One of the luxuries of democracy is that we don’t have to listen. Or we can listen and hear what we want to hear. We can find resonance in dissonance, or we can hear flat notes.

That is the story of the climate crisis, which is here.

We have been warned over and over, sometimes as gently as a summer zephyr, and sometimes gustily, as with Al Gore’s tireless campaigning and his seminal 1992 book, and later movie, “Earth in the Balance.”

Now the summer is upon us — with its intimations of worse to come.  And this message rings in our ears: The climate is changing — polar ice caps are melting; the sea level is rising; the oceans are heating up; natural patterns are changing, whether it be for sharks or butterflies; and we are going to have to live with a world that we, in some measure, have thrown out of kilter.

Around the beginning of the 20th century, we began an attack on the environment, the likes of which all of history hadn’t seen, including two centuries of industrial revolution. Sadly, it was when invention began improving the lives of millions of people.

Two big forces were unleashed in the early 20th century: the harnessing of electricity and the perfection of the internal combustion engine. These improved life immensely, but there was a downside: They brought with them air pollution and, at the time unknown, started the greenhouse effect.

In the same wave of inventions, we pushed back the ravages of infectious diseases, boosted irrigated farming and enabled huge growth in the world population — all of whom aspired to a better life with electricity and cars.

In 1900, the world population was 1.6 billion. Now it is 8 billion. The population of India alone has increased by about a billion since the British withdrawal in 1947. Most Indians don’t have cars, jet off for their vacations or have enough, or any, electricity, and very few have air conditioning. Obviously, they are aspirational, as are the 1.4 billion people of Africa, most of whom have nothing. But the population of Africa is set to double in 25 years.

The greenhouse effect has been known and argued about for a long time. Starting in 1970, I became aware of it as I started covering energy intensively. I have sat through climate sessions at places like the Aspen Institute, Harvard and MIT, where it was a topic and where the sources of the numbers were discussed, debated, questioned and analyzed.

Oddly, the environmental movement didn’t take up the cause then. It was engaged in a battle to the death with nuclear power. To prosecute its war on nuclear, it had to advocate something else, and that something else was coal: coal in a form of advanced boilers, but nonetheless coal.

The Arab oil embargo of 1973 added to the move to coal. At that point, there was little else, and coal was held out as our almost inexhaustible energy source: coal to liquid, coal to gas, coal in direct combustion. Very quiet voices on the effects of burning so much coal had no hearing. It was a desperate time needing desperate measures.

Natural gas was assumed to be a depleted resource (fracking wasn’t perfected); wind was a scheme, as today’s turbines, relying heavily on rare earths, hadn’t been created, nor had the solar electric cell. So, the air took a shellacking.

To its credit, the Biden administration has been cognizant of the building crisis. With three acts of Congress, it is trying to tackle the problem — albeit in a somewhat incoherent way.

Some of its plans just aren’t going to work. It is pushing so hard against the least troublesome fossil fuel, natural gas, that it might destabilize the whole electric system. The administration has set a goal that by 2050 — just 27 years from now — power production should produce no greenhouse gases whatsoever, known as net-zero.

To reach this goal, the Environmental Protection Agency is proposing strict new standards. However, these call for the deployment of carbon capture technology which, as Jim Matheson, CEO of the Rural Electric Cooperative Association, told a United States Energy Association press briefing, doesn’t exist.

The crisis needs addressing, but panic isn’t a tool. A mad attack on electric utilities, the demonizing of cars or air carriers, or less environmentally aware countries won’t carry us forward.

Awareness and technology are the tools that will turn the tide of climate change and its threat to everything. It took a century to get here, and it may take that long to get back.

What happened to the kingmakers of journalism?

They seem to have died in 2011 with David Broder of The Washington Post. In an age when columnists could still influence the flow of events, Broder stood out as much for what he wasn’t as for what he was.

He wasn’t, for example, a flashy writer. He didn’t have George Will’s turn of phrase. He didn’t add to the language like another kingmaker a generation before him, Walter Lippmann. Lippmann gave us “Great Society,” “Cold War” and “stereotype.”

What set Broder apart was the depth of his political reporting.

I worked with Broder at the Post, and he was relentless. If you were into politics, you were grist to his mill. From precinct captains to senators, they were all of interest to Broder, all worthy of his probing; all had a tale to tell, and Broder wanted to hear it.

Journalists at the Post used to drink in a genuinely downmarket bar called The New York Lounge, next to the better-known Post Pub, which, ironically, was eschewed by most of the editorial staff. Incongruously, Broder would be found there occasionally with some political apparatchik, notebook out and drinking a Diet Coke.

A reporter who traveled with Broder described how when they arrived in a midwestern city at 10 p.m., Broder got on the phone to see who of the local political establishment was up. It could have been a candidate or the local state party chairman; all were worth talking to in Broder’s world.

Whereas some newspaper grandees talked to presidents and the power elite (Lippmann helped Woodrow Wilson write his Fourteen Points, Joe Alsop shared sessions with Lyndon Johnson on the Vietnam War, and George Will rehearsed Ronald Reagan for his debates with Jimmy Carter), Broder reported relentlessly at all levels.

For all but the very end of his career, Broder worked as a reporter who wrote two columns a week. This industrious reporting underpinned the columns. They were magisterial and analytical.

You didn’t pick them up to be entertained but to get insight. That is where Broder’s strength lay, and that is what made him a kingmaker. Other political journalists and writers read Broder and were informed by him.

He told them which way the wind was blowing, and that filled their sails and influenced their work. Broder informed the political universe.

That is how he affected the careers of many a political grandee. He said in his studious and understated way, “Look at so-and-so.” And they looked, and then they wrote, and the landscape was changed.

I recall vividly a lunch at the Financial Times headquarters in London in 1975. Apart from FT people who included, as I recall, David Fishlock, the science editor, there was Virginia Hamill from The Washington Post News Service and Bernard Ingham, who was to become Margaret Thatcher’s press secretary.

The talk was about who would win the Democratic nomination. I had flown in from Washington the day before and had read Broder in the Post, so I blurted out, “Jimmy Carter.” The group was askance and wanted to know why I had such a crazy idea. I replied, “Because Broder has discovered him.”

Broder’s influence was subtle but pervasive. He was the reporter’s reporter, the columnist’s columnist.

In the time since Broder’s death, everything has changed. There is so much commentary based on little reporting and politics is dominated by click-bait politicians — for example, Donald Trump, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert.

Analysis has been replaced with tribal bellowing, and social media has taken the debate off the editorial pages and handed it to influencers, who wouldn’t have gotten a letter to the editor published before the internet.

While dwelling on the kingmakers of old, it is worth mentioning the king-humblers, particularly Robert Novak. Novak got the goods.

Again, Novak wasn’t a great writer but was the source of hard gossip. If you wanted to point to wrongdoing in high places, a call to Novak would set the wheels of justice, or at least the downfall would be in motion.

Novak, a friend, thought you should tell readers what they didn’t already know — and he did, often changing career trajectories for politicos.

It is argued that if the Titan submersible had been certified (read peer-reviewed), the deadly accident, which killed all five on board, wouldn’t have taken place. That may or not be true.

Now there are calls for adventurism tourism to be regulated. I submit that if it is subject to regulation (read licensing), there will be very little of it — and it will be more expensive.

These days, there are calls to regulate everything from artificial intelligence to social media. Be warned: Whereas regulation does and should protect the public’s safety, it also has a dead hand. It curbs invention. It is comfortable with the known not the unknown. Purely seeking safety sets up a timid regime.

You want inventions to be safe but also free to evolve. The dynamic of the undertaking is crucial.

Regulations can have a negative dynamic or a positive one. They both seek to protect the public’s health and safety but with differing results.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has the duty to regulate nuclear power and materials. It does this conscientiously but not progressively.

Evolution in nuclear power is very slow and difficult because of the NRC. Every wire, nut and bolt, pump and pipe in the nuclear steam supply system gets certified. And every change needs certification.

The result is that engineers design to pass NRC muster, not to reach into the great unknown of possibility or the soaring spirit of creative invention. The problem isn’t with the NRC staff but with its mandate.

Nowadays, there is a resurgence of interest in nuclear power with small modular reactors, some using unproven but promising designs and technologies that haven’t been investigated since the 1960s, which was the end of the first wave of nuclear invention.

Some small modular reactors are being developed by U.S. companies in Canada and China so as to avoid initial NRC approval. Not that the promoters want to make an unsafe reactor but because if you are at the cutting-edge of invention, it is hard to deal with the safety mandate that is the driving force in the NRC.

Originally, safety and promotion were both handled by the Atomic Energy Commission. That agency had promotion as its primary function but as it well understood that nuclear can be very dangerous, it also had a regulatory function.

I covered the AEC as a reporter and, frankly, its regulation worked as well as what has succeeded it, namely the NRC.

The argument against the AEC reached a crescendo in the early 1970s, with relentless pressure from environmentalists and consumer groups, spearheaded by Ralph Nader, behind the slogan, “It’s its own policeman.”

But what the AEC had, which is now lacking, is a creative dynamic to develop new uses for nuclear but safely. It worked: Experimental reactors were built and experimentation with everything from nuclear stimulation of natural gas reserves — basically nuclear fracking — to a variety of cutting-edge reactors at the Idaho and Oak Ridge national laboratories.

Contrast the stultification in nuclear with the progress in aviation where the Federal Aviation Administration both promotes flying and regulates it, and certifies airplanes.

Of course, there have been mistakes and there are frequent accusations that the FAA is too close to Boeing and the airlines. The most egregious failure might have been in certifying the Boeing 737 Max without insisting on better pilot training on a tricky airplane. The result was two catastrophic crashes with non-U.S. airlines.

Yet the skies are still safe, and they are filled with passenger and cargo aircraft that are evolving with each new technology coming along. When it comes to light aircraft, the FAA has been able to accommodate and find airworthy many new airplanes, from ultralights to aerobatic-certified engines and airframes, some from overseas.

By the diplomatic hoopla in Washington that greeted Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, it would seem that intrepid U.S. explorers had just discovered India and were celebrating him in the way Britain treated tribal leaders in the 19th century: Show them the big time. Then co-opt them to vow allegiance.

In this century, the U.S. equivalent of the big time is a state visit and endless professions of friendship. Experience says Modi won’t bite.

Historically, India has been reluctant to accept the embrace of the West. Although it is democratic, capitalist and has the largest diaspora, India’s affections have been hard to capture.

Since independence from Britain in 1947, India has sought global status by standing aloof and leaning toward countries and regimes that are anathema to the West. Its first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, fostered the concept of a third force in the world: a constellation of unaligned nations with India at the center.

It showed a perverse affection for the Soviet Union — which was hardly nonaligned — and didn’t reflect the values of India: free movement of people, free press, capitalism and democracy.

Years ago, a retired executive editor of the Times of India, whom I knew socially, told me, “There are maybe a million Indians living in the United States and only a handful who live in the Soviet Union, but our leaders have always leaned toward them. It is a puzzle.” 

There are now 4.2 million Indians living in the United States.

At the same time, Indians migrated across the world and made inroads into professions from Canada to New Zealand. In Britain, they are prominent in politics and the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, is of Indian descent.

In the United States, executives of Indian descent run some of the largest tech companies, including IBM, Google and Microsoft.

Indians are a huge force in English literature. Every year Indian writers feature on the prize lists for best new English novels. Whereas the computers most of us use may have been made in China, much of the software was written in India.

Indian words abound in English: Pajamas, ketchup, bungalow, jungle, avatar, verandah, juggernaut and cot are just a few.

The effect of Indian culture on the world is evident from curry and rice to polo to yoga.

Yet, India remains a distant shore, elusive and obvious at the same time. A country of enormous talent that lags economically. It now has the fifth-largest economy in the world. With 1.4 billion people of obvious ability, the question must be, why does it still have crushing poverty?

Andres Carvallo, professor of innovation at Texas State University, told the “Digital 360” webinar, for which I am a regular panelist, he thought it was partly because India lagged in essential electricity production, pointing out that China has four times the electricity output of India.

But is this symptom or cause? I have been puzzling over why India doesn’t do better for decades. It seems to me that the causes are multiple, but some can be laid at Britain’s feet — not because the British were occupiers in India but because of some of the good things they left there that have perversely remained time-warped.

One of India’s ambassadors to Washington told me with pride that every occupier had enriched India and left something of value behind, from Alexander the Great to the Moguls and, of course, Britain and the Raj.

But the Brits also left behind a sluggish bureaucracy to the point of sclerosis and a legal system that is independent but takes an eternity to reach a decision. Additionally, some of the ideas prevalent in British Labor Party thinking — and long since abandoned — took hold in India and have been extremely detrimental. These included protectionism, a state’s role in the economy, and a fear of competition from abroad.

I believe that protectionism is the greatest evil. It discouraged competition, innovation and creativity. It inadvertently allowed a few families to concentrate too much wealth and economic power and to work to protect that.

India is more open now, but it needs to be vigilant against the evils that go with protectionism, which is still part of its DNA.

At one time, you could buy a brand-new Indian made-car — Fiat or Morris design — which was 30 years out of date. No need to innovate; just make the same car year after year.

If it liberalizes its economy, India may one day outpace China. Meantime, do luxuriate in those Indian words that have so spiced up English.

Summer, glorious summer, is upon us. It brings with it the anticipation of vacations, long weekends of sea and sand or mountains, and invigorating scenery.

Each to their own, but summer is spelled N-I-R-V-A-N-A for most Americans. It is the treasured time from Memorial Day to Labor Day when we can kick back and, for a couple of weeks and a few weekends, live the life of leisure and fullness we fantasize about the rest of the year.

But there is an impediment: the airlines.

If you have to fly to your Shangri-La, beware. Airline travel these days is a brief sojourn in the deepest circle of Hell.

I fly a lot, and I can report that you have no idea what you are in for if you haven’t sought to take a flight recently. The airports are obscenely crowded; the concession prices for terrible food aren’t only very high, but many don’t take cash; and the distance between gates is such that you may wonder if the first miles of your trip are on foot.

Making tight connections is a fraught business. A stressed system is breaking down. I saw a woman in tears in Charlotte because the wheelchair assistance person had abandoned her and her flight was leaving from a distant gate.

The electronic signs for departing flights are widely spaced, and if you don’t have the airline app on your phone, good luck getting information about your flight.

Don’t take the gate printed on your boarding pass as the gate you’ll leave from: These change quite often. Uniformed personnel are few and stressed. They appear to be suffering battle fatigue. You can’t be cross at them.

Then there is the willful price-gouging.

The airlines are now masters at hidden charges and outlandish fees. If you want to check a bag, that will be a hefty $35. If you want to sit somewhere other than at the rear by the toilets, you can pay about $50 for that privilege, but you’re still in economy.

Buying a ticket online is a computer game of rare complexity. You find a fare. Woe betide if you make a mistake and have to start over: That fare has disappeared, and a much higher one is on offer.

Of course, you have a bag. The airlines offer something called Basic Economy, which assumes you have no luggage whatsoever or you are going to pay a hefty baggage fee, usually $35 per item, to check your bag. You aren’t entitled to a bag in the cabin.

Or, if you aren’t a cheap-and-cheerless traveler, you can play bag roulette. That is when you’ve checked your bag, paid the fee and found at the gate that the airline is asking for volunteers to check their bags for free because there is no room on board. You can’t know if this will happen. If you’ve checked your bag and paid, you’ll be left seething with the injustice of the thing.

Let us assume you survived to that marvelous moment when you board, which means your flight hasn’t been canceled and even though it has been overbooked, you have a seat.

Ah, there is the rub — the thighs or knees rub. The seat is so small, so close to the one in front, that you are in for agony if you weigh more than 150 pounds and are more than 5 feet 10 inches tall.

Clearly, Procrustes, the robber and torturer of Greek mythology,  who would either cut or stretch his victims to fit his iron bed, is alive and well in cabin design. It is also hard to believe that the huddled masses in coach class will make it to an exit in an emergency, squeezed as they are into their unyielding seats.

Finally, there are the toilets. They are so small that big people can’t use them. My advice: Go before you go. Otherwise, you may not be able to hygienically apply toilet paper.

None of this has to be. The Federal Aviation Administration can regulate cabin conditions for reasons of safety. While it has that authority, it is notoriously disinclined to lay down the law to the airlines. The FAA isn’t regulating the airlines, it is enabling them.

The smoke from wildfires in Canada that has drifted down to the United States, choking New York City and Philadelphia with their worst air quality in history and blanketing much of the East Coast and the Midwest, may be a harbinger for a long, hot, difficult summer across the nation.

It could easily be the summer when the environmental crisis, so easily dismissed as a preoccupation of woke greens and the Biden administration, moves to center stage. It could be when America, in a sense, takes fright. When we realize that global warming is not a will-or-won’t-it-happen issue like Y2K at the turn of the century.

Instead, it is here and now, and it will almost immediately start dictating living and working patterns.

In an extraordinary move, Arizona has limited the growth in some subdivisions in Phoenix. The problem: not enough water. Not just now but going forward. The floods and the refreshing of surface impoundments like Lake Mead and Lake Powell, the nation’s largest reservoirs, haven’t solved the crisis.

All along the flow of the Colorado River, aquifers remain seriously depleted. One good, rainy season, one good snowpack may recharge a dam, but it doesn’t replenish the aquifers, which hydrologists say have been systematically depleting for years.

An aquifer isn’t just an underground river that runs generally after rainfall. It takes years to recharge these great groundwater systems. These have been paying the price of overuse for years; across Texas and all the way to the Imperial Valley in California, unseen damage has been done.

It isn’t just water that looms as a crisis for much of the nation, there is also the sheer unpredictability of the weather.

I talk regularly with electric and gas utility company executives. When I asked them what keeps them awake at night, they used to respond, “Cybersecurity.” Recently, they have said, “The weather.”

This year, we are entering the storm season with unusually warm ocean temperatures in the Atlantic and the Pacific. The sad conclusion is that these will signal exaggerated and very damaging weather activity across the country.

The utilities have been hardening their systems, but electricity is uniquely affected by the weather. The dangers for the electricity industry are multiple and all affect their customers. Too much heat and the air conditioning load gets too high. Too much wind and power lines come down. Too much rain and substations flood, poles snap and there is a crisis from a neighborhood to a region.

In the electricity world, the words of John Donne, the 16th-century English metaphysical poet, apply, “No man is an island entire of itself.”

There is another threat the electric supply system will face this summer if the weather is chaotic: overzealous politics and regulation.

The electric utilities are most identified in the public mind with climate change. The public discounts the myriad industrial processes as well as the cars, trucks, bulldozers, trains and ships that lead to the discharge of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Instead, it is utilities that have a target pinned to them. 

A bad summer will lead to bad regulatory and bad political decisions regarding utilities.

Foremost are likely to be new attacks on natural gas and its supply chain, from the well, through the pipes, into the compressed storage, and ultimately to combustion turbines.

At this time, natural gas — about 60 percent cleaner than coal — is vital to keeping the lights on and the nation running when the wind isn’t blowing or the sun has set or is obscured.

The energy crisis that broke out in the fall of 1973 and lasted to the mid-1980s was characterized by silly overreactions. First among these was the Fuel Use Act of 1978, which removed pilot lights on gas stoves and even threatened the eternal flame at Arlington National Cemetery.

It also accelerated the flight to coal because, extraordinarily, that was the time of the greatest opposition to nuclear power — from the environmental communities.

This summer may be a wakeup for climate change and how we husband our resources. But wild overreaction won’t quiet the weather.

From time to time, I feel it necessary to report on the necktie wars. Sadly, the news is dismal. Neckties are in retreat, and in many instances, they have disappeared. 

Father’s Day this month is already causing stress. The rule was always when in doubt, give a necktie. Certain to please.

But if you give the old boy a necktie this year, you know it will never see the light of day after the insincere raving about how lovely it is.

The next several weeks will see children hopelessly crowding men’s haberdashers, seeking that sure-to-please gift.

I predict that men who have never stuck anything so much as a ticket in the upper left pocket will be inundated with pocket squares. Before pocket squares were what they have shrunk to, they were full-size handkerchiefs, albeit of silk or something that looked like silk.

In an emergency, pocket squares could be whipped out for valuable service: drying a tear, wiping up a spill, or signaling across an airport concourse. Now they are a pathetic reminder that men still like a bit of color and have some fashion flair — despite the unkempt area around the neck, leaving the shirt-wearer looking like a half-made bed.

The great tie makers like Liberty of London, Fumagalli of Italy, Hermes of France, and Ralph Lauren of the United States must be in despair. There are hundreds of fine tie makers, especially in Northern Italy — some of which have been lovingly working with the region’s silk for generations.

Men can now go tieless, where once they were forbidden. Those ties kept on hand at clubs and restaurants are no more. Just this past month in Washington, I saw tieless men at an opera at Kennedy Center, at the city’s two dominant clubs, the Cosmos and the Metropolitan, and even in church. At a funeral in London, I was the only man sporting a tie — a bow tie, to be exact.

Bow ties remain the preserve of a select number of wearers, and they are onto something.

I wear one because of Tucker Carlson. Years ago, before Fox and all that, Tucker wore bow ties. When he was between TV gigs, I invited him to be a guest on “White House Chronicle,” my PBS and SiriusXM program. At that time, Tucker wore bow ties, and, as a gag, I donned one for the interview. Afterward, I found that people love men in bow ties.

So, liking to be loved, I stuck with a bow tie, and it has paid untold dividends for me. I am given special attention on Amtrak and airplanes. Recently, a flight attendant threw her arms around me, saying that my blazer and bow tie reminded her of the old days when passengers were smart dressers and were nice.

I have checked with other bow tie-wearers — from a dentist to an economist — and all report they get this special magical treatment. A frequent remark is, “Thank you for wearing a bow tie. You remind me of my father” or grandfather.

I find many men who would like to experiment with a bow tie are hesitant because they don’t want to make a mess of tying it. Don’t worry, get the pre-tied version. They generally look better and don’t windmill as much as a poorly tied one. My secret is my wife, who is a whizz at tying a bow. Otherwise, when traveling, I go pre-tied.

So, here is a thought: Stop agonizing over wallets, belts and sweaters in the men’s emporium. Get dad a pre-tied bow tie. He won’t dare not to wear it for you. And when he goes out, even down to the convenience store, he will be praised. He may even get a hug, and that is a super Father’s Day gift in my book.

To rephrase Leon Trotsky: You may not be interested in artificial intelligence, but artificial intelligence is interested in you.

Suddenly, long-rumored and awaited, AI is upon the world—a world that isn’t ready for the massive and forever disruption it threatens.

AI could be the greatest disruptor in history, surpassing the arrival of the printing press, the steam engine, and electricity. Those all led to good things.

At this time, the long-term effects of AI are just speculative, but they could be terrifying, throwing tens of millions out of work and making a mockery of truth, rendering pictures and printed words unreliable.

There is no common view on the impact of AI on employment. When I ask, the scientists working on it point to the false fears that once greeted automation. In reality, jobs swelled as new products needed new workers.

My feeling is that the job scenario has yet to be proven with AI. Automation added to work by making old work more efficient and creating things never before enjoyed, and, in the process, opening up new worlds of work.

AI, it seems to me, is all set to subtract from employment, but there is no guarantee it will create great, new avenues of work.

An odd development, spurred by AI, might be in a revival of unionism. More people might want to join a union in the hope that this will offer job security.

The endangered people are those who do less-skilled tasks, like warehouse laborers or fast-food servers. Already Wendy’s, the fast-food chain, is working to replace order-takers in the drive- through lanes with AI-operated systems, mimicking human beings.

Also threatened are those who may find AI can do much, if not all, of their work as well as they do. They include lawyers, journalists, and musicians.

Here the AI impact could, in theory, augment or replace our culture with new creations; superior symphonies than those composed by Beethoven or better country songs than those by Kris Kristofferson.

I asked the AI-powered Bing search engine a question about Adam Smith, the 18th-century Scottish economist. Back came three perfect paragraphs upon which I couldn’t improve. I was tempted to cut-and-paste them into the article I was writing. It is disturbing to find out you are superfluous.

Even AI’s creators and those who understand the technology are alarmed. In my reporting, they range from John E. Savage, An Wang professor emeritus of computer science at Brown University, to Stuart J. Russell, professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, and one of the preeminent researchers and authors on AI. They both told me that scientists don’t actually know how AI works once it is working. There is general agreement that it should be regulated.

Russell, whose most recent book is “Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control,” was one of a group of prominent leaders who signed an open letter on March 29 urging a six-month pause in AI development until more is understood—leading, perhaps, to regulation.

And there’s one rub: How do you regulate AI? Having decided how to regulate AI, how would it be policed? By its nature, AI is amorphous and ubiquitous. Who would punish the violators and how?

The public became truly aware of AI as recently as March 14 with the launch of GPT-4, the successor to GPT-3, which is the technology behind the chatbot ChatGPT. Billions of people went online to test it, including me.

The chatbot answered most of the questions I asked it more or less accurately, but often with some glaring error. It did find out about a friend of my teenage years, but she was from an aristocratic English family, so there was a paper trail for it to unearth.

Berkeley’s Russell told me that he thinks AI will make 2023 a seminal year “like 1066  [the Norman Conquest of England].”

That is another way of saying we are balanced on the knife-edge of history.

Of course, you could end AI, but you would have to get rid of electricity — hardly an option.

Adam Smith, the great Scottish economist and moral philosopher, didn’t have to confront the environmental crisis, the healthcare delivery challenge or any of today’s issues. But his economic theory and moral philosophy — his unseen hand — are as pertinent today as they were in his lifetime.

Notably, Smith believed market forces were a force for good and a force for simply getting things done, acting.

A cardinal virtue of the market at work is discipline. Respect for the bottom line works wonders in producing discipline and results, even in the green economy that places a premium on sustainability.

And it is why Pegasus Capital Advisors, the fast-growing, impact investment firm, is having so much success in Africa, the Caribbean and South America, and Southeast Asia. In all, Pegasus is exploring investments in more than 40 countries.

An investment by Pegasus, under its ebullient founder, chairman and CEO Craig Cogut, must make money and meet other strict criteria. It must help — and maybe save — the local environment. It must benefit local people with employment at decent wages. And it must have a long future of social and economic benefit.

And Pegasus always looks for a strong local partner.

In Africa, Cogut told me, the growing of sustainable crops should be wedded to cold storage and processing, which should be local. He has invested in a marketer of fonio, an African “supergrain.”

“Agriculture and fishing are important sources of food in the global south, but they get shipped out and they need to stay local,” Cogut said.

“In Ecuador, we’re focused on sustainable fishing and shrimp farming,” he said, adding, “Shrimp is an amazing source of protein, but you have to do it in an environmentally correct way.”

Cogut has two passions, and they are where he directs investments: the environment, and health and wellness.

A Harvard-trained lawyer, Cogut took his first job with a law firm in Los Angeles. He became an environmentalist while living there and visiting the nearby national parks frequently. To this day, watching birds while hiking on Audubon Society trails in Connecticut, where he lives, is his passion.

He learned the art of big deals while working with the investment bank Drexel Burnham Lambert during its heyday. When it folded in 1990, Cogut became one of the founding partners of Apollo Advisors, the wildly successful private equity firm. After leaving Apollo in 1996, he founded Pegasus, the private equity firm that is making a difference.

A Pegasus success is Six Senses, which manages eco hotels and resorts with sensitivity to the environment. Pegasus sold Six Senses to IHG in 2019 and is currently partnering with IHG to develop new Six Senses resorts, including an eco-hotel on a Galapagos Island.

“We have been working with the Ecuadorian national park system to replicate what was there before Darwin’s time,” Cogut said.

Another previous Pegasus investment has restored a biodiesel plant in Lima, Peru. This plant, which has been sold, provides diesel fuel, produced from food waste and agricultural waste. “It is now helping the Peruvian government reach its environmental goals,” he said.

Off the coast of Nigeria, Cogut was appalled by natural gas flaring, done in association with oil production. He personally invested in a company to capture the gas and convert it to liquefied natural gas, which is now used to displace diesel in electricity generation — much better for human health and the environment.

After his original investment, a large African infrastructure investor has become the majority owner. This is Cogut’s win-win, where sustainability and commerce come together.

I had a disagreement over how to help Africa’s economy with Britain’s chancellor of the exchequer, Gordon Brown, shortly before he became prime minister. He was trying to raise $50 billion for Africa. I asked Brown how it would be invested so that it would achieve real, positive results. He said, rather unconvincingly, “We’ll give it to the right people.”

If that encounter had taken place today, I would have been able to say, “Call Pegasus. Craig Cogut is the man who can help you.”

When the ancient Greeks wanted to learn what their future held, they would consult with oracles. Alexander the Great, for one, visited the Oracle at Siwa, an oasis in the Egyptian desert. According to his biographer, Plutarch, the oracle told Alexander that he was destined to conquer the world.

In these tumultuous days when we, the electorate, are offered a choice between an old, old president and his daffy vice president and a vengeful reprobate with a persecution complex, I did the smart thing: I consulted the oracle.

No, I didn’t cross the desert on a camel, nor as Alexander did on his much-loved horse, Bucephalus, nor in a snazzy BMW SUV.

I did go to the oracle of the day, which is the only place I know to seek and get what seems to be extraterrestrial advice: the Bing AI. I asked the oracle several questions and got some interesting answers.

When it came to the big question, I beseeched the Bing AI, “Great Oracle, I am an American voter, and I am in an awful tizzy. I don’t know whom to support in the next presidential election.

“It seems to me that one candidate, President Joe Biden, a decent man, may be too old to navigate the difficult waters ahead in domestic and international affairs.

“As for another candidate, former President Donald Trump, many people find aspects of his conduct reprehensible.

“What to do? For me, this is even harder because I am a columnist and television commentator, and I need to have something to say. I am sure you understand, Great Oracle.”

Well, the Bing AI clammed up: It delivered only the formal histories of both men.

I had thought my question would spark a revelation, a wise analysis, or a contradiction of my view of the candidates. Clearly, I shall have to wait for the day when I get into real AI chat: ChatGPT.

Mostly, I had thought the oracle would tell me that all the presidential hopefuls so far will be toast by November 2024, that new candidates will bring us hope, fire up party enthusiasm, and let rip.

Are new faces and new choices too much to hope for?

Republicans are wrestling with their prospective candidate after his latest character stain, having been found liable for sexual abuse and defamation in a civil trial. What does this mean for the whole issue of what we look for in the character of candidates? Rectitude was once considered essential. Not for Trump. Post-Trump is post-rectitude.

Just under 70 percent of the electorate have told pollsters that they think Biden is too old to be re-elected. That isn’t, I submit, a conclusion arrived at by pondering what it means to be 80. That is a conclusion, again I submit, they have come to by looking at the president on TV — on the few occasions they see him there.

Clearly, he doesn’t have the strength or the confidence to hold a press conference. These are vital.

In America, the press conference is the nearest thing we have to question time in the British House of Commons. It is the time of accounting. Biden is behind in his accounting as audited by the press corps.

Harold Meyerson, editor at large of the American Prospect, is avowedly liberal. He is one of the most skillful political writers working today; he is deft, informed, and convincing, and you know where he stands. He stands with the Democrats.

So, it is significant when he raises a question about Biden and when he draws attention, as he did on May 9, to Biden’s absence from public engagement.

Meyerson wrote, “Right now, the Democrats are drifting uneasily toward a waterfall and hoping Biden can somehow navigate the looming turbulence. By autumn, if he hasn’t had some measurable success in … allaying much of the public’s fears of a president drifting into senescence, then some prominent Democrat (a category that doesn’t include Robert Kennedy Jr. or Marianne Williamson) had damn well better enter the race.”