White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: Lives Interrupted

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In 2010, I made more friends than in all of my life. They are scattered across the United States and around the world. But for their sake, I wish they had never heard of me.

Sadly, my new friends know me only because I have taken up their cause. I have written and broadcast about their plight, and they have responded by pouring out their hearts to me.

For very minor service, I have received more gratitude, more praise and more life stories than from anything I have written or broadcast in five decades in journalism.

My sad, suffering new friends are victims of a grossly misnamed disease: chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). It was once known more robustly as myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), which at least suggests seriousness even if it isn't quite accurate. Myalgic describes pain in the joints and encephalomyelitis, inflammation in the brain and spinal cord. CFS has no known cure, and varies in intensity during the sufferer's lifetime.

In 1988, the Centers for Disease Control named the disease chronic fatigue syndrome after an outbreak in 1985 at the Incline Village resort on Lake Tahoe, Nev.

As far back as the 18th century there were recorded outbreaks of the disease, which was given various given names. In 1955, there was a major outbreak at the Royal Free Hospital in London.

The 300-case cluster in Nevada is generally recognized to be the largest in the United States. The second-largest cluster occurred in Lyndonville, NY, a northwestern hamlet where 216 cases were confirmed in a population of fewer than 1,000, also in l985.

A Lyndonville physician, David Bell, is regarded as one of the true experts on CFS, as well as one of the most dispassionate in the controversies that swirl around the disease. Bell has resisted pressure from both the medical establishment and patients' groups while retaining their respect.

As I see it, there are four controversies that plague discussion, research and therapies:

  • Is it a psychological disease with severe physical manifestations (a diagnosis favored by the British medical establishment)?

  • Is it caused by the new retrovirus XMRV (first spotted in prostate cancers) as some researchers believe, and nearly all the 1 million patients in the United States pray will lead to a cure?

  • Some charge there is a conspiracy in the medical establishment to downplay CFS out of guilt over past indifference, or pressure from the psychiatric practitioners who are reluctant to surrender jurisdiction.

  • Others fear a threat to the general population — clusters confirm CFS is contagious. But the pathway of the pathogen (air, blood, sexual intercourse, surfaces, food) or how great the risk is unknown.

Thanks to the Harvey Whittemore family — daughter Andrea Whittemore Goad has been a CFS sufferer since childhood — some serious, privately-funded research is being done at the Whittemore Peterson Institute (WPI) in Reno, Nev.

It is from this institute that the most compelling evidence of a retroviral role in CFS has originated. But recently, it has been refuted by British scientists who claim there was contamination in the tests, skewing the results.

Dr. Judith Mikovits of WPI rejects the British conclusions of contamination. She is very confident that she has found XMRV present in a majority of CFS patients, contending that she has used four methods of analysis against one in Britain.

Bell, the hands-on doctor from New York, told me he believes the virus is present. Yet only when XMRV is irrefutably proven to be to blame can the search for a cure take shape.

These are among issues that will be discussed on April 6-7 at a “state of the science” meeting at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. But there is no expectation that anything very new will be revealed as the debate rages daily on the Internet.

Deborah Waroff, a gifted New York City author, former securities analyst and CFS sufferer for 22 years, tells the story of her first attack this way: “I have no idea how I got it. I had the symptoms of flu. After a week, thinking I was pretty well, I went back to my normal activities like biking and tennis. Then after a week, I was sick again. This repeated several times that summer [1989], until I got to a point where I was never well again. After a little activity, I would collapse, fold up.” Often, Waroff is bedridden, and nothing has improved permanently.

Her symptoms were classic; fever, dizziness, stomach upset, swollen lymph glands and frequent headaches. She developed cognitive problems such as putting the wrong words in sentences, known as dysphasia.

Waroff introduced me to my new friends and their terrible witness to suffering, abandonment and medical indifference. Their families break up, their spouses and lovers drift off. Infected parents worry for their children. One correspondent told me that they are the “unburied dead.” Others said they were “living in coffins.”

They have no celebrity spokesperson. They have no Washington lobby fighting for research dollars. They have no hope that a cure is just around the corner; and little confidence that government research organizations are trying hard enough, if at all, to find one. To know them is to peer into hell. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate



Nuclear Still the Best Power for a Great Future

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For 40 years I've written about nuclear power, defended it and believed, as I still do, that it offers the best signpost to a great future, to what Churchill called the 'sunlit uplands' — in short, to utopia.

I regard electricity as one of mankind's great achievements, saving people from the menial, painful drudgery that marks daily existence without it. Growing up in Africa, I'd see men and women walking miles, many miles, barefoot across the savanna, looking for a few pieces of wood to burn for cooking and hot water.

Electricity, I've believed for these four decades, is assured for thousands of years through nuclear. With advanced breeder reactors and with the energy stored in weapons plutonium, it comes close to perpetual motion: So much energy from so little fuel.

The alternative is to burn up the Earth, fossil fuel by fossil fuel, until we are searching, like the people of the African savanna, for something that is left to burn.

Wind and solar are defined by their geography and limited by their scattered nature. Their place at the table is assured but not dominant. Industrial societies need large, centralized energy sources.

Yet a nuclear tragedy of almost immeasurable proportions is unfolding in Japan. The sum of all the fears about nuclear is being realized. Hades and Poseidon have joined to cut nuclear down.

Do disasters, like the Japanese nuclear one, really kill technologies? Mostly, obsolescence does that, but their demise can be accelerated by a last huge mishap.

While the Hindenburg disaster at Lakehurst, N.J., in 1937 didn't end lighter-than-air aircraft for passenger travel, it drew the curtains: Fixed-wing airplanes were doing a better job. The Concorde supersonic jet didn't leave the skies because of a fatal accident at Paris-Charles De Gaulle Airport in 2000, but it did make the Concorde's planned retirement immediate.

Conversely, Titanic's sinking in 1912 didn't put an end to ocean liners: They got safer. Throughout the 19th century boilers were constantly blowing up, not the least on the stern-wheelers plying the Mississippi. Boats kept working and the technology — primarily safety valves — got better. Bad technologies are replaced by safer ones and good ones with flaws were improved upon.

That is the history of boats, cars, planes and, yes, resoundingly yes, of nuclear power.

After the Three Mile Island disaster in 1979, a new word, "passive," began to dominate reactor design and construction, but maybe too late for the General Electric Mark 1 boiling water reactors ordered so long ago. Passive, as it sounds, is a design in which cooling pumps are not as important. The idea is to depend more on gravity feeds and convective cooling. These are featured in newer designs, and there has been some back-fitting. Things were moving in the right direction, but not fast enough.

The story of the reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi site is a story of success and failure. They were designed 40 years ago to meet what in advanced design is known as a "maximum" credible accident. That was, in that location, an earthquake of a magnitude which had never occurred there. Excluded from this calculation of credible — i.e. it could happen — was the tsunami.

That exceeded the imagination of catastrophe to that point in time. Within the credible design envelope, the plants performed flawlessly, just as they were supposed to: The plants shut down; the emergency cooling pumps started up in fractions of a second; and when they failed, batteries took over. The problem was the tsunami destroyed the diesel generators, and the whole sequence of disaster began.

The opponents of nuclear power — and they have been pathological in opposition for more than 40 years — have their footwear on and are ready to dance on the grave of nuclear. They might want to unlace and take a seat: Nuclear power does not have an alternative.

Big demand for new energy (ideally carbon-free energy) around the globe, and especially in India and China, can't be satisfied without nuclear. Abundance of natural gas in the United States already has reduced the demand for new nuclear reactors to four or five plants. We'll be OK for a while. –– For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 

When the Environmental Remedy Is the Problem

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In the Dr. Dolittle children’s books, written by Hugh Lofting, there appears a strange creature called the pushmi-pullyu. It is a gazelle-unicorn cross with two heads (one of each) at opposite ends of its body. Push-pull is its problem.

One might have thought that the lovable creature, featured in two movie versions of the classic series, might have been interred with it inventor. Alas, no. It has been seen around the White House, haunting many of President Obama’s policies — stimulate and cut; withdraw and fight on (Afghanistan); propose and abandon (Guantanamo); and not least the mixed signals he sends on energy, especially nuclear energy.

Obama often endorses nuclear power, but he has frustrated its development in the United States, and wasted $10 billion, by reversing longstanding U.S. policy at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. After exhaustive scientific analysis, and some of the best civil engineering on earth, he came out against Yucca in his presidential campaign. The nuclear waste repository is being abandoned without an alternative site. Not having one makes nuclear a harder sell to the public.

Now there is fear throughout the electric industry that the energy-loving administration is about to deal a body blow to the energy generators.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is about to issue a rule that would force more than 400 hundred electric-generating plants, along with other industrial entities, which use river, bay or ocean water for cooling, to abandon decades-old practices and build expensive, unsightly cooling towers. The nuclear operators, in particular, feel vulnerable because environmentalists often attack nuclear power in roundabout ways.

The legal challenge to using river and bay water goes back to the Clean Water Act of 1972, as amended, which, in the event of industrial use of water for cooling demands the use of “best available technology” to reduce the impact marine life, especially fish.

EPA is on the threshold, somewhat delayed, of publishing new regulations which it is believed will force nuclear power plants using once-through cooling to abandon it and install cooling towers. Pressure on the agency to revisit the seemingly settled, once-through practice in plants has come as a result of pressure from the Waterkeeper Alliance, Riverkeeper and other water-use advocacy groups.

According to the Nuclear Energy Institute, a lobbying group for nuclear power, it would cost $95 billion to build all the requested cooling towers.

Nuclear groups feel they are most vulnerable because of the longstanding opposition to nuclear power by many environmental groups. If the economics of the times preclude backfitting many cooling towers, the threat that new plants will be forced backward is very real.

But some observers believe that the defenders of waterways may be hoisted this time on their own petard.

Cooling towers are those giant structures of the kind shown around the world at the time of the Three Mile Island accident. They are also employed by other power plants, mostly coal-burners. And they are very old technology.

Over the decades, the engineering of water intakes has evolved from a simple, large pipe with a screen on it to complex layers of baffles and other devices to keep fish in the main stream of a river and away from away from the intakes. Other devices involve lights, music, and a conveyor which returns the fish to their habitat in buckets on a wheel. Another solution is to sink wells under the surface of the water, pumping only water which has been screened naturally by the bottom of the waterway and is free of fish and most microbial life.

In short “best available technology” may now be at the intake, not in the towers which embody technology dating from the 1920s.

Also, towers present an environmental problem. In their vapor clouds they distribute all the impurities that might be in the water, including heavy concentrations of salt. At the Indian Point nuclear plant on the Hudson River in New York, the plumes the proposed cooling towers will contain some sea salt and river impurities, the operators claim. Worse the operators claim, the visual impact on the beautiful Hudson Valley will be unacceptable.

There is an irony here: For a long time, the cry “not in my backyard” belonged to the environmentalists. Now it can be heard from local communities, like Buchanan, near the Indian Point nuclear plant.

The worm may be turning; but nonetheless, the utilities fear EPA and the years of litigation and expense which is at hand. – For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 

A Wake-Up Call for Public Broadcasting

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The U.S. House of Representatives, in an act of retribution that is vicious, punitive and crass, voted to eliminate the modest funding provided to public broadcasting through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB).

The $430 million in federal funding for public broadcasting is somewhat less than the $500 million purportedly spent by the Pentagon on military bands. Like Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries, the House has ruled that everything must go.

The cut would be another thread pulled out of the tapestry of our national culture. Without public broadcasting, MSNBC and Fox will set the tone for a generation or more; Twitter will set our thought processes. Already dispassionate news is in retreat.

Fortunately, Republican leaders rewrote the House bill because they knew it would never sail in the Senate, where Democrats hold a majority. The cleansed version didn’t whack CPB funding but instead met the goals of deficit hawks by cutting other spending.

Let me state that I produce and host “White House Chronicle,” a Washington talk show that airs on a number of Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) stations. I offer my television show free of charge to all stations. I pay for the program's closed-captioning, and pay PBS to put it on its satellite.

The action of the House will, if anything, benefit independent producers such as myself, Dennis Wholey and Rick Steves. Our product, for which we find the funding, possibly could be more acceptable to the stations than expensive programming like “Frontline,” “Nova” and the Ken Burns' series.

But I must say that PBS programming, already burdened with reruns and resuscitated British comedies, will be the worse for it. Its promise, never fulfilled, will be dashed.

CPB is the creation of Congress for helping fund the Public Broadcasting Service and National Public Radio. NPR, a ratings behemoth, will survive better. It has a loyal following and has proven that there is a market for down-the-middle news programming.

PBS, unlike NPR, has no central programming function, but instead is a loose confederation of television stations that have different owners. Yet PBS does control the “voice” of PBS television. It does this through programs it supports and sends to the stations on what is called the “hard feed.” You know these as the aforementioned “Frontline” and “Nova,” but they also include “The NewsHour,” “Washington Week with Gwen Ifill,” “Charlie Rose,” “Consider This,” and the heirs to “Masterpiece Theater.”

These programs, unlike mine, are fed to the individual stations in a bundle for which the stations pay. They are produced by well-heeled stations like Boston's WGBH-TV, New York's WNET-TV and Washington's WETA-TV.

Some of these PBS programs have been around a long time — and they show it. Television is a cruel medium and it demands innovation, experimentation and retirement. In commercial television, life is short and death is brutal. Even the Sunday-morning programs go through dramatic iterations. Less so PBS programs.

But the more egregious failure of public broadcasting is there isn’t enough fun in it: There are no high-jinks. If “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” had been offered free of charge to PBS, it probably wouldn't have made it to the coveted world of the hard feed, where tedium and quality are dreadfully mixed in the manager’s minds. I'd like to think my program's originating station, WHUT, and WETA, which carries my program on Sunday mornings, would've picked up something so revolutionary. But PBS itself? No.

In the 1950s, the most staid broadcast entity on earth was the BBC. I worked there as a news film scriptwriter. We could show pictures of blood, but not tell people what it was. Hard to believe, huh? But elsewhere in the corporation, things were moving: Brilliant young people were pouring out of Oxford and Cambridge and setting the Thames on fire with programs like “That Was the Week That Was” with David Frost and “Not Only … But Also” with the comedy team of Dudley Moore and Peter Cook. It was explosive, dramatic, exciting, uninhibited television. The best place to be in the evening was in front of your television set.

Maybe the brush with Congress will be good for the managers of PBS, and they'll lift up their skirts a bit, as the BBC ­– that old matron — did in the 1960s.

Public broadcasting can save itself, but not with “The Lawrence Welk Show” or that tired, old British show, “Are You Being Served?” – For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 

The Government Pulls Better than It Pushes

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Anyone who knows anything about railroads knows pulling is better than pushing. If you want to change the world, pull, don't push. This is especially true in the introduction of new technology.

Sadly, we are politically better at pushing than pulling. Congress, in particular, feels it is well-equipped to push and poorly equipped to pull. Its favored tool for pushing is the tax incentive. This is a subsidy in disguise, designed to propel a technology into the market.

It is the driving dynamic behind today's world of ethanol, solar, wind and the much-anticipated, smart electric grid. Pushing is good, if you understand that it is also inefficient. It hears the market imperfectly and, as a result, begs for unending government indulgence.

If the government is to have a role in the market of inventions, and in today's world it is obliged to, make it the customer not the inventor, hatchery manager or midwife. Let it pull and reward the winner not the wannabes.

A random sampling of technology that the government pulled into the market place:

·         The supercomputer. In 1955 Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb, railed in now declassified documents about the inadequacy of “computing machines.” To achieve this goal, the national weapons labs bought computers, the bigger the better, sight unseen.

·         The Internet. This was invented to safeguard communications, not because it was a good idea that might find a market. Classic pull over push.

·         The aeroderivative turbine. This machine has revolutionized the burning of natural gas by electric utilities; but its genesis–its pull–came from the need for higher temperatures in fighter jet engines.

The pattern, of course, is clear. When the military is the customer, the puller, all the parts of the chain of invention come into play: private industry, academia and suppliers of components.

A new opportunity is at hand for the government to pull a technology into the market and strengthen the national defense, in military and civilian dimensions. The product is the small modular reactor. There is wide agreement that it is a good idea, but it looks set to be taken over by the push people, with all the known waste and inefficiency. Already, the designs are circulating along with calculations of how much government push is needed. Heaven forbid.

On the shelf there already exist many small reactor designs, some military and some civilian. In 1959 the government built a nuclear-powered, civilian ship called the NS Savannah. It used a safe, small reactor that has been decommissioned long since, but which is a starting point.

Another reactor was designed and built for a West German, nuclear-powered, trade and research ship called the Otto Hahn. The contractor was the American nuclear company Babcock & Wilcox.

Babcock has emerged and is a contender for the small reactor. Problem is that civilian nuclear culture is now mired in push, i.e. money from the government. Money for investigating, not delivering.

Yet there is a military need here and now that becomes more urgent all the time. The military needs a reactor that can provide power on forward bases: Diesel is expensive and depends on long, vulnerable supply lines.

We know how to make small nuclear reactors already, both civilian and military. Why don't we do it?

The USS Enterprise–one of the greatest examples of naval engineering ever–has eight small reactors on board. Other ships and submarines of the nuclear Navy have two reactors each.

We should shelve the idea of loan guarantees and build a small reactor, initially for new military use on bases, forward and otherwise.

For 40 years I've been asking why haven't we learned more from the Navy about small reactors? They work so well.

When James R. Schlesinger was chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, he said it was an excellent question. So I took it to the legendary Adm. Hyman G. Rickover, whose attitude was that the Navy had disclosed enough in handing over the light water technology in the Shippingport reactor in Pennsylvania.

The truth is the Navy is reluctant to get embroiled in what it sees as the civilian nuclear swamp, where their derivative reactors would be examined in licensing proceedings and subjected to scrutiny by anti-nuclear groups like the Union of Concerned Scientists. – For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 

 

 

Stand Up to NIMBY — and Create Jobs

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In Britain, they call it “DADA.” It means Decide. Announce. Defend. Abandon.

In America we call it “NIMBY” — “not in my back yard.”

It applies to all kinds of infrastructure construction, from airports to roads. But it is electric and gas utilities that feel the brunt of local opposition.

These localized forces of “no” have caused the buildup of a substantial backlog of infrastructure projects, not only for sexy green-energy technologies but also for the traditional needs of energy production and distribution — pipelines, power lines, replacement of aging equipment and the construction of new facilities to meet new loads and move the energy infrastructure into the 21st century.

It also includes old-fashioned technology — meters, switches, transformers — to get new green electricity to the consumer.

A new study, from a group advocating upgrading energy facilities, says the pent-up need for utilities to start these projects is so great that if the impediments can be dealt with, 250,000 jobs can be created almost immediately, without action from Congress or a raid on the federal treasury.

The group, Build America Now, is headed by a veteran utility consultant Steven Mitnick, who has advised the governor of New York, headed his own electric transmission company, and was a senior strategist in the electric and gas practice of McKinsey & Co., the consulting firm.

According to Mitnick, the backlog buildup in the utility sector could be a bonanza for the Obama administration. He calculates that if the Gulliver of energy projects can be freed from the Lilliputian ties of local regulatory opposition, unemployment would be reduced by two-tenths of 1 percent. Not inconsiderable.

Mitnick told me the beauty of pushing these utility projects is that they would be financed by the utilities and “they really are shovel-ready.” Whereas Obama’s much-discussed green jobs will one day pay off, Mitnick believes these more traditional jobs — which he calls “backbone” jobs — are in the starter’s gate.

The study provides lists of utilities and gas companies and their projects that stretch across the energy field. In essence, Mitnick is saying that there are jobs in energy here and now and that they deserve a political shove, especially at the state level.

Here are some examples:

•In Minnesota, five transmission lines have been proposed, creating 7,800 jobs.

•In New Jersey, Spectra Energy has proposed to build a gas pipeline, creating 700 new jobs.

•In Texas, Panda Energy is building a power plant using natural gas, creating 500 jobs.

•In Colorado, Xcel Energy is retiring some coal-fired plants, installing pollution-control equipment in others and building new natural gas plants, creating 1,254 jobs.

The biggest job growth by far is associated with shale gas in the states of New York, Pennsylvania and West Virginia: a whopping 165,000 jobs.

When I asked Mitnick why these projects and others have been allowed to back up, he calculated that naysayers, the NIMBY folk, had swarmed state regulators for years, forcing the companies into defensive inaction.

But the midterm elections may have changed all that.

“Governors and state legislators were elected to put job-creation and economic development as priority No. 1,” Mitnick said. Therefore, in the new climate, opponents of growth can be reasoned with or sidestepped when jobs are at stake.

“The governors simply need to get the word out to state regulators that the world has changed and regulators need to make job-creation and economic growth part of the equation,” Mitnick said.

So it is back to the future, according to Mitnick, who taught economics at Georgetown University early in his career.

“Throughout the 20th century, utilities and energy companies were engines of growth because they could efficiently finance infrastructure growth,” he said.

Will an explosion of energy infrastructure jobs push up utility bills? Not much, Mitnick said, because most of an energy bill is for fuel and taxes. Besides, there would be an efficiency premium for the consumer, he added.

The idea here is not that it is green vs. brown, but now vs. later.

Israel Set To Join the Rich Countries’ Club

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From Israel, there is good news and bad news.

The good news – and it is huge – is that Israel will soon be awash in natural gas. Gas discovered on the country’s outer continental shelf will turn the country from being hydrocarbon-deprived to being a net exporter.

Indeed, Israel is set to become so rich that it is laying the groundwork for creating a sovereign wealth fund for overseas investments in order to protect the country from inflation and the shekel from getting too strong.

The bad news is that with Hezbollah poised to control Lebanon’s government, Iran has de facto arrived on Israel’s northern border. Even without an Iranian nuclear weapon, this is a grave deterioration in Israel’s security.

Already Lebanon has asked the United Nations to guarantee that Israel does not violate the integrity of Lebanon’s outer continental shelf, where Iran plans to help Lebanon drill for gas.

Geology is about to change the political geography of the world’s most combustible neighborhood.

The two huge gas discoveries are in the Tamar and Leviathan fields. Taken together, the gas reserves are estimated at 26 trillion cubic feet or 10 times larger than Britain’s North Sea discoveries.

Since its creation in 1948, Israel has drilled on land for oil and gas with very little success. While the Arab Gulf countries have found and produced massive quantities of oil and gas, Israel has scrounged in the international markets for its hydrocarbons, including coal. But its isolation has made this difficult and expensive.

In recent years, Israel has bought gas from Egypt. Now Egypt will lose its good customer.

Turkey, Israel’s only Moslem friend until the botched seizure of a humanitarian ship bound for blockaded Gaza, will be affected too. There were plans for a pipeline that would carry gas from Azerbaijan across Turkey and undersea to Israel. That economic boost will not go to Turkey, but instead will probably go to Greece and Greek Cyprus. There have been preliminary discussions between Israel and Greece about shipping gas through Greece–by an undersea pipeline or a liquefied natural gas train–as an entry point into Europe.

Cyprus is a possible export-staging destination, as the Leviathan field, 86 miles off the Israeli coast, is nearby. But Turkish Cyprus, on the north side of the island, is not onboard.

The Tamar field is 50 miles off the Israeli coast and there are two smaller fields, potentially subject to claim by a free Gaza or a Palestinian state.

The gas will change Israel itself. Its defense force will have to defend the gas installations and the miles of pipes, pumps and other infrastructure. Israel has no domestic heating market, so all the new gas bounty will go to electric generation. The government hopes to make Israel the first 100-percent electric car country and the new gas will speed that transformation.

Credit for the Eastern Mediterranean gas discoveries goes to Houston-based Noble Energy. It is the technical leader in a consortium of Israeli companies. Now the world wants in before a whiff of the new gas has come onshore. Gazprom, Russia’s gas behemoth is keen to have a piece as an investment and to protect its European markets.

The Israeli government expects an influx of U.S. and European companies to supply piping, pumps, controllers and construction equipment and materials. It is not just private companies that are salivating: The Jerusalem government has just passed a law to tax gas profits at 62 percent.

Israel’s hostile neighbors want in too. The Eastern Mediterranean is in play in an area where play is rough.

 

 

 

Oil Prices Could Affect Presidential Politics

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Like death and taxes, the price if oil is always with us. And like taxes, it may be President Obama’s worst nightmare at election time next year.

Among forecasters, there is a sharp division between those who see an inexorable rise in the price of oil and those who believe it will stabilize about where it is now.

The hawks see gasoline streaking ahead to $4-a-gallon this year and $5-a-gallon in 2012.

Others say demand will collapse and it won’t go that high. The federal Energy Information Administration is very conservative in its forecasts and it gives very high prices only a 10-percent chance of coming about.

Adding to the confusion is a nasty little spat between the International Energy Agency in Paris and the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries over price, inventory and what OPEC calls “technical factors,” such as pipelines down for repair or the loss of the Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico last April 20.

The IEA is saying that OPEC is keeping its production quotas low to jack up the price—currently just under $90 a barrel and the highest grade Brent crude from the North Sea as high as $99 a barrel—and it is endangering the global recovery with its actions.

But OPEC Secretary General Abdalla Salem el-Badri has taken issue with the IEA for roiling the markets with weak data and speculation. “Supplying the world’s media with unrealistic assumptions and forecasts will serve only to confuse matters and create unnecessary fear in the markets,” he said.
OPEC, which drastically cut back its targets for production in 2008 with the collapse of the global economy, has, in fact, increased its production by 2.3 million barrels a day while formally not changing its declared targets. OPEC controls about 42 percent of the world’s oil production.

What is certain is that world is slurping up more oil than ever. The latest IEA prediction is that daily consumption is increasing and will reach 89.1 million barrels a day as the recovery proceeds. Emerging markets and China in particular are held responsible for the surge, though that could change if Beijing takes steps to slow its booming economy.

With the exception of two of the savants of the oil industry, the legendary T. Boone Pickens and former Shell Oil Company chief John Hofmeister, comment in the United States has been muted. When asked why the price of oil was so high despite the recession, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs brushed aside the question, recommending the reporter ask the secretary of the Department of Energy, a physicist who has not spoken on oil pricing. Jack Gerard, president of the American Petroleum Institute, did not offer an explanation when he was asked the same question at a meeting in Washington.

The fact is that the price of oil is not determined only by simple supply and demand but by complex premiums and market sensitivities. It is a market that is roiled by wars and rumors of wars and, because oil was the first truly globalized commodity, the premiums can have their genesis far from the futures markets of New York and London.

Uncertainty in Russia, turmoil in Central Asia, the ongoing suspense of Iran’s nuclear plans and even corrosion in the Trans Alaska Pipeline System are cranked into the price. No wonder so many hedge funds are involved in oil. Instability is mothers’ milk to hedge funds.

One way or another, two things stand out: The chances are that the summer- driving season will put pressure on gasoline prices this year, after an extremely cold winter all over the Northern Hemisphere. The conservative (10-percent chance of happening) scenario by the federal Energy Information Administration says $4-a-gallon gas would come at the end of the summer.

The second reality is that the world thirst for oil has not been slaked; as the world prospers, the greater that thirst.

In 1974, the heads of 23 democracies lost their jobs because of surging energy prices. Obama, beware.

 

WikiLeaks and Journalism Lore

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“Publish and be damned,” the Duke of Wellington told the courtesan Harriette Wilson, who threatened to publish her memoirs and the general’s love letters in 1825.

In challenging Wilson, Wellington gave publishers and journalists a rallying cry that has echoed down through the years.

The irony here is that “The Iron Duke” despised anything that suggested opening up to the people: Indeed, he may have been history’s greatest elitist. He is not likely to have endorsed the dumping of hundreds of thousands of classified diplomatic dispatches by WikiLeaks. As for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, Wellington would have had him shot or maybe hanged for better effect.

Yet Wellington gave us the famous phrase and, by and large, it has been a serviceable rule for journalism.

Publications that have sought to censor themselves—sometimes out of fear and sometimes for political reasons–have paid a high price. In 1963, the Profumo affair nearly brought down the Conservative government in Britain. But The Sunday Mirror, which had learned that war minister John Profumo was sharing the favors of party girl Christine Keeler with the Soviet naval attaché and a few others to boot, did not publish for fear of libel.

In the end the scandal leaked out in the United States, and the newspaper was left looking very foolish. I know because I was working at The Sunday Mirror.

A few decades later, Newsweek sat on the Monica Lewinsky–Bill Clinton scandal and inadvertently boosted the fortunes of Matt Drudge.

It is easier to say “publish and be damned” about a sex scandal involving public figures than it is about national and international security, which is orders of magnitude more difficult.

Is WikiLeaks doing a public service in posting hundreds of thousands of classified diplomatic dispatches on the Web and hand-feeding them to five major news outlets, The New York Times, Le Monde, The Guardian, El Pais and Der Spiegel? Or is Assange indulging in a grand act of anti-Americanism; or an equally grand act of anarchy, using technology in furtherance of the petulance of one man and his small band of accomplices?

The measurable good is slight. It may be confined to improved computer security, itself lamentable.

The evil is ongoing and will take years to assess. The first casualty will be in the quality of information sent back from the field to Washington: It will be sanitized, bowdlerized and neutered. The free exchange of ideas and information is compromised. The integrity of diplomatic communications cannot be taken for granted in future.

Then there are those, uncountable, whose careers have been ended because they were friends of the United States; not spies, just friends.

During the first tranche of leaks, I was the guest of the U.S. ambassador in a small country. Although there was nothing incriminating released, our diplomats suffered acute embarrassment and wondered how difficult their jobs would be in the future.

The gravest category is where vicious regimes are exploiting the WikiLeaks information to punish their political enemies: Step forward Robert Mugabe, the savage and ruthless dictator in Zimbabwe who has trashed what was once the jewel of Africa. He has seized on meetings his political rival Morgan Tsvangira held with Western diplomats, seeking to save the people of Zimbabwe from the predations of Mugabe and his band of thugs.

“Treason”cries Mugabe, who is as promiscuous in accusing his enemies of treason as was Henry VIII.

Relying on a law from the colonial days, Mugabe has appointed a commission to rule on whether Tsvangirai should face trial for treason. He has also picked out negative comments about Tsvangirai from various American dispatches to vilify his political rival.

Assange knew exactly what he was doing because he provided early access to his data dump to the five most reputable news organizations he knew. Clearly he hoped they would treat the material gingerly, as they have.

In so doing Assange must have hoped to mitigate the really serious damage–including executions–that might result from his mischief. He was hoping they would save him from the damnation of his own publishing.

Blame Robert Burns for Your New Year’s Hangover

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Most of you are going to drink more than usual on New Year’s Eve. For some of you, it will be the only time you drink in the year; and for accomplished drinkers, well, get a designated driver — and maybe a designated bed. Things can get way out of hand.

Everything is stacked in favor of excess New Year’s Eve. Everything.

There is a long tradition of tippling. Maiden aunts hit the sherry; fathers start on dry martinis, and do not always make it to midnight; and French children are allowed watered wine. Trust the French. Also, you know you do not have to work the next day; although you will be ill-equipped to start implementing New Year’s resolutions, beyond the one never to do it again, or at least not for a year.

That other day of indulgence is March 17: St. Patrick’s Day. Do not confuse it with New Year’s Eve. St. Patrick’s is for the seasoned imbiber not the milquetoast church deacon who says “just the one” and after many flutes of Champagne, has to be helped home. New Year’s belongs not to the Irish but to the Scots. That old reprobate Robert Burns (1759-96) has his fingers all over it. He provided the excuse in a poem, “A Man’s A Man for A’ That” and a poem and song, “Auld Lang Syne.”

After the Act of Union in 1707, merging a reluctant Scotland and England, Scots’ pride was damaged and their language headed for extinction. It was the hard-living Burns who gave them back their pride and some sense of the specialness of Scotland and its clans.

The romantic movement Burns helped to ignite was further developed in the following century, when Queen Victoria showed a special affection for Scotland. She spent so much time at Balmoral Castle that some wag put a sign on Buckingham Palace which read, “This Desirable Residence To Let.” If the Queen, it is argued, had been as fond of Ireland, it might have remained part of the United Kingdom.

Be that as it may, the Scots influenced the English in the celebration of the New Year (known as Hogmanay in Scotland); and the Brits carried the Scots tradition around the world.

Of course, they also carried the native brew of Scotland around the world: Scotch became the ubiquitous drink it is today.

The Scots have always shown admirable dexterity is accommodating their Calvinism with strong drink and hard living. In the 37 years of his life, Burns fathered 14 children, nine of them with his wife, Jean; and he rivaled the English poet Lord Byron in his amorous imperialism. He also had an extravagant regard for New Year and for whisky.

The Scottish romantic movement — apart from getting us soused on Dec. 31– also spread the tradition of “first footing,” said to bring good luck to the first person across the threshold of a Scottish home on Jan. 1. Traditionally this was supposed to be a tall, dark person with a gift of salt. Standards have slipped, alas, and the revelers are more likely to be seeking more drink — or coming round the next day to apologize.

In the bad old days of journalism, when every day was a kind of New Year, there were theories aplenty of how to survive late into the night and to be in shape for the morrow. They include the following:

1. Do not mix grape and grain. Stick to wine or spirits. Do not turn yourself into a cocktail shaker.

2. Start the evening with a glass of milk, or swallow a pat of butter. This slows alcohol absorption.

3. No matter how bad you have been, take two aspirins before bed. That way you will not have to lie to God about reforming. He has heard it all before.

4. In the afternoon, read Dorothy Parker’s delicious short story, “You Were Perfectly Fine.” That should persuade you to see in the New Year in front of the television with a cup of herb tea. Cheers!