, like Siemens — which is developing electric aviation-specific motors — to evolve their products. The H55 buys its components.

Borschberg says the flight trainer market for a two-seater simple aircraft is large and expanding, particularly in Asia. “There is a pilot shortage all over the world,” he told me.

The limitation of the H55 and other light electric airplanes, including those made in Slovenia, is range. The H55 has only 90 minutes of endurance because of the limits of battery technology. You had better have landed or you will be out of juice; up, up and away having become down, down and dismay. OK for one-hour flight training, but not for those cross-country flights that trainee pilots must make, at least in the United States.

For that reason, Lindbergh is promoting, through his company VerdeGo Aero, a hybrid with a gasoline engine and electric motors. While not a pure electric play, this will perform bridging, much as hybrids have in the car market.

Elsewhere, there is huge excitement about all-electric air taxis and many companies, including Uber, are concentrating on these. In fact, Uber ties eventual financial success to driverless air taxis.

Lindbergh says money is pouring into the electric aircraft field with rich individuals, including Larry Page, co-founder of Google, leading the way. Pure electric drones (like the air taxis, but not designed to carry passengers) are the darling of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

The new airplanes are of various shapes and sizes. Electricity allows you to have many propulsion points, many propellers or one; propellers at the back or the front, and even to have jet equivalent with propellers forcing air into a tunnel to create thrust.

The sky’s the limit, you might say, if batteries catch up with soaring hopes.

 

 

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Photo: H55 Electric Flight Trainer © H55/ Anna Pizzolante

I was once interested in buying a historic mansion in Virginia. It was a classic, but it needed a lot of work. It was being sold by a bank and, for a whole afternoon, my wife and I dreamed of owning it.

It was on the market because the previous owner, who had bought it to restore it, had gone broke. His mistake was that he had tried to do the whole job at once: the wiring, the plumbing, the plastering, the floors. Too much.

Had he done what other restorers would have done in similar situations, gone about restoration piece by piece, he would be the proprietor of a remarkable antebellum home today.

Some big jobs need to be done one thing at a time.

Immigration reform may be such a big job; so big it demands to be done in pieces, fixing what is fixable in the short term while the great issues — who, from where and how many — wait for another day and a calmer political climate.

To me, the most fixable is the plight of those who are already here: the 11 million illegal residents, predominantly from Central America.

They are here. They are people who succumbed to the basic human desire to better themselves and provide more for their families. They are illegal but they are not evil. They broke the law to find a better, safer life — the same motivation that brought people from Europe to these shores for five centuries.

Laws are made by people; human need and human aspiration are primal. We, American citizens (except those whose ancestors were transported in slavery), are the product of the same aspiration that has brought most illegal immigrants to live among us: to work hard, to raise families and to live in peace. Statistically, they are slightly more law-abiding than those who would have them gone by deportation. They are a vital new population of artisans — skilled manual workers.

The Immigrant Tax Inquiry Group (ITIG) and its tireless founder, Mark Jason, a former IRS inspector and Reagan Republican, attracted my attention six years ago because it had a ready answer for those who are illegal but otherwise blameless.

Jason wants illegal immigrants to be given a 10-year, renewable work permit with a special tax provision: There would be a 5 percent tax levied on employers and a 5 percent tax paid by the worker – what Jason calls “five plus five.” The billions of dollars raised by the program would be earmarked for the neighborhoods where the illegals are concentrated to alleviate the burdens they impose on education, health care, policing and other social services.

Notably, his Malibu, Calif.-based group’s program has no amnesty in the usual sense; no path to citizenship, not even an entitlement to lifetime abode.

Jason has poured his personal fortune into a lobbying effort on behalf of the ITIG program, including congressional briefings and information sessions.

To me, the program would solve an immediate problem: It would end the massive deportations — so fundamentally un-American — which have gone on through four administrations. It would allow families to come out from behind the curtain of fear — fear in the knowledge that tonight might be their last night of hope, of a united a family and of a livable wage. In the morning (the favored time for arrests), the state could come down on hope and love with the dreaded knock on the door; paradise lost.

The Jason work-permit program is one room in the immigration edifice that could be renovated now, and with benefit rather than cost. The deportations cost in every way: They cost in lives shattered, ICE teams, deportation centers, court hearings, talented labor lost, and finally transportation to places now alien to most of those headed there as deportees – hapless and more or less stateless. There is a fix at hand.

Light the candles, tune the instruments, warm up the vocal cords, a very special day is upon us. It is time to celebrate a birth, a unique birth, and a birth that in many ways has lit human hope, kindled human aspiration and fired up a few revolutions.

Happy birthday, America!

I do not know any other country that has a birthday. Others have days that celebrate their independence, their casting off a colonial state or the expulsion of a tyrannical power, but no other country has a birthday. Celebrate that, too.

As I was born a Brit, I have no idea how I would have greeted the events of 1776. Would I, like Edmund Burke, the great Anglo-Irish orator and member of Parliament, have seen the emerging difference between the rugged, inventive, self-motivated farmers in the American colonies and the then subservient masses in Britain? Or would I, like Lord North, prime minister of Great Britain, and his monarch George III, have regarded the colonists as traitors?

The farmers, these landed gentlemen, were not only creating a new country destined for world leadership, but they also were forming what would come to be the universal middle class, where accomplishment would triumph birth.

Slowly in the United States, the idea grew that people who worked with their hands could belong to the middle class, aspire to having their children go to college and move up; to improve on their parents’ station in life. While this did not reach fruition until the last century, the seeds were sown in the 18th century. It was an American evolution.

When I was a boy in faraway Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), we worshipped all things American, although we were devotedly British. My father, who worked with his hands, had read that American artisans could enjoy a middle-class life. Awesome. A local publisher, Bernard Woolf, told me that the United States led the world because, for example, you could study ice cream making in college. I do not know where he got that idea, maybe from something he had read about Howard Johnson’s and its 28 flavors of ice cream.

As teenagers we fantasized about owning American products, including cars complete with fins and automatic drive. In fact, when the first automatics — which were American, of course — showed up, the dealership in Salisbury (now Harare) was mobbed by people anxious to see this marvel.

We believed in the virtues of the dwindling British Empire (we were a living, breathing example of it), but also in American know-how, and that there was no human challenge that America could not meet. That was slightly dented when the United States failed (correctly) to back Britain and France in the Suez Crisis of 1956, and again when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik the following year.

None of that really mattered. The United States remained, as Ronald Reagan was to say later, “a city on a hill” for us.

When I moved to Britain itself, I heard the first criticisms of the United States — heard for the first time that it was a harsh, cruel place. That was the socialist line that affected many Labor Party followers. But no one suggested that the United States was anything other than a land of opportunity.

I will bet that if you stood anywhere in the world and said, “I have a bunch of green cards here for the first takers,” you would be sacked like a quarterback on a bad day.

America is still the place to be if you want to cast off the bonds of limitation which abound around the world, whether they are social, economic or religious. This is the land of opportunity; opportunity to pursue all manner of dreams and to buck the conventional.

Week after week, in my work as a columnist and broadcaster, I criticize something about the United States, from the death penalty to the health care system, to economic unfairness. So much so that you might not know I dearly love the place.

Happy Fourth of July, America. Happy birthday, Land of Dreams.

Barring the political equivalent of an act of God, Boris Johnson becomes leader of the British Conservative Party and prime minister on July 22.

Johnson is a man who fails upward. So much so that he has said, “As I have discovered myself, there are no disasters just fresh opportunities. And, indeed, fresh opportunities for fresh disasters.”

Johnson has been sacked by an editor, a publisher and by his party leader. He sins, gets caught, wriggles out and comes back emboldened.

His first recorded transgression was when he got the heave-ho from The Times of London for fabricating quotes — usually a career killer. Instead, he was hired by The Daily Telegraph and sent to Brussels to cover the European Union. He covered it by minting tales of bureaucratic excess. Later, some of Johnson’s suspect reporting entered the mythology that has powered Brexit.

One fib was that the European Commission was laying down requirements for the shape of bananas imported into Europe. Another was that there were plans for the Brussels bureaucrats to build themselves a luxurious skyscraper. He was accused of fake news long before that term was in wide use.

Johnson — as journalists like to say among themselves — wasn’t one to let the facts stand in the way of a good story. His Brussels colleagues named him as the proprietor of the “mendacious smirk.” He had a way of looking to the side and down, sniggering away the evidence when his facts were challenged.

On the upside, Johnson is articulate and adept at turning disaster into, if not triumph, something that is funny or so outrageous that the blow is diverted. When, as mayor of London, he was stranded on a zipline and left hanging above the ground, he entertained film crews with hilarious commentary. Boris meets Lucille Ball.

It’s generally accepted that Johnson was an adequate mayor of London; although, like all politicians, he accepted things already in train as his creations. He’s thought to have handled London’s hosting of the Olympic Games well. He opposed the expansion of Heathrow Airport and understood the importance of city branding, saving London’s iconic double decker buses.

For five years, Johnson was editor of The Spectator, a conservative political and literary magazine. His staff there accused him of being late, disorganized and not showing up at all, charges that have clung to him everywhere he’s worked. But he was a successful editor and presided over a rise in circulation, as well as moving the content toward his own brand of liberal conservatism.

Lazy or not, Johnson’s journalistic output over the years has been considerable and includes a workman-like biography of Churchill.

As a member of parliament, which overlapped with his editorship, Johnson never reached the heights in oratory that had been expected. He described his own parliamentary speeches as “crap.”

As an after-dinner speaker, he’s been brilliant: irreverent, self-deprecating and funny. Johnson has always played the clown — and it has played well for him.

Born on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Johnson was educated in England and took the upper middle class route through private schools, including Eton, and on to Oxford where he studied Classics. These he loved and has since cloaked himself in his familiarity with antiquity as a way of signaling superiority and intellectual weight. An example is a longish article he wrote later comparing London to Athens and, by implication, himself to Pericles.

Fun and games also have, it might be said, pervaded Johnson’s private life. When he was married to his second wife, Johnson acknowledged a child out of wedlock. When he was editor of The Spectator, the magazine was rocked with scandal. Johnson was having an affair with the top columnist; the publisher, a woman, was involved with a member of the government; and an editor was involved with a secretary. Cupid was not a spectator at The Spectator.

The sins of the flesh would have brought down other politicians, but Johnson has moved on and up. Now he is set to marry a woman 25 years his junior.

He upended his old friend David Cameron when he threw in with the Brexiteers and became the public face of Brexit. Again, facts went out the window. Johnson saw a way to power, and he grabbed it.

Now the premiership is almost his and Britain, going through turbulent times, faces an unsteady, cartoonish hand at its helm.

I constantly marvel at how wondrous electricity is, maybe because I grew up in Africa where, for stretches of my childhood, we lived under canvas in the bush without it. I can tell you it wasn’t romantic.

My father repaired machinery in rural areas. Whenever equipment like corn-grinding, diesel-powered mills failed, the family went to the location, pitched tents and managed the best we could. Food was cooked out in the open on fires, bread baked in cast iron pots sunk into the fire.

It was almost impossible to read by hurricane lantern. Listening to 78 RPM records, played on a wind-up phonograph, was tiresome. Ours broke and stayed broken. The labor of the thing wasn’t worth the scratchy sound.

Life wasn’t awful, but it was tough. Particularly on my mother, who had to get us fed and bathed with constant fires and a kerosene stove. It gave me a lifelong reverence for electricity.

When I flip on the light in the morning, turn on the coffee maker and run the shower, I’m reminded of the generous contribution of electrons to my well-being and that of so much of the world: happiness at the touch of a switch.

All of this came back to me in Philadelphia, where the savants of the industry gathered recently at the Edison Electric Institute’s annual meeting to ponder the future of the investor-owned electricity industry.

This industry, which keeps the electrons flowing, is in a state of change. And change was much in the air in Philadelphia.

It’s the change that is driving the switch from coal to natural gas and, more pronounced, the switch to renewables.

Once electricity was made in one place and delivered to the customer in another, now it’s more complicated with local “minigrids,” reflecting diverse generating sites where wind turbines, solar arrays and even gas turbines are situated.

Some consumers, like universities and hospitals, are building minigrids for security. Some localities feel it’ll be cheaper to change their relationship with the grid, and utilities themselves are building minigrids.

Christopher Crane, president and CEO of giant Exelon Corporation, said that where power once flowed one way down its wires, now it’s looking at flows that go two ways.

Lynn Good, chairman, president and CEO of Duke Energy, another giant utility famed for its engineering prowess, spoke about the challenges and opportunities of the new order, pointing out that despite the changes, which include the switch to electric vehicles — there are now 1 million in the United States — and the abandonment of coal, some old bugaboos remain. Good said building infrastructure (power lines, generating stations and substations) remains as difficult as ever.

The utilities are in a paradox: Electricity demand is flat — and most have programs to reduce demand through efficiency — yet they remain, as E&E News reporter Rod Kuckro told me, darlings on Wall Street. The switch to electric vehicles is a new market for utilities, while it augurs less well for the oil industry.

Looming full of promise for the utilities are smart cities, which will rely on electricity as their bedrock, their fuel and their glue. But these also will impose a demand: More electrification asks more reliability. Utilities are facing the need for greater resilience, fewer storm outages and reliable backup, like batteries, when lines do go down in aberrant weather.

Even here, things could change. Tech titans, like Google, which are very interested in smart cities, would also like to be electricity providers.

The existential threat to the happy future of the utility companies is cybersecurity. They are, in tandem with the Department of Energy and other federal agencies, throwing talent and money into hardening their systems. Trouble is, as Alex Santos, co-founder of the information security firm Fortress, said, “It’s a Cold War kind of situation where they build, we build.” Now the hackers build, and the utilities build against them.

When in Philadelphia, 267 years ago, Ben Franklin used a kite and a key in a thunderstorm to certify that the electricity in lightning was the same as the one known on the ground, he moved the theory of electricity along mightily. It’s still moving. Thanks, Ben.

American conservatives hate it. Even the most passionate British conservatives support it. It was conceived by Winston Churchill as far back as 1908, mentioned again in 1924, and laid out as a plank for British reconstruction in his forward-looking “Plan for Postwar Britain” in 1943.

This toxic issue, which turns red blue and blue red when you cross the Atlantic, is Britain’s National Health Service (NHS).

Introduced in 1948 by the Labor government of Clement Atlee, it is often thought of in the United States as a socialist idea. Churchill was, in fact, influenced greatly by William Beveridge, a liberal economist who played a key role in the formation of what came to be known as the welfare state, which combined national insurance (social security) with national health insurance.

The Brits, I can attest as a former Brit, love the NHS. They also love to criticize it. It is up there with the weather.

Also, it should be noted, the NHS is not perfect; it is and always will be a work in progress.

So large a system has its failures. Whenever there is one, conservative American friends are quick to send me the bad news — as though a surgical mess-up in Birmingham was a harbinger of the collapse of the entire system.

The NHS has been described as the third rail of British politics.

Clearly, President Trump had never heard that and had the temerity to suggest that the NHS should be part of trade negotiations between the United States and Britain. No, a thousand times no, was the instant reaction of the conservative ministers and former ministers now jostling for election as prime minister.

Any suggestion that the NHS — Britain’s most popular government program — would be in any way subject to commercial interference would doom a British candidate for public office.

How it was that Trump thought he could grab the third rail and get away with it is unknown, but he walked that one back, as they say nowadays, quickly the next day.

Over the years, I have been asked innumerable times about how the Brits do things from public transport to creative theater; from the financing of the BBC to the hobby of racing pigeons. When it comes to the NHS I am never asked; I am told. Liberals tell me it is what we need in the United States: a single-payer system. Conservatives tell me that it is communism and that the Brits get terrible health care.

I am not sure the former is desirable, and I know the latter to be poppycock fed by a fury that is based on misinformation willingly received and willingly disseminated.

I have received care as a young man under the NHS and members of my family have been recipients through the years. I have spent long hours examining various health systems and a good deal of time taking to British doctors and professionals. I have also done the unlikely in this debate: talked to patients.

A dear relative was gravely ill a few years ago. I spent a week at her bedside in a large hospital in Kingston, just outside London. As she was sedated at the time, I had a lot of time to study the place.

It was big with wings specializing in everything from heart failure to eye surgery. It seemed to work pretty well, although the public wards were crowded.

But there were these takeaways: No one was refused, nor would be sent home early, and no surprise bill would come in the mail. My relative had a private health plan on top of the NHS standard and got a private room and good food.

The biggest difference is in cost. Health care spending accounts for 17.9 percent of GDP in the United States, whereas it accounts for just 9.7 percent of GDP in the United Kingdom. Germany, France and Canada all have different systems that come out in the same place as the U.K., with service delivered for money spent.

Structural costs bring our bill up. All those women in your doctor’s office, arguing with insurance companies on the phone over “codes,” are not practicing medicine. They are engaged in a kind of health care roulette: Will they or will they not pay? Is it in the plan?

I am not sure the NHS is right for the United States, but structural overhaul is necessary. Wasted efforts and greed pervade the system.

By the way, I do not have a dog in this fight: I am on Medicare — and that costs the taxpayer too much because of weak controls.

 

 

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Photo Editorial credit: Sasa Wick / Shutterstock.com. Bournemouth, UK September 01, 2018 South Western Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust keeps their emergency services ready at the Airshow