White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

You Can Keep Cutting Taxes, If You Want to Pay the Price

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By Llewellyn King

Those Republican presidential candidates who had been governors, vied with each other in their latest debate to claim who had cut taxes the most.

When I hear tax-cutting expounded as an unassailable conservative virtue, my mind goes back to a lunch in Houston in the 1970s, when two of conservatism’s rising stars and I were speakers at a meeting of the American Petroleum Institute.

The stars were Trent Lott, then a member of the House from Mississippi, and George Will, the hottest columnist burning up the op-ed pages across the country.

The three of us were urged to lunch together while the organizers got organized. I had recently launched The Energy Daily, a publication in Washington, D.C.

The conversation turned to taxes. We all agreed that we while we hated paying taxes, the United States was an under-taxed country. Let me repeat: Trent Lott, George Will and I agreed that the United States was under-taxed country.

So, I ask, how did we get to where we are today, when Republican presidential hopefuls are firmly committed to tax-cutting; when every state or local Republican governing body would rather see chaos reign — as has happened with our cities — than whisper that we should raise money to fix the problem?

The standard-bearer for taxophobia is neither an elected official nor a presidential hopeful. He is Grover Norquist, founder and president of Americans for Tax Reform, a political organization as powerful as the National Rifle Association, and as distorting of the national agenda.

Norquist has introduced a rigidity that makes discussion of tax policy almost impossible on the right. Tax has become not a matter of need and policy, but a litmus test of conservative purity.

The genesis of taxes as an evil goes back to a group of young conservatives — which included Norquist — with a consuming conviction that government is too big, and that the only way to cut it down to size (what size?) was, in their phrase, to “starve the beast.”

The problem is that Americans keep asking more of their government, and consequently it grows. We want more diseases to be researched by the National Institutes of Health, and more energy solutions to be developed by the Department of Energy. We want the food chain to be secured and nuclear waste disposed of. We want better roads, bridges, airports and air traffic control. When something untoward happens, like bee colony collapse or the disappearance of a strain of bananas, we want the Department of Agriculture to find a fix.

All those without a mention of providing social services, extending entitlements, and beefing up the military — all favored by the public.

The trouble gets worse when tax-cutting becomes an ethic, because even good taxes are an anathema to politicians, who are wont to start their political lives by signing Norquist’s “no new taxes” pledge.

Take the mess the highway trust fund is in. It is funded in fits and starts by a conflicted Congress, trapped between what it knows to be need and the desire to limit spending. Infrastructure needs to be funded in multi-year programs. Before the recent budget deal, it was funded for just three months. Can anyone build a bridge in three months?

The danger of blind tax hatred can be seen with the gas tax. It is generally agreed that using less gasoline would be a net good: fewer oil imports, fewer greenhouse gases, and more livable cities. Today’s price is low, even by historical standards.

An opportunity that may never come again exists to fix much of the nation’s crumbling infrastructure by increasing the federal gas tax from its present 18.4 cents per gallon, where it has languished since 1993. There is enormous elasticity in the amount of gas an individual or a family uses. You can buy a smaller car or a hybrid, or travel less. The price of gas is not like the price of shelter.

Many of the ills that contribute to the sense that the nation has lost its way would go away with better roads and general infrastructure improvement. You do not feel good waiting to cross a bridge or idling for hours on Interstate 95.

Sitting in a traffic jam for two hours in the morning and two hours at night may not qualify as a tax, but it is taxing. — For InsideSources.com


Signaling Climate Virtue in Paris

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By Llewellyn King

Anyone who is anyone will be off to Paris in December. That’s where the United Nations is holding its Climate Change Conference. Forget Davos: That annual summit in the Swiss Alps is just for billionaire buffoons who have made it big on the Internet and mastered the art of lending money to Greece and getting out early, or those who think that standardizing coffee shops is good for the world.

Davos is better for partying in January than the Super Bowl because it drags on for days. But if you aren’t one of the aforementioned billionaires, after your first two bottles of wine, you’ll have to fly home because no one told you how expensive Switzerland is, nor how hard the Swiss franc is next to every other currency.

The best of all possible places in the world to be on November 30 to December 11 is Paris. If you’re not there, it says you don’t care.

In progressive circles, you have to be seen to care deeply. Your presence in Paris will manifest “virtue signaling” — a phrase on everyone’s lips in Britain since James Bartholomew coined it in the April 18, 2015 edition of The Spectator, a weekly British conservative magazine. You know how it works. You wear fake fur to signal that you love animals. You drive a hybrid vehicle to show that you save oil and are doing your bit to reduce your carbon footprint. That signals virtue, but it’s a week signal. You can boost that signal by attaching a conspicuous bicycle rack to your hybrid vehicle, even if you don’t own a bike.

You have to be careful in Paris. Signaling is everything: Think before you signal. For example, claim you had other business that brought you to Paris, like the book you’re planning to write on the Louvre or the history of alfresco sex along the Seine in the time of the Francois I. This way, you avoid the thought — perish it — that you wasted all that jet fuel just to attend a conference where you absolutely knew you had to be seen, like the White House Correspondents’ Association annual dinner in Washington, D.C.

If you flew to Paris first class, conceal it by complaining about the smallness of the seats and awfulness of the meals. If you’re winging across the Atlantic or the Pacific in a private jet, land in another country and take the train to Paris. European trains are electric and that signals virtue. Generally trains signal virtue, except Amtrak, which signals something else.

Housing is a problem in Paris because you’ll be tempted to stay in one of the great hotels. Warning! Cross these places of luxury, taste and convenience off the list: The Ritz, the George V, the Bristol, and the Meurice. People who signal their deep concern about global warming are also concerned by the amount of energy it takes to keep the rich in comfort.

If you’re to get entry to the finest salons on the Left Bank and the conference halls, and if you’re to shake hands with climate seer James Hansen, you must signal virtue. Borrow a bicycle, or grow a beard, but not too full or Le Flick, the French police, will have you in the cells as a terrorist in no time.  Sandals send a great signal, as do rough linens from India. If you have a lovely mink, leave it at home. Bad signaling. If Paris turns cold, buy a duffel coat or an old military great coat. Show them that you care, that you live lightly on the Earth.

If you can’t resist a slap-up dinner at Maxim’s or Laperouse, try getting there on the Metro wrapped in something dowdy. You can expose the fine threads inside. You’ll find staff very understanding. Hell, they learned it all from the French existentialists, who loved to signal virtue almost as much as they loved rich women, who bought them things while they philosophized: an unmistakable signal of virtue.

If you can just signal virtue, you can sink to any depths – and the good people of Paris will help you.

If I make it there, I’ll be staying in a modest hotel on the Ile St. Louis. And I’ll signal virtue by wearing cords and an old tweed jacket

Mark Twain said, “Give a man a reputation as an early riser, and he can sleep ‘til noon.” Signal virtue and you can let rip. –For InsideSources.com

AARP Is Alientating Me and Other Oldsters

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By Llewellyn King

The common law has a tort that allows an aggrieved party, a spouse or a lover, to sue for alienation of affections. Derived from English common law, it has been abolished in all but seven states.

The most obvious targets for lawsuits were lovers who had taken the loved one from a marriage and made away to some new love nest; there to pursue, well, you know.

But it wasn’t just the third party in a love triangle who could be sued. It could be a priest, a psychiatrist, or even a family member who had advised a change in the marriage or its equivalent.

Clearly, alienation of affections isn’t what the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has in mind when it cries out for tort reform.

My interest in this kind of lawsuit is practical. I wonder if there is an obscure tort that would entitle me to damages from the AARP. I want millions of dollars from the giant nonprofit organization for making me old. That’s right, old!

The AARP is in the business, besides selling insurance of all types, of alienating us oldsters from our sense of well-being, of the sense of triumph that has brought us this far. It wants to deny us one of the great joys that all of us in our Viagra years should be entitled to enjoy: the pleasure of ridiculing the younger generations.

Ah, the rapture! How can the young’uns, with their eyes glued to cell phones, know the thrill of the chase in the good old days? How can they know, in the these days of the Internet, what it was like to pursue the blue passages of literature that led us to John Donne, Sir John Suckling and Frank Harris? They don’t know what spats were, or the pleasures that were to be found at a drive-in movie theater with the girl next door.

The AARP wants to take away the comfort of reminiscing; wants to rob us of the joy of old-age superiority, and the satisfaction that comes from of looking down on those who aren’t gifted with mileage of time. Damn the AARP! The elephantine organization seems to want to make us old so that it can sell us stuff: insurance, cell phones, walk-in tubs, and funeral packages.

For evidence, and at random, I bring you the latest edition of the AARP Bulletin, a publication which, in the good old days, would have been banned in Boston. It’s a sampling of how the AARP is out to disquiet me and everyone else who has reached the Age of Enlightenment, which lies somewhere north of 65.

The cover sets the tone of latest issue. It features brain health, or how you can find out if you are losing your marbles. Inside, it has a quiz that anyone over d’un certain age who takes it will be reminded that they can’t remember little things like where they put their car keys, or that they made “a doctor appointment for a check-up months ago but completely forgot it.” Clearly signs that one is on the slippery slope of dementia.

Oprah Winfrey is on the cover, which states, “Oprah Joins Americans Over 50 On a Search for Meaning.” Hell, if Oprah hasn’t found the meaning that abides in a glass of single malt whisky at her age, I doubt anyone can help the poor dear. But does she have to take us with her, tramping through the forests of “whys” and “what ifs”?

If all the philosophers, clerics and gurus who ever lived can’t answer these questions, can we trust Oprah to answer the Big Question? Take a cruise, lady. It works for most of us.

Also in the bulletin, the AARP wants us to worry about “the frightening prospect of cyberattacks” on the electric grid. Really, we care more that we can’t work the electric gizmos that we have charged up in the best of times.

As to the ads, they focus on terminal illness, immobility (Want a stairlift on Medicare?), money shortage, and are so depressing that you wonder why we don’t collectively drink the Kool Aid. The AARP will sell that to us, too, probably.

The AARP has upped my anxiety and alienated me from the fun of being old. I want to sue. –For InsideSources.com

 

The Riddle of the U.S. Snub of Jordan

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By Llewellyn King

The continued refusal of the Obama administration to sanction the sale of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAVs) aircraft to Jordan provides a kind of window into the confusion and incoherence of U.S. policy in the Middle East.

Next to Israel, little Jordan (population about 8 million) has been one of our best friends in the region. It has a peace treaty with Israel, and has been seen as a moderate force in the Arab world. Its royal family, Western-educated and bilingual in English, have been favorites, politically and socially, in London and Washington.

Jordan’s King Abdullah II was educated in England and the United States, having attended tony prep schools in both countries before he attended the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst (as did his father, King Hussein), the British equivalent of the United States Military Academy at West Point, in 1980. Commissioned into the British Army as a second lieutenant, he served for a year in 1981 as a troop commander in the 13th/18th Royal Hussars.

Abdullah took a few years off from the military in the 1980s, studying at Pembroke College, Oxford and Georgetown University. But before becoming king in 1999, he served in Jordan’s army, where he rose to the rank of major general, and air force, where he was trained to fly Cobra attack helicopters – his father was an avid and daring helicopter pilot.

My sources tell me that Abdullah is a close friend of Secretary of State John Kerry.

Yet when Jordan came a-knockin’, the administration barred the door. This with them knowing well that the Predator and the Reaper, which is a larger and more sophisticated model, are not the only UAVs on the market. Both Israel and China are vendors of unmanned surveillance aircraft, and Jordan is actively being courted by them. Curiouser and curiouser, as Alice cried.

The administration, while declaring its affection for Jordan, may have in mind that Jordan has been more friend than ally: Jordan did not support the U.S. invasion of Iraq. But why would that deter the Obama administration? It is because of the fight against ISIS that Jordan has requested permission to purchase unarmed Predators needed for surveillance, as well as armed ones.

The arguments for the sale, frequently championed by Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., is that it is a win-win for the United States and Jordan. Jordan gets the best technology for surveillance that money can buy; the United States gets one more eye in the sky over Syria and Iraq, which share borders with Jordan.

Sources to the left and right of the foreign policy establishment in Washington tell me they are baffled by the administration’s reluctance. Policy wonks are wondering aloud, “What is the White House thinking? It will lose a sale and Jordan will buy inferior military hardware, while being shut out of a valuable source of surveillance intelligence. If China or Israel supply drones to Jordan, U.S. access to this intelligence may come with strings.”

It is easy to understand that the administration does not know what to do about Syria. What might have been done was not done. Four years ago, there might have been the diplomatic equivalent of a plea bargain with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, or we might have more effectively armed those rebelling against him, before those motivated by religious sectarianism became dominant.

But none of those missed opportunities justifies snubbing one of our only friends in the region, as chaos escalates beyond the wildest fears of many a Middle East Cassandra. The administration seems to have gone into a catatonic state in Middle East policy, feeling as though whatever it does will not work, and that its legacy will be written in failed states including Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria.

Hunter, who is a member of the House Armed Services Committee, said, “Damage has been done to U.S. relations with Jordan, but the simple act of approving drone exports would prevent further harm. If Jordanian policy, like President Obama’s, is to ‘degrade and ultimately destroy’ ISIS, why is the Obama administration refusing to provide an ally with the tools to do just that? ” — For InsideSources.com

How to Learn to Love Stoplights and Your Electric Car

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By Llewellyn King
 
Ever thought you’d be pleased to wait at a stoplight?  Well, the day is coming when the stoplight may also be a refueling point for your electric car. It won’t be the key point, but it might give your car a little boost until you get home, or to your parking garage or the supermarket.
 
Electric cars are much in the news these days, as the big automakers like Mercedes and General Motors try to catch up with the space, and notoriety, that Elon Musk and his Tesla Motors occupy.
 
But the bugaboo for electric cars, whether they are the super-refined Tesla or the more utilitarian Nissan Leaf, is charging. Batteries are getting better all the time, but they still need frequent charging. You wouldn’t want to try to go any distance without planning ahead for where you can plug in, whether it’s a high-speed, high-voltage charging station or a wire coming out of a kitchen window, which would need about eight hours to get you ready to speed off with that legendary electric car acceleration.
 
Electric cars have been the dream of automakers since the first cars, some of which were electric, but the limits of lead-acid batteries doomed them to very narrow uses. When I lived in Britain, milk delivery vehicles, called milk floats, were electric; and Harrods, the great London department store, used electric delivery vans for decades. In this case the slow-moving, use-specific and very distinctive vehicles possibly were as much for advertising as anything else. Customers wanted to have them pull up at their homes, suggesting that they could afford the substantial prices that are still part of the mystique of Harrods.
 
Over the decades, many new battery types have been tried, including some very far-out ideas like the aluminum-air battery. But the best, so far, is the lithium ion battery, a version of which you have in your cell phone or your computer, and which powers both pure electric cars and the electric component of hybrids like the Toyota Prius. 
 
But there’s still the pesky issue of charging. A Nissan Leaf has a range of about 100 miles, and a Tesla Model S Performance car’s range is 265 miles. The test comes on a cold, wet night when you’re throwing everything at the electric system in addition to propulsion. Get it wrong and your only way home is by tow truck. 
 
But the technology is on the way. The limits, as in so many things, are not on the technology, but the institutions that will bring it to market. Anyone want to make a business of car charging?
 
The technology, where the power is delivered by magnetic field without a direct connection to the wires, is called induction charging. You probably use it if you have an electric toothbrush, or a phone that charges in a cradle. Scaled up, it can be used to charge cars without a hard wire: a car, or other vehicle, drives over a plate in a parking lot or at a stoplight in the road and, miraculously, charging begins. 
 
The Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo., is working on induction charging; and in South Korea, the technology already is in use for buses. The South Korean buses charge, among other places on their routes, at bus stops. While the bus is loading passengers, it is also fueling. Very cool.
 
Nikola Tesla, after whom the car is named, was the Serbian-American genius who briefly worked with Thomas Edison before selling several patent rights, including those to his alternating-current machinery, to George Westinghouse. Tesla claimed he’d found a way of distributing electricity without wires. But how he’d planned to do this remains one of science’s biggest mysteries because he left no plans when he died in 1943.
 
It’s fitting that Tesla, in some small way, may be vindicated as electric vehicles named for him could be among the early beneficiaries of wireless charging. — For InsideSources.com

 

Richardson Says We Should Honor Russia Plutonium Deal

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By Llewellyn King

Bill Richardson could teach Donald Trump something about the art of the deal.

He has done a lot of them. Richardson also wrote a book about the art of the deal, the big deal, entitled “How to Sweet-Talk a Shark; Strategies and Stories from a Master Negotiator.”

In a towering life of public service (U.S. representative, U.N. ambassador, secretary of Energy, New Mexico governor, and peripatetic hostage negotiator), Richardson confronted Fidel Castro, Saddam Hussein, the Taliban, two of North Korea’s dictators, and an assortment of international thugs. He was a five-time nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize.

The essence of Richardson’s deal-making was that the commitment must be kept by both parties.

At present Richardson sees one of his deals in jeopardy, and he was in Washington last week to raise the alarm, meeting privately with former colleagues and appearing at a press conference at the National Press Club.

The deal in jeopardy involves a commitment he made, when he was secretary of Energy in the Clinton administration, with the Russians to dispose of weapons-grade plutonium, the long-lived ingredient in nuclear weapons. There are 34 metric tons of the stuff that the United States is bound, by treaty with Russia, to dispose by integrating it into nuclear fuel and burning it in civilian power plants. This is known as mixed oxide fuel or MOX.

But the Obama administration wants to end the program, before a fleck of plutonium has been processed for fuel. It is seeking to pull the plug on the construction of the facility at a Department of Energy site on the Savannah River in South Carolina, which is two-thirds complete and has already cost over $4 billion.

The administration is now looking not at the completion cost, but at the lifetime cost of the facility. And it is saying that it is too high; although that could have been calculated years ago.

The deal was signed by Vice President Al Gore with Russia back in 2000. The Russians, for their part, are burning their surplus plutonium in fast reactors, which we do not have in operation.

The back story may be not about lifetime cost, but about the deployment of federal dollars in the very near future. Nuclear industry insiders believe that the Department of Energy, which makes nuclear weapons and stockpiles them, wants to divert all available resources to its weapons refurbishment program and, in argot of the moment, kick the plutonium can down the road. New funds are harder to come by than re-purposing extant ones.

The department is floating the idea that the plutonium should be “down-blended,” meaning mixed with some secret ingredient that the department believes will render it safe for all time, and stored in a troubled existing facility: the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico.

“I don’t believe this is a good course of action.” Richardson told reporters at the press club event. He said the WIPP facility was designed for low-level waste … there would be a lot of opposition in New Mexico.” He was involved in that project, too, when he was in government.

On sanctity of treaties, Richardson said, “I think that [closing down the MOX facility] would be a grave mistake across the board.”

Richardson said that he had negotiated with the Russians as U.N. ambassador and as Energy secretary. In the matter of plutonium disposal, he said the Russians have kept their side of the deal. There was plenty of tension over Ukraine and Syria, and “we don’t need any more tension.” He said, “This is one potential area of cooperation that should not be discarded, and it would be, should the MOX facility be discarded.”

If the MOX facility is shuttered, it will be one of many nuclear facilities across the country, paid for by taxpayers, which have been abandoned because of other priorities or political agendas. The price is high in enthusiasm, creativity and commitment from the workforce at facilities, like the MOX one.

The dollars spent have no legacy except a sad, new kind of national monument: structures that have been left forlorn and incomplete as politics have zigged and zagged. These abandoned structures range from the experimental Fast Flux Test Facility in Hanford, Wash. to the Integrated Fast Reactor in Idaho Falls, Idaho to the sad, $18-billion Yucca Mountain facility sitting unused in Nevada. There are many more.

As Richardson might tell, in a long life in public service, you have to defend the deal long after it was signed, sealed and delivered. Not so, perhaps, in real estate transactions. — For InsideSources.com

 


Dos and Don’ts for the Next GOP Debate

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Dear Debaters,

I loved your show. At first, I thought I had chanced upon something affiliated with the Miss Universe Pageant. And I had an awful moment when I braced against the possibility of having to see Donald Trump mince across the stage in a Speedo.

When I got the two events untangled in my mind, everything was swell. I even enjoyed the warm-up version with jokes by Lindsey Graham. He is quite a cut-up for a war hawk. I am glad he traveled to the Middle East so often, but I wish he had told us what he learned there. Did he stay with the U.S. military or did he do a kind of Lindsey of Arabia, riding a camel and eating shawarma? Did he teach them the intricacies of South Carolina barbecue? We should be told.

As for that sly, former New York governor George Pataki, he sounded presidential when he chided those who would obey the law selectively. Trouble is George has saved himself from overexertion out of the gate, and now the field is in the stretch, while he is ambling up to the first turn.

In the main event, we all swooned — well, nearly — for dear, sweet Ben Carson. Such a nice man. Ready-made to be ambassador the Court of St. James’s (United Kingdom, that is) or president of Harvard, Ben would bring class to anything. But why, oh why, is he running for president of the United States? Clearly, he does not do foreign policy, banking or sanctions management. But thank you, doctor, for toning up the Republican Party. It needed it. Have you seen the Trump Tower? How gauche!

Carly Fiorina, you are quite an information sponge. Loved the way you tossed off those statistics about brigades, divisions and ships. Super! But did you have to simper over Bibi Netanyahu? You can love Israel without embracing Netanyahu who is, if you think about it, something like Israel’s Donald Trump, but more cunning. Swatting has served you well, Carly, but do not paint yourself in a corner with Vladimir Putin. Do not tell him what you will do as president. I would cozy up to him while rearming.

Talk to everyone and carry a big stick; John Kasich understands that. Wow, John, when you were talking about how you balanced the budget with someone from the other party, I guess you meant to say it was Bill Clinton, but it slipped your mind.

And then, The Donald. Could this be the beginning of the end? And those faces you pulled? Expect to see them in Democratic ads. Donald, if you make it to the next debate, read up on things outside of New York, Florida and New Jersey. There are aids for embryonic politicians that you can buy in a bookstore: they are called CliffsNotes. In no time, you will drop historical facts, mention faraway land masses, and quote Winston Churchill or Julius Caesar. Those pesky foreign names? Easy. Get The New York Times and read the foreign section on Page Two. In just one week, you will be conversant with the names of all kinds of demagogues, who are just waiting to deal with you. I promise.

Many of you are showing improvement from last time, especially Jeb Bush. He has graduated from looking like a schoolmaster all the way up to having all the savoir faire of a county bank manager. Can the White House be far behind? — For InsideSources.com



The Efficient, Stupid Market for Nuclear Electricity

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By Llewellyn King

The market is a wondrous place. It ensures you can drink Scotch whisky in Cape Town and Moscow, or Washington and Tokyo, if you prefer. It distributes goods and services superbly, and it cannot be improved upon in seeking efficiency.

But it can’t think and it can’t plan; and it’s a cruel exterminator of the weak, the unready or, for that matter, the future.

Yet there are those who believe that the market has wisdom as well as efficiency. Not so.

If it were wise, or forward-looking, or sensitive, Mozart wouldn’t have died a pauper, and one of the greatest — if not the greatest architecturally — railway station ever built, Penn Station, wouldn’t have been demolished in 1963 to make way for the profit that could be squeezed out of the architectural deformity that replaced it: the Madison Square Garden/Penn Station horror in New York City.

End of the line

End of the line

Around Washington, Los Angeles and other cities are the traces of the tracks of the railroads and streetcar lines of yore. These were torn up when the market anointed the automobile as the uber-urban transport of the future. As Washington and Los Angeles drown in traffic, many wish the tracks — now mostly bike paths — were still there to carry the commuter trains and streetcars that are so badly needed in the most traffic-clogged cities.

Now the market, with its concentration on the present tense, is about to do another great mischief to the future. An abundance of natural gas is sending the market signals which threaten carbon-free nuclear plants before their life is run out, and before a time when nuclear electricity will again be cheaper than gas-generated electricity. World commodity prices are depressed at present, and no one believes that gas will always be the bargain it is today.

Two nuclear plants, Vermont Yankee in Vernon, Vt. and Kewaunee in Carlton, Wisc., have already been shuttered, and three plants on the Exelon Corp. system in the Midwest are in jeopardy. They’ve won a temporary reprieve because the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) says the fact that they have round-the-clock reliability has to be taken into account against wind and solar, which don’t. In a twist, solar and wind have saved some nuclear for the while.

Natural gas, the market distorting fuel of the moment, is a greenhouse gas producer, although less so than coal. However gas, in the final analysis, could be as bad, or worse, than coal when you take into account the habitual losses of the stuff during extraction. Natural gas is almost pure methane. When this gets into the atmosphere, it’s a serious climate pollutant, maybe more so than carbon dioxide, which results when it is burned.

Taken together — methane leaks with the carbon dioxide emissions — and natural gas looks less and less friendly to the environment.

Whatever is said about nuclear, it’s the “Big Green” when it comes to the air. Unlike solar and wind, it’s available 24 hours a day, which is why three Midwest plants got their temporary reprieve by the FERC in August.

When President Obama goes to Paris to plead with the world for action on climate change in December, the market will be undercutting him at home, as more and more electricity is being generated by natural gas for no better reason than it’s cheap.

As with buying clothes or building with lumber, the cost of cheap is very high. The market says, “gas, gas, gas” because it’s cheap – now. The market isn’t responsible for the price tomorrow, or for the non-economic costs like climate change. 

But if you want a lot of electricity that disturbs very little of the world’s surface, and doesn’t put any carbon or methane into the air, the answer is nuclear: big, green nuclear. — For InsideSources.com

In Search of the Real Elizabeth Warren

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By Llewellyn King

I went to Boston this week in pursuit of the real Elizabeth Warren. You see, I don’t think the whole story of Warren comes across on television where she can seem overstated, too passionate about everyday things to be taken seriously.

Like others, I’ve wondered why the progressives are so enamored of her. Suffolk University, mostly known for its authoritative polls, gave her platform as part of an ongoing series of public events in conjunction with The Boston Globe. But whether the dearest hopes of the progressives will be fulfilled, or whether the senior senator from Massachusetts has reached her political apogee is unclear.

What I did find is that Warren has star power. She is a natural at the podium, and revels in it. At least she did at Suffolk, where the cognoscenti came out to roar their affirmation every time she threw them some red meat, which she did often.

Here’s a sampling:

On student loans: “The U.S. government is charging too much interest on student loans. It shouldn’t be making money on the backs of students.”

On the U.S. Senate: “It was rigged and is rigged [by lobbyists and money in politics]. The wind only blows in one direction in Washington … to make sure that the rich have power and remain in power.”

Warren’s questioner, Globe political reporter Joshua Miller, led her through the predictable obstacle course of whether she was angling to be the vice presidential candidate, if Joe Biden runs and becomes the Democratic nominee. She waffled on this question, as one expected, admitting to long talks about policy with Biden and declaring herself prepared to talk policy with anyone. She said the subject of the vice presidency might have come up.

Short answer, in my interpretation: She would join the ticket in a heartbeat. This isn’t only for reasons of ambition — of which she has demonstrated plenty, from her odyssey through law schools, until she found a perch at Harvard as a full professor — but also age.

Warren is 66 years old and although her demeanor and appearance are of a much younger woman, the math is awkward. There are those in the Democratic Party who say she needs a full term in the Senate to get some legislative experience and to fulfill the commitment of her first elected office. But eight years from now, she’ll probably be judged as too old to run for president.

Clearly Warren didn’t fancy the punishment, and probable futility, of a run against Hillary Clinton. But the vice presidency might suit her extraordinarily well, given Biden’s age of 72.

Warren has stage presence; she fills a room. She is funny, notwithstanding that you can be too witty in national politics, as with failed presidential aspirants Mo Udall and Bob Dole. She reminds me of those relentlessly upbeat mothers, who were always on-call to fix things in the children’s books of my youth.

Although Warren comes from a working-class background, years of success at the best schools has left her with the patina of someone from the comfortable classes; someone for whom things work out in life. She counters this by stressing the plight of the middle class, the decline in real wages and her won passion for fast food and beer — light beer, of course.

Warren’s father was janitor in Oklahoma who suffered from heart disease and her mother worked for the Sears catalog. The young Elizabeth did her bit for the family income by waitressing.

However, it’s hard to imagine her at home at a union fish fry. My feeling is  that she’d be more comfortable — the life of the party, in fact — at a yacht club.

Progressives yearn for Warren and she speaks to their issues: the lack of Wall Street regulation and federal medical research dollars, and the need for gun control, student loan reform, equal pay for equal work, and government contracting reform.

Less dour than Bernie Sanders, and less extreme, it’s no wonder they long for her to occupy high office; she’s a classic, untrammeled liberal.

All in all, I’d like to go to a party where Warren is the host: the kind where they serve more than light beer.  — For InsideSources.com.

The Stripping of Man: Hats, Ties, now Socks

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By Llewellyn King

Men’s hats bit the dust in the time of Jack Kennedy. Oh, sure, there are baseball caps and various ersatz chapeaux to keep the top of a man cool or warm. But they aren’t grand symbols of taste on the head: boaters, derbies, fedoras, homburgs, panamas, trilbies and — forgotten glory — silk top hats.

More recently, the bell has tolled for the necktie — that useless but delightful fashion option for men. Who ever complimented a man on his unadorned neck?

I blame Hollywood and the whole state of California for suppressing fashion by promoting the idea that casual dressing is superior. The Golden State has upended the decent order of all things sartorial for men; reduced us to looking like bums in shapeless clothes emblazoned with the manufacturer’s name.

What became of the well-fitting — bespoke, if possible — suit or blazer, craftily cut to minimize bulge around the waist and maximize size at the shoulder? What of the fine shirt in linen, poplin, French twill, silk or even broadcloth? What has replaced the sense of social perfection of a man showing his cuffs in a double-breasted Melton blazer?

Teach us to dress: Albert J. Beveridge, literature and drama teacher, 1912

Teach us to dress: Albert J. Beveridge, literature and drama teacher, 1912

This decline in the male wardrobe I’ve borne with fortitude. But I believe that wardrobe disassembling has hit its nadir: men wearing suits without socks. Enough, enough, enough!

A senior executive of a California company, of course, showed up sans socks for a taping of my television program. I’ll give the man his due: he wore a decent suit, a passable shirt and a power tie. His feet supported quality loafers. But why no socks? Does anyone admire the male ankle? Is it a thing of beauty? Have I missed out on the charm of this lovely body part?

That horror wasn’t an isolated event: Recently, I dined at a French restaurant in Boston with a distinguished citizen — an ambassador plenipotentiary to a European country, no less — who wasn’t wearing socks. Does the State Department know? Is there a protocol for ambassadorial dress? Can down-dressers be rebuked? Is this matter addressed in Hillary Clinton’s copious emails? We should be told in the president’s Saturday broadcast whether the nation is going to be allowed to go down the sartorial drain.

I’ve been checking out Chinese dignitaries. Every last one of them, as far as I can determine, wears socks. Even Russian President Vladimir Putin transgresses international standards of statesmanship only from the waist up. Shoes and socks prevail for this improbable Tarzan.

The passion to be casual is causing actual hardship. Nobody knows what to wear at important events. Some years ago, I participated in a U.S.-Japan business forum in Hawaii. The U.S. delegation head decided that polo shirts would be appropriate attire for men. But his dress decision didn’t reach the Japanese delegates, and they all wore suits. After lunch, though, the Japanese went casual and the Americans donned suits. Mutual red faces.

Does anyone really think a partner or associate in a big law firm feels good with his tummy rolls accentuated by a knit shirt advertising a crocodile? For women, this casual thing is a refined cruelty. You work like hell: law school, junior legal slave, and finally — hosanna — partner. Time for a fabulous Chanel suit, patent leather-toed slingbacks and heaps of pearls.

Not so fast. The managers have decreed it’s time to go casual, to bring out the jeans. The law-school look for work.

We have to make America look as if it cares again. Therefore, I won’t vote for any presidential aspirant who, if male, doesn’t wear a tie or plunges his feet into loafers without socks; or who, if female, wears flats and eschews leg and foot coverage. I’m saving my vote for a sartorially principled candidate. — For InsideSources.com