Llewellyn King

Electricity Is the Big Future Winner for Cars, Even Small Planes

May 12, 2017 by Llewellyn King Leave a Comment

Electricity, the world’s silent workhorse for a century, is about to conquer new worlds.

While electric cars are coming on fast, their acceptance will speed up geometrically in the next decade, according to an extraordinary new study by RethinkX, a San Francisco-based research group and think tank. Indeed, the group is predicting a true revolution in electrified transportation.

In this revolution, futuristic companies with a lot of talent and a lot of money — like Uber, Google and Amazon — will be seminal players. Old-line car companies and the oil companies will have to deal with a new order in which their roles could be dramatically diminished.

The big winner in this transportation future is electricity. Even the electric airplane — an idea about as old as aviation — is surging forward.

While RethinkX raised the curtain on the future of ground transportation in its new study, Uber raised the curtain on the future of the electric airplane this month at its Elevate conference in Dallas. More than 500 aviation enthusiasts attended the conference: dreamers, designers, builders — and even venture capital investors, who have already signed their checks. Dozens of designs for small electric airplanes, using multiple rotors and batteries, were on display. Enthusiasm was incandescent.

This July, small, electric pilotless aircraft — crosses between drones and helicopters — are scheduled to go into service in Dubai. They are supposed to ferry single passengers from their hotels and other gathering points to airports and recreation centers in the largest and most populous city in the United Arab Emirates.

These small aircraft, with electric motors and batteries, have an endurance time of about 30 minutes. EHang, a Chinese company, developed them.

If Uber, and more than a dozen other U.S. companies have their way, similar aircraft will one day take their place in the skies of America and other advanced nations. Uber hopes to test-fly an electric airplane in 2020.

According to RethinkX, the private car is about to disappear, or to be rapidly reduced in importance. The report — which might boost the stock of futuristic companies and electric utilities, and depress the stock of oil companies and old-line car makers and oil companies — is making waves in the far reaches of corporate thinking.

Tony Seba, co-founder of RethinkX and co-author of the report, told me that mainstream analysts are not yet on board with the changes, which will rock the automobile, oil and electric industries. They have not understood the impact of technological convergence, he said.

He sees a future, about to happen, in which driverless electric cars, owned not by individuals, but rather by transportation companies like Uber, flood the streets, to be summoned by phone and directed by voice: “Take me out to the ballgame.”

Seba, an MIT-trained engineer and student of what he calls “disruption,” told me he expects a convergence between electric vehicles, automated driving and ride-sharing will come soon, reducing the number of vehicles on U.S. roads from 247 million in 2020 to 44 million in 2030.

“The average family will save $5,600 in transportation costs,” Seba says.

Apart from the transport companies, the big winner will be the utilities that will see a demand growth of 18 percent, Seba predicts. He believes present infrastructure can accommodate this growth surge because demand will be mostly off-peak.

There are similar expectations of a golden future for small, electric, vertical takeoff airplanes, incorporating drone and other technologies. The limit for the aircraft, which use lithium batteries, is the batteries. But the enthusiasts gathered at Uber’s conference say flight is possible now with present-day batteries and these will only get better.

Richard Whittle, a leading aviation journalist and author who chaired an Elevate session, told me, “It was a pretty impressive event.”

While the arguments by Seba and his co-author James Arbib, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and philanthropist, point to an electrified transportation future, I have one question: Will people give up the personal, primal pleasure of owning a car?

Seba and Arbib think so, pointing out that people used to take pride in their LP and CD collections, but now they access their music electronically.

The future is pulling up on a highway near you; it may also be flying overhead.

Photo: Håkan Dahlström, “Electric car charging station” 2013. Used under the Creative Commons Attributions 2.0 Generic License.

Notebook: The Limits of the Writing Life for a Journalist

May 8, 2017 by Llewellyn King Leave a Comment

As opportunities in journalism have tightened, many of my colleagues have tuned to writing books. I admire them. Actually, I more than admire them: I’m astounded by them.

Among them is my friend Richard Whittle, a former Pentagon correspondent for The Dallas Morning News, who has written two first-rate books. His first was about the V-22 Osprey vertical takeoff aircraft and his second was about drones.

Whittle is hard at it on a third. He tells me that he loves his second career – and, as an elegant writer and an impeccable reporter, he’s doing well.

I’m frequently asked why I don’t take this path and write books about the subjects I know something about or, to be exact, subjects about which I’m supposed to know something. The answer is simple: fear. Not fear about my ability, but fear of boredom. Fear of waking up every day and having to take up where I left off the day before.

The peripatetic journalistic life suits me; maybe too well. I love the idea that each day could bring something new, unexpected and thrilling, just because it’s new.

Like many newspapermen, I answer phones with alacrity because the next call might, as it says in “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam,” could “in a trice life’s leaden metal into gold transmute.”

The poet was referring to liquor, and it might be why liquor and newspapering have been so indelibly linked. Certainly, the drinking by newpapermen — and I’ve worked on newspapers in colonial Africa, London, New York, Baltimore and Washington, D.C. — was endemic and awesome.

Less now, I gather. The venerable National Press Club in Washington used to support two bars and, at lunch and in the evening, drinkers crowded them 15- deep. Now the only bar is sadly empty most of the time.

Once I ran into a colleague at the end of the day at the Paris Air Show. “How are you?” I asked. “I’m cold, I’m wet, my feet hurt and I haven’t found a story,” he said. I knew why he was miserable: Life’s leaden metal hadn’t been transmuted into gold nuggets of news.

The book writers, if they’re any good, unearth many stories, but the thrill of publication isn’t daily. It can take a year or longer. Not for me.

News writing, like drinking, produces its thrills predictably, and I’m for the early gratification. More power to my colleagues who are undaunted by the long haul.

Why Are the Bus Riders Left Out in the Cold?

Rhode Island, where I live, is, as I have found, a kindly place: people look out for one another. So why, I wonder, are there so few bus shelters and even benches?

I find the public transportation users (I’m one) standing forlornly, in all kinds of weather, waiting for a bus. Recently, in the heavy rains, they were especially bedraggled. This must negatively affect ridership. Since I have difficulty standing for long periods, I don’t take the buses in Providence and its surrounding communities. But I’d take them if I could sit down while waiting.

In Washington, D.C., where I’m often, I take the buses a lot. There are seats in shelters that don’t keep you warm but do keep you dry.

It’s cruel to leave those who ride buses without shelter or seating.

Sleeping Rough in a Place of Learning

I travel to Cambridge, Mass., quite a bit. But recently, in this self-regarding gyre of great ideas, I’ve noticed more homeless people than ever sleeping on the streets. One wonders, wandering the streets so close to the Great Minds, whether some of them haven’t thought of a solution? Is it a step too far from the ivory towers to the hard pavement where the luckless sleep?

Second Story To Add Restaurant, Lose One Stage

I went to Warren, R.I. to see “Art” at 2^nd Story Theatre. At the end Ed Shea, the dominant force there – by turns actor, director and manager — came on stage to announce that the building, which now includes two small theaters and a very pleasant bar, is to be refurbished, and that the first-story theater will be transformed into a restaurant.

I wish them well, but it’s unclear how this will work. Will the restaurant be complimentary or competitive? If I’m going to eat and go to the theater, I favor supper after rather than dinner before. Going to a good restaurant is, in itself, a theatrical experience and competes with theater for entertainment hours.

One of the joys of Rhode Island is its profusion of really good places to eat. Warren is no exception. New Orleans has the reputation, but Rhode Island has the vittles.

Second story will lose a stage, but Shea still plans to cook up some imaginative theater on the remaining one.

The New Language of the New Trumpian Politics

May 5, 2017 by Llewellyn King Leave a Comment

President Trump may or may not have done good things in his first 100 days in office. But have no doubt, he has affected the language of politics, uprooted the tried-and-true meanings of the past for a new more ambiguous, fluid and hazier speech.

These words and phrases are the language of the day:

Takeaways: These are the facts which you try and sort out from the presidential utterances. Takeaways mostly are the nuggets, the nub, the likely policy in the mattress of words. Takeaways are nearly as good as facts, but not quite as tricky. Takeaways don’t have to be facts, they can be hints, even insults or praise, which indicate which way the presidential wind is blowing; whether it is a zephyr or a gale, a wind of change or just hot air.

Double down: This is when President Trump or his staff cling to a position for a while. For example, the president has doubled down on his demand for wall along the southern border. He has not wavered in his desire to see masonry separating us from Mexico, from the bad hombres there who have never heard of airplanes, boats or Canada. A fence won’t do; nor will an electronic barrier. It has to be a wall, like Hadrian’s Wall, separating England from Scotland, or the Great Wall of China or the Berlin Wall. History loves walls. History doesn’t do fences.

Walk back: Walking back statements, positions, accusations and policies is a kind of wiggle room on steroids. If it stirs up a storm, walk it back. If the historical facts you’ve quoted are pure nonsense, walk them back. If your international agenda has changed, walk back the old one.

Take the strange matter of Chinese currency manipulation. Candidate Trump was going to straighten out that one. But when he needed the Chinese to pressure North Korea, he walked back the issue of currency manipulation. He also did a few backward steps on Chinese incursion into the South China Sea.

Historians might note that in relation to China, President Trump has traded away a lot for little or nothing. The Chinese aren’t going to topple the dictatorship of Kim Jong-un in North Korea, or even cut off a lot of their trade with him. “Smart cookies” are in Beijing, too.

Fake news: This is the new aspirin of politics. Take two and recant in the morning. Fake news is, by presidential dictate, anything you don’t like on the news; or the entire purveyor of the news, like CNN or The New York Times. Fake has not yet lost its old meaning: It means made up, false, fictitious.

In the Land of Trump, there are no facts, except those on which he has doubled down, and which might be walked back at some time in the future.

Enemies of the people: That means journalists. All of them, if they don”t work for Fox News — and a few of those are suspect.

Now the president, the negotiator-in-chief, the man who can look across the table at an adversary and get the wretch to sign and concede, is taking on the Arab-Israeli conflict. Trump may not have negotiated the Russians into submission or the Chinese into compliance, but no matter. When at first you don’t succeed, go for the big one. Double down.

Maybe Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, will walk through the Valley of Failed negotiations and succeed. But no matter. It’s a no-brainer. You can walk that one back, littering the way with accusations of intransigence and ill will. One doesn’t have to walk back failure in the Middle East. That one walks itself.

Author’s note: I’ll walk back all my negative comments as needed or, perchance, double down on them. They are, of course, fake and have been penned by a certifiable enemy of the people.

Research Funding: Scientists Fear as the Sick Despair

April 28, 2017 by Llewellyn King 2 Comments

When you are sick, very sick, you wait for medicine to work its magic. But if the disease is Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME), you have to wait for the medicine to be invented.

The bad news is that so little funding is going into solving the ME problem, commonly known as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, that those sick today may be sick for the rest of their lives. They are living a life that is a nearly intolerable to themselves and a massive burden to their loved ones, spouses, parents and caregivers.

What is known is that ME is a disease of the immune system. It is vicious and debilitating, leaving the patient confined to a marginal life, a parallel and unequal existence.

Most infections are of healthy people who are struck down often, but not always, after exercise. The first symptoms can be flu-like: The sufferers feel a few days in bed will do the trick. But having ME is a life sentence. There also have been group infections, known as “clusters,” where hundreds have been stricken.

If you have ME, the least exertion can force you to spend days in bed, exhausted, hurting in myriad ways from headaches to what one woman described as “feeling like your bones are exploding.”

In severe cases, the patient cannot tolerate light or sound. A young man, newly married, and felled unaccountably, had to live in a closet for an extended period before he could handle light and sound. Symptoms vary but most of the time a victim feels, as one told me, “like you are a car that has run out of gas and your tank cannot be filled up again.” A teenager told me that if she is to go out with friends, she has to weigh that against days of bed rest, in a complete state of collapse.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH)— the principal researcher into ME and dozens of other perplexing diseases — has historically given ME a pittance. In the last three years funding has been held to $5 million a year, although the Obama administration had promised more. To put this in perspective, the trade association of the pharmaceutical industry calculates that it costs $1.2 billion dollars to bring a new drug to market. Sadly that industry has not shown interest in ME, so the research is mostly funded by NIH and private groups and individuals.

The news that the Trump administration is thinking of cutting the total NIH budget by $5 billion has caused a palpable anxiety to grip the ME community. The disease is cruel enough, does it need to be compounded by the government?

That is why those who could manage it and members of their families were enthusiastic supporters of the March for Science. They were out there with a sense of being at the barricades as the barbarians massed on the other side.

The United States has led the world for years in scientific discovery and implementation. It is deeply disturbing to think that the country would draw back from it. But the administration’s ambivalence is clear. The Department of Energy with 17 national laboratories, every one the envy of the world, is headed by Rick Perry.

When he ran for president, he did so on a plank that included closing the department. The Environmental Protection Agency, with a history of struggling to get the regulatory science right, is headed by Scott Pruitt. As attorney general of Oklahoma, he sought to hobble the agency with lawsuits.

So across science, from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to the research service of the Department of Agriculture, there is fear among scientists; fear for their jobs, fear for science and fear for America.

In the sick rooms of the 1 million or so ME sufferers, despondency has reached new depths. You will not be cured if no one cares enough to look for a cure. Can you double down on despair?

ME/CFS Alert YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/MECFSAlert

ME/CFS Alert Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/mecfsalert/

The Supreme Ugliness of the Deportation Regime

April 20, 2017 by Llewellyn King 1 Comment

It is ugly today, it will be uglier tomorrow and months from now, it will be even uglier. The relentless rounding up of undocumented people living in the United States is the horror that can be ended, if there was a will to end it – and if it were not a source of political feedstock for unyielding positions so close to the Trump presidency.

Mind you, it was not all that pretty under the Obama administration. He signaled his heart was in the right place while the deportations continued. What Obama did was to protect, by executive order, the undocumented who were brought in by their parents while underage. Now there is a report of the first of these dreamers, Juan Manuel Montes, being arrested.

We get little snippets of how ugly the deportations are from time to time in the media: a child bawling her eyes out because ICE policemen have seized her mother. That poor woman is on her way to a country she left because there was little there for her when she committed the crime of settling without papers in the United States; when she availed herself of the opportunity which nearly all American settlers once did: to live and work in freedom and peace.

In writing about the inhumanity of deporting the undocumented, I know what I have opened myself up to a flood of abusive mail, denouncing me as a crypto-communist and much worse. Always the same theme and often the same words inform these communications: “What is it that they don’t understand about illegal?” That is crime enough for those who want mass deportations.

At present the threshold, we are told, is that the deportee should have at some time committed a felony. Under federal law, illegal residence here is not a felony but a misdemeanor. One such crime in some states is driving under the influence. A felony? Yup. By the way, it is a crime for which former President George W. Bush was convicted in 1976.

Things are going to go from ugly to hideous when the federal government brings its might against sanctuary cities. There is the raw combustible material of civil strife here — ugliness in the streets which has not been seen since 1968.

When neither of two options is acceptable, it is time to seek a third way: a compromise.

I have been advocating a compromise which was developed by a quiet, former IRS tax inspector and California university system auditor who lives in Malibu, Calif. He is Mark Jason and his idea is simple: cool things down and get some benefit for local authorities in areas where the undocumented are concentrated.

Jason and his Immigrant Tax Inquiry Group, wholly funded by himself, would recognize the presence of the undocumented and give them a way to remain and live productive lives. His proposal is a 10-year work permit dependent on a tax of 5 percent to be paid by both the worker and the employer. Jason calculates a revenue bounty of $176 billion over 10 years. There would be no citizenship for the worker. This money, Jason says, ought to go to the localities where the undocumented live and to defray the costs of education, healthcare, policing and other essential services.

This third way, this 5-percent solution, would not satisfy the immigrant advocates who want a “path to citizenship” or those who want to throw the baggage out; the dreaded knock on the door, families shattered, dreams turned into nightmares.

I still think we must control immigration, prevent it at points of entry, not when a life has been established and families are at risk.

There is a horror greater than the illegality of an otherwise productive citizen. It is the supreme ugliness of the state sending its agents against the individual, whether it is the state seeking to bivouac troops in private homes, as the English did to the American colonists, or the agents of the state coming into a home to rip it asunder.

That is an ultimate ugliness, unspeakable, unbecoming and, dare I say, un-American.

Photo: NEW YORK CITY – FEBRUARY 11 2017: Several hundred protesters gathered in Washington Square Park to voice support for immigrants & Muslims in light of Trump’s travel ban.

United Airlines Is Just One Miscreant in the Age of Frustration

April 15, 2017 by Llewellyn King 1 Comment

I have believed for a long time now that Donald Trump was elected president partly because of the behavior of companies like United Airlines and its large and growing fraternity of institutions that find the individual customer an inconvenience.

We live in an age where we have to take what we are handed by the institutions that are supposed to serve us. We live in an age of frustration. The daily frustration of life has bubbled up in politics, on social media and even in graffiti.

These are some of the institutions of our torment:

The banks that leave you half an hour on the telephone, pleading to speak to someone — a human being — who might, just might, help you.
The telephone companies that want you to crawl around the floor, at the behest of directions from a call center in Bangladesh, doing your own repairs.
The internet providers that will not believe that their systems could need fixing and will only send a technician when all logic and patience is exhausted and someone in the Philippines is satisfied that you do know what you are saying and that English is, in fact, your first language.
The medical insurance company that has a computer converse with you about a problem with your account.

Nowadays services are provided for high, unexpected fees. Vendors, such as hotels and car rental companies, dissemble about costs. They use marketing to bait and obfuscate — Amtrak excels at this. The fine print is there for the purpose of trapping the hapless customer. The price of everything is calculated as to what can be extracted from you at the time of purchase.

Of course, Trump was not the answer. Electing him may have been electing a fox to protect the chickens. But it was a cry for help from many voters.

Big is not beautiful when it comes to services. It means that you, the customer, are nothing, an impediment, a nuisance, an awkwardness, a de minimis statistic, a grain of sand on the beach of corporate wealth.

Electricity Is the Gift That Can Keep on Giving in Africa

April 8, 2017 by Llewellyn King Leave a Comment

Photo: South Africa – August 24, 2014: African woman with child collecting water from the river on the road leading to local Game Reserve.

He is generic Africa Man. You can see him everywhere, walking barefoot across the Savannah and desert landscapes. He is on a mission that gets harder as time goes on.

His mission is to find enough wood — a few dry sticks here, some roots there — to make a fire for a hot meal and to bathe. He walks and walks, adding a stick and a piece of scrub wood to the bundle carried, in the traditional way, on his head.

Generic Africa Woman is busy, too. Her mission is to draw water. She carries a container on her head, filled with water from a distant well, to make dinner — a meal of maize (corn) porridge with maybe a stew of some meat or even caterpillar — and to bathe.

African life is picturesque, but it is not pretty. Hardship is in daily attendance in much of Africa, blighted from deforestation and polluted water.

Yet Western aid has not been easily delivered. Much of it has been stolen, some of it has been misapplied and some of it has led to aid dependency.

So, as an old Africa hand (I was born in what is now Zimbabwe, and left when I was 20 years old), I was elated to learn of a new and critical partnership just announced between the Edison Electric Institute (EEI) and the U.S. Department of State’s Power Africa initiative. Electricity anywhere is the gift that gives and gives, but especially when it begins to transform lives of hard struggle to ones that are less so.

When I was a boy, the opening of a power station or the building of a power line were events that brought forth celebration. Electricity signaled a better tomorrow.

When a village — whether it is in Bolivia, India or Uganda — is electrified, good things flow. A simple hotplate replaces days of firewood collection and those who can read can do so after the sun sets: hygiene improves, education is facilitated and expectations soar.

When the shantytowns that surround Johannesburg, South Africa, were electrified, the productivity of workers who flood into the city every day went up. Simply, they were saved from the drudgery of collecting animal droppings, wood scraps and other combustible stuff to burn.

The colonizers of Africa realized the need for electricity. Hence, in my part of the continent, two great dams were built on the Zambezi River: the Kariba, between Zimbabwe and Zambia, and the Cahora Bassa in Mozambique.

As a very young reporter, I covered the construction of the Kariba Dam, and its near destruction by unusually heavy flooding, in 1957. It has been the backbone of electricity supply for Zimbabwe and Zambia for more than 50 years.

But in recent years the dam, holding back the world’s largest, man-made impoundment of water, has begun to show deterioration in the concave wall, but especially behind the wall. The outflow has been eroding the plunge pool and threatening the wall. Hundreds of millions of dollars have had to be raised internationally for remediation, which is yet to begin in earnest. If the dam should fail, about 4 million people would die downstream.

The dam also has been producing much less electricity than it had been previously due to multi-year drought in the region. Copper production in Zambia, a vital industry, has had to be curtailed because of severe electric shortages. Blackouts are routine throughout the region.

Electricity is also a problem in South Africa, the industrial and commercial giant of Africa. Delay in ordering new generation, political interference in the decision processes and other problems, stemming from the end of apartheid, have damaged the system. Blackouts are affecting South Africa’s competitive posture.

Now the government is being romanced by Russia, hoping to sell it a new nuclear plant on favorable terms. It would join the two-unit, 1,860-MW Koeberg Nuclear Power Station, which has been operating since 1984. Unfortunately emerging countries have a fascination with big, showy projects, like the national airlines and steel mills that have cost them so dearly in their post-colonial phase.

EEI and the State Department need to guide the countries of Africa to today’s energy solutions, not yesterday’s. Africa needs to turn to its most abundant resource: sunshine. In North Africa, Morocco is building the world’s largest solar installation. Way to go.

Regulation Can Be a Huge Goad to Innovation and Creativity

April 1, 2017 by Llewellyn King Leave a Comment

There is a paradox of regulation clearly not known in the Trump White House. It is this: Regulation can stimulate creativity and move forward innovation.

This has been especially true of energy. Ergo, President Donald Trump’s latest move to lessen the effect of regulation on energy companies may have a converse and debilitating impact.

Consider these three examples:

When Congress required tankers to have double hulls, after the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska’s Prince William Sound in 1989, the oil companies and their lobbyists wailed that it would push up the price of gas at the pump.

Happily, the government held tough and soon oil spills in from tanker punctures were almost eliminated.

The cost? Fractions of a penny per gallon, so small they cannot be easily found.

Victory to regulation, the environment and common sense. In due course, the oil companies took out advertisements to boast of their environmental sensitivity by double-hulling their tankers.

When the Environmental Protection Agency mandated a 75-percent reduction in hydrocarbon and nitrogen oxide emissions from two-stroke marine engines in 1996, with a 10-year compliance period, the boat manufacturers issued dire predictions of a slump in recreational boating and a huge loss of associated jobs.

In fact, two things happened: Two-stroke marine engines were saved with electronic fuel-injection, and four-stroke marine engines started to take over the market — the same four-stroke engines the manufacturers had said would be prohibitively expensive and too heavy for small boats.

Today, most new small boats have four-stroke engines. They are quieter, more fuel efficient, less polluting and have added to the joy of boating. The weight and economic penalty, predicted by the anti-regulation boat manufacturers, turned out to be of no account. The problems were engineered out. That is what engineers do when they are unleashed: They design to meet the standards.

Similarly fleet-average standards, so hated by the automobile industry, have led to better cars, greater efficiencies, a reduction in air pollution and oil imports. They also pushed the industry to look beyond the internal combustion engine to such developments hybrids and all-electric vehicles and new concepts, like hydrogen and compressed natural gas vehicles.

A high bar produces higher jumpers. Water restrictions have produced more efficient toilets, electric appliance ratings have reduced the consumption of electricity. Regulation is sometimes incentive by another name.

Well-thought-out regulation is constructive, mindless regulation deleterious — as when the purpose is political rather than practical. Restrictions on stem cell research and the unnecessary amount of ethanol added to gasoline come to mind.

In his energy executive order, repealing many of the Obama administration’s clean energy regulations, Trump has done no one any favors: Less challenge, less innovation, less protection of the environment, and less global leadership is a cruel gift.

Take coal mining. Trump wants to save coal mining jobs, but his executive order will cause coal production to increase, further glutting the market. There are ways of burning coal more cleanly and if the president wants to help the coal industry, he should be supporting these. He also might want to look at the disposition of coal ash and its possible uses, not bankrupt what is left of the coal industry by false generosity.

Trump’s energy executive order might have had virtue 40-plus years ago. Back in the bleak days of the 1973 Arab oil embargo, and the future shock it induced, coal was our only plentiful energy source. I was one of the authors of a study, prepared for President Richard Nixon, that highlighted coal. Hence a passion that lasted through the Carter administration to gasify coal, liquefy it and back out oil with it whenever possible.

However the national genius produced a flood of innovation, leading today’s abundance of oil and gas.

For InsideSources

The Battle for America Is the Battle for Science

March 25, 2017 by Llewellyn King 1 Comment

The man who popularized Greek-style yogurt, Hamdi Ulukaya, is probably one of the only, if not the only, billionaire of recent years who does not owe his fortune to the government. Jeff Bezos does, Bill Gates does, Mark Zuckerberg does, along with dozens of others who have amassed fortunes in the digital age.

They are smart men all who have exploited opportunities, which would not have existed but for the government’s presence in science. I applaud individuals who build on government discoveries to make their fortunes.

But government-backed science, which has brought us everything from GPS to the internet, is in for a radical reversal, as laid out in the Trump administration’s budget proposal.

It was greeted with derision when it was released, with many hoping Congress will reverse it. However in the science community, in the halls of the National Science Foundation, in the facilities of the National Institutes of Health, and in the sprawling world of the Department of Energy’s national laboratories, there is fear and alarm.

There should be. There should be from the world of learning a great bellow of rage, too.

The Trump administration has declared essentially that the United States cannot afford to be wise, cannot afford to invent, cannot afford to cure or to minister, and cannot afford to continue the rate of scientific evolution, which has made science of the post-World War II period so thrilling, benefiting countless people.

The administration has identified 62 programs for elimination or severe cutbacks. It has done this in a mixture of ignorance, indifference and delusion. The ignorance is that it does not seem to know how we got where we are; the indifference is part of a broad, anti-intellectual tilt on the political right; and the delusion is the hapless belief that science and engineering’s forward leap of 75 years will be carried on in the private sector.

The broad antipathy to science, to learning in all but the most general sense, is the mark of the Trump budget proposal.

But science, whether it is coming from ARPA-E, (Advanced Projects Research Research Agency-Energy) or the National Science Foundation’s watering of the tender shoots of invention, the Department of Energy’s world-leading contribution to the Human Genome Project, or the National Institutes of Health’s endless war against disease (especially the small and awful diseases like Myalgic Encephalomyelitis and the rarest cancers) is the future. Without it, the nation is gobbling its seed corn.

In the Trump administration, there is money to build a giant wall but no money to surge forward into the future.

To the administration, as indicated in its budget proposal, the sciences and the engineering that flows from them is a luxury. It is not. It is the raw materials of peace and strength in this century and beyond.

To take just one of the follies implicit in the philistine budget, cutting funding for medical research will come just when there is need for more — research that if not funded by the government will not be done. New epidemics like bird flu, Zika and Ebola cry out for research.

Increasingly, the old paradigm that new drugs would come from the drug companies is broken. It now costs a drug company close to $2 billion to bring a new compound to market. That cost is reflected in new drug prices, as the companies struggle to recoup their investments before their drugs go off patent. Shareholder value does not encourage the taking of chances, but rather the buying up of the competition. And that is happening in the industry.

The world desperately needs a new generation of antibiotics. The drug companies are not developing them, and the bugs are mutating happily, developing resistance to the drugs that have held bacterial disease at bay since penicillin led the way 89 years ago.

Fighting the political folly that threatens science is the battle for America. In 50 years, without amply government-funded research and development, will we still be the incubator for invention, the shock troops against disease, the progenitors of a time of global abundance?

Our place in the world is not determined by our ideology, but by our invention. Sadly, the pace of invention is at stake, attacked by a particularly virulent and aberrant strain of governmental thinking.

Good Reason to Look at Health Care Anew

March 17, 2017 by Llewellyn King 2 Comments

Nothing is ever done until everyone is convinced that it ought to be done, and has been convinced for so long that it is now time to do something else. — F.M. Cornford

There are no simple solutions to complex problems — unless they’ve become so complex that only a simple solution will do. Welcome to health care and insurance in all of their complexity.

Engineers like to say that if a new machine of structure has too many parts, it’s not ready. Not a bad idea to keep in mind when creating a societal structure like health care. One should know where one wants to go; knowing what one doesn’t want isn’t a starting point.

I submit that the goal of health policy, stripped of its advocates, denigrators and rentiers, should be to get everyone insured for the minimum amount of money and best care result. Simple, eh?

Some aspects:

There ought to be enough money for the United States to have universal health care, not a patchwork — a crazy quilt with holes and weak seams. We spend 19 percent of our GDP on health care, but Germany and the Netherlands spend just under 12 percent of theirs on hybrid public/private, comprehensive systems.
Insurance is a probability game, ergo it’s not unreasonable to ask the able-bodied to pay for the sick.
Mandates are not alien to us. We are mandated to pay taxes, drive with licenses and even wear clothes.
The more people covered by insurance, the lower the cost to all.
There seems to be no good explanation in the public record as to why medicine is so expensive in the United States — so much more expensive than elsewhere on earth, under wildly different systems.
The United States is the only country that leans on employers to provide health insurance to employees and to administer the policy and deal with issues that arrive with disputes.
The cost of the service patients receive is opaque once a third-party payer is responsible: the insurer. The basis of a hospital charge is hidden from the patients and policymakers. The patient has little idea what a procedure costs and who benefits from the expenditure, including doctors who own imaging companies, testing labs and even operating theaters. At the time of delivery, as Norman Macrae noted in The Economist years ago, neither the doctor nor the patients has an interest in the cost.
Hospitals are burdened with emergency rooms that can’t refuse the uninsured and hide this cost by overcharging elsewhere.

For more than 30 years I operated a publishing business and provided health care for my employees. It cost. It cost in time. It cost in premiums. It cost in employee well-being because as the premiums (well before Obamacare) rose by 15 percent to 25 percent, I was forced to shop for providers — which meant, in many cases, new doctors for my employees every year.

After salaries, health care was the big expenditure. I thought I was in the publishing business, but I was also, reluctantly, in the health care business.

I was keen that people have the security that goes with not having to be frightened of getting sick or falling off a bicycle. Some of my employees were on a spouse’s policy as well as mine and didn’t tell me. One man, a printer, said he didn’t like to fill in forms, so he, his wife and three children just told the hospital emergency room that the family had no money. He wanted me to give him what I was paying the insurer so he could spend it.

None of the proposals now before Congress, nor those codified in Obamacare, address the fact that as a nation we backed into health care and created complex set of stakeholders — some of whom should leave the field.

For someone who has wrestled with health care as a provider, as in other things, I believe that if the purpose is not defined, you’ll get the wrong result no matter how hard you try.

The big questions Congress should be asking of the House Republican health care plan, backed by President Donald Trump, are: Will it save money? Will everyone be covered adequately? From my point of view, Congress is proposing to replace a monster with a monstrosity.

That’s no prescription for a healthy nation, free from fear of accident or illness. Time to grab a clean sheet of paper and start again, maybe check on what works around the world, if that isn’t too damaging to our self-esteem.

For InsideSources