White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

A Disease That Cries Out for Research as Many Suffer Silently

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Photo: Tom Camenzind, an ME/CFS patient, photographed at his home in San Ramon, Calif. / Credit: Linda Gasparello

All diseases are cruel, but some have a refined brutality all their own. One such is Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME), also known as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS). It is a monster, often hidden in plain sight; the suffering it inflicts is limitless.

Tom Camenzind is a handsome young man who should be in the joyous throes of youth. A popular and gifted student at Stanford University, Tom was clearing the hurdles of academia with ease and grace. In January of his sophomore year, he caught a cold on campus. ME walked through some door, and stole his promising life.

Today Tom lies conscious but prone in his parents’ home in San Ramon, Calif. He is totally paralyzed and can only communicate with his parents, Mark and Dorothy, by pressure from his fingers on sensors. He cannot tolerate everyday sounds, light or touch.

When the sensor-activated bell sounds, Tom’s parents come rushing to his side. Mark is an engineer and Dorothy is a physician, and the strain of their son’s affliction on them is palpable. Tom cannot do anything, anything whatsoever, for himself. At 23 years old, he is on the threshold of life, but he cannot cross it. He breathes and thinks, but he cannot live his life.

Recently, I filmed the Camenzinds for a special edition of “White House Chronicle,” a weekly program that I produce and host for PBS and other broadcast outlets. It was made in conjunction with the Solve ME/CFS Initiative, a Los Angeles-based charity.

Tom’s agony, and that of 1 million in America and 17 million around the world, predominantly women, cries out in terrible, silent eloquence for a national research effort with international cooperation on ME/CFS – so that those who suffer, like Tom, can dare to hope.

Tom’s paralysis is extreme, but others suffer daily with extreme fatigue, headaches, muscle pain, dysphasia and light and sound intolerance. Normal work is impossible, as is maintaining ordinary family life. Precious few ME/CFS patients make a full recovery. My files contain letters from sufferers who beg for death. Suicide is common.

Yet the United States has never put the effort — read dollars — into ME/CFS that it deserves, that it needs, that one would expect. Previous administrations have spent a paltry $5 million a year on research on the disease. While that amount was due to rise to $15 million, there is no guarantee it will under the Trump administration. The Office of Management and Budget has proposed deep cuts in funding for the National Institutes of Health, the research agency.

Even the diagnosis of the disease is a challenge. There are no conventional biomarkers that can be found in body fluids. One certain but clumsy way of diagnosing it is by asking patients who are ambulatory to walk on a treadmill. If they collapse for one or more days, the diagnosis is positive.

Many suffer for years and cannot find a doctor who knows anything about the disease. The disease is not part of the curriculum in medical schools.

Most patients see many doctors and get many wrong diagnoses before they find a specialist – if they find one at all. Most states have no specialists.

For patients, costs are huge and help is slight. Lovers drift away, spouses give up, children are often thought to be lazy and are criticized by parents, siblings and teachers. Schools are baffled when active kids fall apart from ME.

Over the years, there have been efforts by private charities, like the Solve ME/CFS Initiative, to fund the research gap. But still missing is the government, the big foundations and Big Pharma.

Sadly, ME has no celebrity champions. AIDS had Elizabeth Taylor, Muscular Dystrophy has Jerry Lewis and Parkinson’s Disease has Michael J. Fox.

For Tom to come back to his life one day, money and research are needed now. Oh, so needed.

 

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of “White House Chronicle” on PBS. His e-mail is llewellynking1@gmail.com.

The Ties that Bind, Old-School and Otherwise

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I ask you, what’s a man to do? Men are terrified to leave the house these days. Should they wear a suit and look overdressed, as though they’re on the way to a meeting with the bank, trying to look both stable and reliable while subtly conveying need? Or should one assume that one’s body language is so articulate that social status, wealth, success and importance (or need) will shine though like people in Hollywood?

Actually, I blame Hollywood for everything: the sartorial confusion, the dress wilderness, the not knowing how to look and the death throes of the necktie.

I have it well documented that the dress decay — that’s what I think it is — came from show business. No less an authority on social rectitude, the manager of the Carlyle Hotel in New York, told me that the Hollywood riffraff, who he loved for their free-spending ways, had destroyed the dress code; made it hard for a poor newspaper man to pass for an investment banker by having the right kit.

“You used to be able to get all togged up for success,” a Savile Row tailor explained.

He said anyone could tell who had a bespoke suit and who didn’t, and he said a real gentlemen had at least one bespoke suit. In a famous phrase from the party girl Mandy Rice-Davies, “He would wouldn’t he.” This man made suits for the upper crust, or those who wished to be thought of us as such.

His name, the master tailor, was Henry Stewart. Although he learned his trade in Savile Row, when I knew him he practiced it in New York and made very beautiful, very expensive suits. He boasted he could “give a man a waist,” even if years of good living had transmuted his concave stomach to convex.

Back in those days, a tailor would ask a man, “How do you dress, sir?” If that phrase has you bemused, think about the male anatomy and what the effects of gravity are on it below the waist and out of sight.

My father owned only one suit and what an ill-fitting thing it was. He wore it for church, Masonic meetings and to borrow money at the bank. Otherwise, a small contractor, he wore his work clothes, which actually gave him more dignity than the suit.

Nowadays, in my experience, rather than dressing up to go to church one does just the opposite: jeans, cut-offs, flip-flops are good enough, apparently. Gone are the days of men in suits and women in hats and gloves on a Sunday. Gone the way of the necktie. What must God think?

I have watched the agonizing death of the tie, of that once sacred part of a man’s wardrobe; that single piece of cloth that gave man the option to express a modicum of individuality. Now it is old-fashioned, out of step and not hip to wear a tie.

But for those of us who were steeped in the tie culture, it is a tough farewell. Men, take your favorite tie in hand and sing, “We’ll meet again, don’t know where don’t know when, but I know we’ll meet again some sunny day.”

I’m putting a lock on my tie rack in case the agents of the open-necked state come for them — to deport them to Italy, the home of gorgeous silk ties.

I wore a tie at school, in my first job at age 16 and ever since. I am naked otherwise. No tie and I feel hostile eyes can see into my soul and know how little I think and what mundane if unspeakable thoughts I have. My soul is exposed without a tie and, preferably, a suit.

I fear the naked throat is the symbol of the decline of the West. I want to be counted as fighting for civilization, with a snazzy Windsor knot, a throwback to when a man’s tie was his shield, his comfort — and something to wipe his eyeglasses with.

For InsideSources

China’s Not-So-Secret Weapons — Rare Earths

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In October 1973, the world shuddered when the Arab members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries imposed an oil embargo on the United States and other nations that provided military aid to Israel in the Yom Kippur war. At the same time, they ramped up prices.

The United States realized it was dependent on imported oil — and much of that came from the Middle East, with Saudi Arabia the big swing producer. It shook the nation. How had a few foreign powers put a noose around the neck of the world’s largest economy?

Well, it could happen again and very soon. The commodity that could bring us to our knees isn’t oil, but rather a group of elements known as rare earths, falling between 21 and 71 on the periodic table. This time, just one country is holding the noose: China.

China controls the world’s production and distribution of rare earths. It produces more than 92 percent of them and holds the world in its hand when it comes to the future of almost anything in high technology.

Rare earths are great multipliers and the heaviest are the most valuable. They make the things we take for granted, from the small motors in automobiles to the wind turbines that are revolutionizing the production of electricity, many times more efficient. For example, rare earths increase a conventional magnet’s power by at least fivefold. They are the new oil.

Rare earths are also at work in cell phones and computers. Fighter jets and smart weapons, like cruise missiles, rely on them. In national defense, there is no substitute and no other supply source available.

Like so much else, the use of rare earths as an enhancer was a U.S. discovery: General Motors, in fact. In 1982, General Motors research scientist John Croat created the world’s strongest permanent magnet using rare earths. He formed a company, called Magnequench. In 1992, the company and Croat’s patents were sold to a Chinese company.

From that time on it became national policy for China to be not just the supplier of rare earths, but to control the whole supply chain. For example, it didn’t just want to supply the rare earths for wind turbines; it insisted that major suppliers, such as Siemens, move some of their manufacturing to China. Soon Chinese companies, fortified with international expertise, went into wind turbine manufacture themselves.

“Now China is the major manufacturer of wind turbines,” says Jim Kennedy, a St. Louis-based consultant who is devoted to raising the alarm over rare earths vulnerability. A new and important book, “Sellout” by Victoria Bruce, details the way the world handed control of its technological future to China and Kennedy’s struggle to alert the United States.

At present, the rare earths threat from China is serious but not critical. If President Donald Trump — apparently encouraged by his trade adviser Peter Navarro, and his policy adviser Steve Bannon — is contemplating a trade war with China, rare earths are China’s most potent weapon.

A trade war moves the rare earths threat from existential to immediate.

In a strange regulatory twist the United States, and most of the world, won’t be able to open rare earths mines without legislation and an international treaty modification. Rare earths are often found in conjunction with thorium, a mildly radioactive metal, which occurs in nature and doesn’t represent any kind of threat.

However, it’s a large regulatory problem. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the International Atomic Energy Agency have defined thorium as a nuclear “source material” that requires special disposition. Until these classifications, thorium was disposed of along with other mine tailings. Now it has to be separated and collected. Essentially until a new regime for thorium is found, including thorium-powered reactors, the mining of rare earths will be uneconomic in the United States and other nuclear non-proliferation treaty countries.

Congress needs to look into this urgently, ideally before Trump’s trade war gets going, according to several sources familiar with the crisis. A thorium reactor was developed in the 1960s at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. While it’s regarded by many nuclear scientists as a superior technology, only Canada and China are pursuing it at present.

Meanwhile, future disruptions from China won’t necessarily be in the markets. It could be in the obscure but vital commodities known as rare earths: China’s not quite secret weapon.

Scaramucci’s Vain Quest to Stop the Leaks

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There’s a new sheriff in town. He has strapped on his shooting irons and has been hunting down varmints — varmints right in the ranch house.

The sheriff is Anthony Scaramucci, the new White House communications director, and the varmints are the “leakers.” Watch out!

Scaramucci has threatened to fire people. He says he may be contacting the FBI and the Justice Department. He has also hinted that the leakers are high officials who are using juniors to contact the press.

This is a strange interpretation of “communications.”

The White House is leaking because it isn’t talking coherently. The Trump administration is not rooted in policy or philosophy, and the White House staff is divided against itself; a deeply unhappy place wanting in direction and internal clarity.

So, it leaks. It leaks for personal reasons. It leaks for patriotic reasons. It leaks out of frustration. And it leaks because no one is in charge administratively: too many assistants — including Scaramucci — are reporting directly to the president, eschewing the line of command that normally flows through the chief of staff and the national security adviser. With Scaramucci on the loose, Reince Priebus is chief of staff in title only: a male nipple.

The communications failure is enormous and extends down to the inability of the press office to answer simple questions, like who was playing golf with the president? One wouldn’t assume this to be a state secret, but reporters ask and get no answer. They aren’t rebuffed, they’re just not answered.

In this instance, a question not answered is a revelation of another sort: the communications staff members are willfully kept in the dark. It isn’t claimed that state secrets and initiatives are being discussed on the greens. It’s a simple matter of the president’s recreation. Is Trump ashamed of the company he keeps?

The avalanche of leaks are cries for clarity in a chaotic administration. They are the symptoms, not the disease.

The leaks may just get worse. But the mechanics or leaking will get more inventive as Scaramucci ferrets around, suspecting his colleagues who will live in increasing fear.

Leaking is as old a journalism and was going on long before the invention of movable type. Journalists regard it with equanimity, as part of the trade, an integral part of the job — also as part of their right to collect the news, and the public’s right to know.

However, leaking does have large consequences when it comes to how the government makes decisions. The anti-leakers have a point here: Nowadays, ideas can’t be batted about inside government with abandon. Particularly, they can’t be committed to writing without the fear of them getting into the press.

Leaking classified information is criminal. WikiLeaks troubled many journalists; delicate choices in a democracy.

But that’s not what Scaramucci is fishing for; he wants to end the embarrassment of the president.

For those who keep secrets, technology has made the job a thousand times harder. When I was a young reporter, a congressman or White House staffer wishing to show you some document — to leak it — either had to tell you what it said or allow you to see and copy it by hand. This was risky, as only a few hands would’ve had access to the document or letter.

The Xerox machine changed that instantly, and the arrival of the digital age put a leak a keystroke away. Privacy and secrecy aren’t what they used to be.

But the hunt-and-kill mission Scaramucci is on won’t stop this White House — this seething hive of fear and ambition, this policy free for all, this scarcely controlled chaos, this gyre of half-formed purposes — from leaking.

With Sheriff Scaramucci nosing around, casting doubt on everyone, the leaking might accelerate but will be more devious: Tell a junior to tell friend to tell a reporter, rather than telling the reporter something directly. Email and telephones will be eschewed, or used with great care.

If the communications director wants to control leaking, he should try communicating. He shouldn’t send the press secretary out there looking like a pudding before the custard is poured over it, without her knowing what the president’s policies are or what he meant by his latest enigmatic tweet.

Sheriff, calm the chaos, and start communicating. Then, pardner, the leaks will dry up like them thar desert.

 

For InsideSources

Photo:  White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci speaks to members of the media outside the White House in Washington, Tuesday, July 25, 2017. AP PHOTO/PABLO MARTINEZ MONSIVAIS

 

Airlines: The Uncomfortable, Dangerous Skies

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According to Greek legend, Procrustes was a rogue blacksmith who had an iron bed that he would invite to travelers to use, except that if they were too short, he would stretch them until they fit it and if they were too long, he would amputate the offending limbs.

Well, over at American Airlines, the spirit of Procrustes is alive and well.

They’re planning to reward you for your business by putting you in even smaller seats than you’re now squeezed into. They’re going to lop two inches off the space you’re getting on their new Boeing 737 MAX airplanes.

In fairness, I must point out that Spirit Airlines already has customers on their aircraft squeezed into the smaller seats. Others will follow suit.

Unbelievably, American and some airlines are going to compound their hostility to their customers by making the toilets even smaller than they are now. Soon they may reduce service to a kind of communal bedpan; that way they could cram in more seats.

But that’s not all. The airlines are already discussing a sub-coach fare, where you’d get the tiny seat and the dolls-house toilet, and you wouldn’t get any space in the overhead bins and your flight wouldn’t qualify for frequent-flyer miles.

The plan here is to get you to upgrade to a slightly larger seat, allowing you to carry your bag on board. The wise will take that option because otherwise, it looks like you’ll be paying a fee for your small bag to go into the hold. Crafty.
All this is glorious fun for late-night comedians — none of whom would be caught dead in coach, by the way. They’re all up front, if a private plane isn’t available.

But there’s a big safety issue here which the airlines, in their desire to get more bodies jammed into the wretched space available, don’t talk about. If there were an accident — and there will be one because safe as airline travel is, there are always accidents — people will be stuck in their seats because the gangways will be too crowded. Crowding makes for chaos.

The worst scenario – and I’ve discussed this with aviation experts aplenty over many years — is what would happen in those precious moments, either after a very hard landing with a collapse of the gear or a collision on the ground, before fire breaks out? Precious seconds when people in panic in the rear of the plane will most likely be fighting each other to get to the escape routes. And, of course, there will be some fool trying to get his or her suitcase out of the overhead bin.

Hijacking goes back to the earliest days of airplanes, but ramped up in the 1960s with hijackings to Cuba, and then the Middle East got into the game.

Pilots, airlines and the government knew there was a simple way of frustrating this: harden the cockpits with locks and steel bars. The White House knew about the fix, as did the FAA: I raised it with the White House, and friends raised it with the FAA.

But the airlines said it would be too expensive, which is always the first line of argument from people who don’t want to do something; the existential fear of spending money.

After 9/11, the cockpits were hardened almost overnight. I asked a former White House science adviser why the fix couldn’t have been done earlier, when people in aviation had suggested it. He told me, “I should have pushed that one harder.” Indubitably.

The unconscionable crowding of airliners, like the hardening of cockpits, will have to wait until the aviation community, the FAA and the public realizes that not only is flying in coach on an airliner today a horrible experience, but it’s also potentially dangerous, very dangerous.

 

Photo: “A true workhorse, the 757” 12 May 2009, 14:47 Cory W. Watts from Madison, Wisconsin, United States of America. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

A Plea to Start Again on the Whole Issue of Health Care

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The process now underway in Congress to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) reminds me of what would happen if you tried to thread a small darning needle with a strand of bulky yarn: It won’t go through the eye. The more you try to pull the strand through the eye, the less useful the yarn coming through it will be.

Therefore, isn’t it time to reconsider the whole proposition as though there were no Obamacare, no House version of its replacement, and no preconceived objective beyond affordable care for all?

Also, there should be no pre-established conditions, such as single-payer and multiple-payer; no pre-established goals, such as preserving particular insurance practices and expectations that employers will always be part of the deal; and no expectation that the health-care bill should also be a tax bill or a welfare bill.

Its simple goal should be to free people from fear of medical catastrophe and enable physicians and hospitals to care for the sick without commercial pressure.

I’ve come to the belief that big, new ideas are needed from my own experience as an employer-provider. For more than 30 years, as a small Washington publisher, I provided health insurance for my staff of 25. It was a nightmare that got worse as medicine got more expensive.

Of many strange situations, none was worse than the employee who developed nasopharyngeal cancer, a rare type of head and neck cancer. The insurance paid for chemotherapy and radiation, but refused to pay for expensive painkillers. These had to be brought in from France by a family member.

Maybe the most discouraging was a printing-press operator who wanted the premiums given to him, as he refused to see the point of insurance, although he was married with three small children. “We don’t use insurance,” he declared. “When the kids are sick we go to the emergency room and tell them we have no money.” When pressed, he said they did this because they didn’t want the bother of filling out forms.

If you think, as I do, that the system we have is less than perfect, one is immediately thought to be a believer in British-type national health insurance. Not necessarily so.

As a former citizen, I know something about Britain’s National Health Service and I think it is better than what is happening in the United States. I’ve received treatment in Britain under the system and members of my family in England are devoted to it. There is good treatment for major procedures. However for lesser ailments, there are long waiting lists. Bureaucracy is everywhere.

Worse, can you imagine a health-care system dependent on the budget cycle in Congress?

In Switzerland there is a totally private system, which looks like improved Obamacare. Everyone is obliged to buy insurance, just as everyone has to pay taxes. There are no limits on troublesome things like preexisting conditions. The government regulates the insurers. In a referendum, the Swiss rejected a switch to a single-payer system by 60-40 percent.

There also are mixed systems in Germany and Holland. The commonality is that everyone is covered and the governments regulate. That way, insurance pools are large and have the correct mix of old and young — otherwise the old will overwhelm any system.

Unless we devise a structure that caters to all, we will continue with overburdened emergency rooms, preposterous hospital charges and doctors who will pick and choose their patients.

No one on a gurney being wheeled down a hospital corridor should be thinking, “How will I pay for this?”

The chances are that when Congress has finished trying to thread the unthreadable needle, there will be a groundswell on the left for single-payer — better, possibly, but not a fit in the United States.

Meanwhile, there are too many pre-existing conditions in congressional thinking. We need a new prescription, a bigger needle and a finer thread.

Photo: CALDWELL, IDAHO – NOVEMBER 9 2016: at healthcare.gov getting ready to start an application. txking / Shutterstock.com

Europeans Feel They Can’t Trust U.S. in the Time of Trump

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HELSINKI — The love affairs between nations have some of the same dynamics as those between people: When they are sundered, they do not return to where they were before one of the partners betrayed the other. Trust, once lost, is not easily restored and when it is, it is changed; it is less complete, more suspicious.

That change, that loss of trust, was on display the week of the Group of 20 summit in Hamburg, Germany, and President Trump’s second trip to Europe. It was not restored, the doubts not assuaged by the clumsy speech Trump delivered in Poland. His speechwriter got Poland’s historical role in Europe right, but he did not get its controversial authoritarian role today right at all.

It was the wrong place for that speech; a wrong reading of the crisis in Europe today. It is not only a crisis about its survivability, but also a crisis about its relationship with the United States; what has happened to the United States, where is it going and can it be trusted?

We have lost much of the trust of our friends and allies and we have done so by our own hand. This has been greeted by those who wish us harm with a kind of diplomatic smirk.

American steadfastness in the world, once as solid as the Rockies, has crumbled; it has been traded away for a kind of desire to shock. We have abandoned friends tested by time not because we should but because we could.

The trashing of the Trans-Pacific Partnership was the first act of infidelity in the steady betrayal of allies. To the 11 other potential signatories, it was a simple statement: America does not care anymore. Its abandonment also diminished U.S. leadership in Asia. The result: a distrust of our consistency that will not easily be restored, and a vacuum waiting for China to fill.

After the communist triumph, Henry Luce, the proprietor of Time Inc., bellowed, “Who lost China?” Today’s question: “Who is empowering China?”

In Europe, the Trump administration has strung together a series of small offenses and insults, calculated to exacerbate not to heal. Trump has chosen to be the enfant terrible of the West. Why, oh why?

Every U.S. administration since Eisenhower has supported the integration of Europe. Bit by bit, as Europe struggled to become something bigger than the sum of its parts, the United States has been its cheerleader — even when it was feared (wrongly) that a kind of Fortress Europe might result from integration.

Along comes Trump like a loud reveler in a funny hat, outdoing European fears about The Ugly American.

Trump has ruffled European feathers in all the ways imaginable, from his initial refusal to assert that the United States would honor NATO’s Article 5 and come to the aid of members if attacked.

Trump’s renunciation of the Paris climate accord stung Europe. But so too did his endorsement of Britain’s vote to leave the European Union and his cozying up to Nigel Farage, the British nationalist, and Marine Le Pen, the French anti-EU politician. These things rankle, so why do them?

This week in Europe, I found a resignation about Trump. People who, when I last visited or spoke to them, were expressing deep concern are now shrugging and considering the president as a dancing bear, amusing and dangerous. Europe, they tell me, is looking at a new uncertain future, but one that depends less on U.S. leadership than it has at any time since 1945.

An inadvertent gift may be that Trump has forced Europe to look again to itself and to what is right about its union: Its dream of being a bulwark against future internecine wars, with or without U.S. backing. And, of course, the “shared values” that Trump trotted out de rigueur in Warsaw.

Europe is shrinking in size with Britain’s exit and the United States is shrinking in world influence with Trump’s ascent.

Dark shadows are passing over the Western alliance and the liberal values it has promoted like free trade, human rights and accessible justice — long the best hope of the world.

Trump’s Polish speech has not reassured.

 

Photo: London, UK. 25th March 2017. EDITORIAL – Thousands gather for the UNITE FOR EUROPE rally, through central London, in protest against the British governments’ BREXIT from the European Union.

Somebody Tell the President How We Got ‘Dominance’ in Energy

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Two things are reverberating around the energy world. One is President Donald Trump’s announcement that it is U.S. policy to seek energy “dominance,” and the other a projection by Lisa Wood of the Institute for Electric Innovation at the Edison Foundation that by 2025 there will be 7 million electric vehicles on the road.

Let us take them sequentially. In talking about energy dominance the president is acting like a man in a gorilla suit, thumping his chest and making strange noises that can only be understood by other men in gorilla suits.

The goal of every president, from Nixon on, has been to make the United States energy self-sufficient, as it was at the end of World War II — a time when Texas was the Saudi Arabia of the world and world oil consumption was modest. Now world consumption hovers around 95 million barrels a day and U.S. consumption around 20 million barrels a day.

The government-imposed fleet-mile standards have done much to improve mileage and curb U.S. energy appetite. With that program nixed by Trump and low prices, U.S. consumption might for a while edge up slightly.

The big change has been hugely increased production of oil and gas from shale in the United States through hydraulic fracturing, called “fracking,” of very tight formations.

It is this that allows Trump and Secretary of Energy Rick Perry to talk of “dominance,” undiplomatic and even offensive as such language must seem. It is as though Trump policy is to kick sand in the face of anyone who might be a customer in the future or who bailed us out in the past. In the lexicon of ill-considered words in relations with allies and customers, “dominance” must be right up there.

Oil and gas abundance has changed everything where hydrocarbons are concerned and has even affected nuclear power. Gas is cheap, so cheap that it is cheaper than coal or nuclear for electric generation. The president might love coal and coal miners, but even relaxing environmental rules will not save coal domestically though exports will continue.

India and China, which burn vast quantities of coal and may have to burn more, would like to get off it. Their cities are choking on bad air and the health of their people is being harmed. That is why they are the new hope for nuclear generation.
The market is against coal as is public opinion. King Coal is due to abdicate and the men in the gorilla suits cannot save his throne.

Enter the electric car as another game-changer, slowly at first, then very fast.

The projection by the Edison Foundation’s innovation arm that electric car deployment would reach 7 million vehicles by 2025 should encourage a new interest in the utility sector because it is the electric car that looks likely to change domestic demand for oil, freeing more of it for export. If charging stations can be deployed quickly enough, the 7 million figure may seem modest.

Natural gas is already an export commodity with 16 permits for terminals issued under the Obama administration.

If Trump and Perry want the United States to continue to be out in front in energy, they might think hard about how the fracking miracle came about. Call it the 40-year cycle: It took about 40 years of trial and error to unleash the bounty of close formation gas and oil. It also took a lot science, a lot of government-backed geology and one brave entrepreneur, George Mitchell of Mitchell Energy & Development Corp. to bring it off. The government poured the science in everything from new design drill bits to 3-D seismic and GPS mapping; oil-field know-how came from Mitchell.

Likewise, with wind and solar technology, the wind turbines and solar panels being deployed today were first investigated, again with a lot of taxpayer money, back in the 1970s at government laboratories like Sandia in New Mexico. I know: I covered the first faltering steps.

The point here is that to lead or, if you prefer, to dominate in energy you need patience, science and funding endurance. Trump and Perry are starting their quest to world “dominance” by slashing the research budget of the Department of Energy and doing away with ARPA-E, the super-reach arm of the agency.

It is not a strategy for staying out front, for dominating for very long.

Photo: President Donald Trump points to the crowd as he walks to the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, Thursday, June 1, 2017, after speaking in the Rose Garden about the US role in the Paris climate change accord. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

Covering the White House, From Twilight to Dark

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Freedom of the press, in my view, has two parts. First there is the freedom to publish, to criticize and to petition. Then there is the critical issue of the freedom to gather the news — not just to report it but also to gather it.

Without the freedom to gather the news, the freedom to print it, broadcast it or comment on it becomes pyrrhic. The official line predominates.

Right now, the freedom to report the news at the White House is under attack and the public’s right know is being impinged. What you get: all the news that can be leaked.

Covering the news at the White House has gotten progressively harder since the days of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, the first administrations I covered.

The Trump administration has attacked the press, ridiculed it and is starving it of critical access. Now there is talk of doing away with the daily press briefing, honored and needed. It is where the government is asked what it is doing and ideally tells the people. It is America’s answer to the much admired “Question Time” in Britain’s House of Commons.

It has never been easy to cover the White House, and history is littered with the ways in which presidents sought to affect the way in which they were covered. Jack Kennedy, a darling to some reporters, so hated the coverage he was getting from The New York Herald Tribune that for a while he forbade it in the White House.

Lyndon Johnson worked over the press corps the way he worked over members of Congress: punishment and reward.

At The Washington Daily News, Wauhillau La Hay worried aloud — often in my presence — that the file from the Scripps-Howard Washington bureau (it was an afternoon newspaper owned by Scripps-Howard) would make it hard for her to cover the social side of the White House, her assignment.

Richard Nixon believed that the press was out to get him and his famous enemies list was real. Yet he ran a surprisingly open White House, as had Johnson.

Compared to what was to follow, it was wide open. Once a reporter got through the gate you were a free agent to roam much of the grounds and to visit the West Wing, if you had someone to see. More important, you got one-on-one interviews with principles without some minder from the press office sitting in and acting as a double agent, reporting back on both the journalist and the interviewee.

After your interview, you were sometimes invited into the office of another staffer. As often as not, they wanted to know what you knew as much as you wanted to know what they knew, even during Watergate.

The best information is the information you get face-to-face, one-on-one. That has become very difficult as time has rolled on. Personally, I found the George H.W. Bush open enough. I remember going over to see his chief of staff, John Sununu, without problem. I phoned him, got a time and went over. No press office involvement. Once, he asked me if I would like to write a speech for the president. I averred.

Excessive leaking is a symptom, a cry from within the belly of the beast that all is not well. At this point the leakers are patriots, not criminals.

In recent administrations, the only way for White House reporters to get into conversations with White House staffers has been to travel with the president overseas: a very expensive stab in the dark. A European trip can cost more than $20,000, and few news outlets can afford the gamble. Even if you are in the pool and sitting on Air Force One, nothing is guaranteed.

If, as has been suggested, the daily briefings stop, more leaks are inevitable. If you cannot seek the information directly, you have to try to get it otherwise. If the front door is closed, a ladder up to the window is the next step. At the same time, relationships become more devious. Like an illicit love affair, no public acknowledgment in public places.

If the right to gather the news is abridged, the whole concept of a free press is diminished. The diminishment is underway.

Government in the dark is the government of authoritarians; not the kind of government one expects from a nation that prohibits the “abridging” of the press in its Constitution. Shame.

 

For InsideSources

Photo: Richard M. Nixon press conference. General Services Administration. National Archives and Records Service. Office of Presidential Libraries. Office of Presidential Papers. (01/20/1969 – ca. 12/1974); President (1969-1974 : Nixon). White House Photo Office. (1969 – 1974)

Nuclear Booms in Asia as New Reactor Ideas Flourish in U.S.

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By Llewellyn King

The nuclear electric industry has sustained some mighty blows in the United States and Western Europe in recent years. It might be reeling, but it is not out and it is not going down for the count. Taken globally, things are good.

The need to curb carbon in the air, to service a growing world population and the surging cities are impelling nuclear forward. At the annual summit meeting of the U.S. Nuclear Infrastructure Council (NIC) in Washington, this future was laid out with passion: Nuclear power is experiencing a growth spurt but not in the United States and Western Europe, except for Britain.

Nuclear demand is high where air pollution is at its worst and where economic activity is fast and furious — in Asia generally, and in China and India in particular.

Vijay Sazawal, president of IAEC Consulting, told the NIC meeting that India would be adding two reactors a year to its nuclear fleet moving forward. China and India are building half of the 60 new reactors under construction worldwide, according to Andrew Paterson of Verdigris Capital Group, which studies nuclear.

Paterson predicted world electricity demand will double by 2050 and that most of the demand would come from the megacities of Asia, Africa and Latin America. He said, “By 2030, China will have 15 megacities (10 million or more people) and 150 cities with more than 1 million people.”

Wind and solar energy, the other carbon-free electricity sources, also will grow dramatically but will be constrained by their land needs. Big cities are ill-suited to roof-mounted solar, and windmills require large acreages of open land not found near megacities.

In the United States, the shadow of the Westinghouse bankruptcy is passing over the nuclear community. How could a once-proud and dominant company get its sums so wrong that it has been forced into bankruptcy? The collapse of the company — which was building two plants with four reactors in South Carolina and Georgia, four reactors in China, and was engaged in projects in the United Kingdom and India — will be studied in business schools for generations to come. Bad management, not bad nuclear, has brought Westinghouse and its parent Toshiba to its knees.

But nuclear believers are undaunted. Nuclear advocates have a kind of religious commitment to their technology, to their science and to the engineering that turns the science into power plants.

I have been writing about nuclear since 1970, and I have featured it on my television program, “White House Chronicle,” for more than 20 years. I can attest that there is something special in the passion of nuclear people for nuclear power. They have fervor wrapped in a passion for kind of energy utopia. They believe in the great gift that nuclear offers a populous world: a huge volume of electricity.

The kernel here, the core belief, the holy grail of nuclear is wrapped up in “energy density”: how a small amount of nuclear material can produce a giant amount of electricity in a plant that has few moving parts, aside from the conventional steam turbine. As designs have evolved and plants have become “passive” in their safety systems, the things that can go wrong have been largely eliminated.

To understand energy density think this way: The average wind turbine you see along the highway turns out 2 megawatts of electricity when there is wind, a trifling amount compared to the 1,600 megawatts a new nuclear plant produces continuously — and probably will produce for 100 years before it is retired.

Asia, choking on air pollution and with huge growth, needs nuclear. America is not gasping for new generation: demand is static and there is a natural gas glut. Also, there is land aplenty for solar and wind to be installed.

But U.S. nuclear creativity, even genius, will not rest. The United States is on the frontier, pioneering a generation of wholly new reactor concepts, mostly for small modular reactors and even big new reactors, which may first be built in China and India but, like so much else, will be “thought up in America.”

At nuclear conclaves like the NIC meeting, there is sadness that the U.S. market is stagnant. But there is incandescent hope for the future.