White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

We Ask More of Government, but Say We Want Less

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Ready for a little heresy? Here goes: The government we have is about the right size, or a little small, for what it is asked to do.

I call as my first witness the humble banana. In a few short years the Cavendish banana, the variety which we know and love (about 100 billion are consumed annually worldwide), may fail as a crop throughout the banana-producing regions of the world.

That is because Cavendish bananas, which have no useful seeds and are cultivated from clippings, have been infected with the strain of a fungus that nearly wiped out the world’s former top banana, the Gros Michel, or Big Mike, in the 1960s.

But worry not. Somewhere in the sprawling Department of Agriculture, scientists are working to save the American breakfast fruit, at least I hope so.

I call my second witness: the Burmese Python. This invasive rascal – a constrictor that can crush and swallow an alligator – is perpetrating the animal equivalent of genocide in the Florida Everglades. I hope there is a federal program to contain this constrictor before it overcomes its aversion to cold winters or, as the climate continues to warm, it comes sailing up the Potomac River at 6 miles per hour.

The same hope extends to saving honeybees, without which all plant life (except bananas and other clones) will perish. We also need to save the dwindling bat population, to stop the Asian carp from swimming up the Mississippi River and threatening the Great Lakes. And we need federal sleuths to track down the salmonella infection in eggs and punish the farmers who produced them.

We expect the federal government to be omnipotent and omnipresent. We were shattered to learn, for example, that the Feds had no way of sealing the runaway oil well in the Gulf of Mexico. We also want the government to have limitless compassion for the flood victims in Pakistan and the hurricane survivors in Haiti.

These are just some of the small-scale problems, not the big ones of war and peace, of welfare and Obamacare. But they are among a myriad of things we want done by our government. Now. Fast.

Recently I have become interested in so-called orphan diseases. These are the cripplers and killers that have no powerful lobbies fighting for federal research dollars, and have failed to excite the pharmaceutical industry because there is unlikely to be a cure in a pill. Desperately, those who suffer from these diseases call on the government to do the research and find a cure.

But here is another problem: not enough competition in the government. While the National Institutes of Health is criticized for picking winners and losers for research dollars, it is the only game in town. The solution would be a competing institution.

In the world of energy and nuclear weaponry, there are many competing government laboratories, including the three large federal weapons labs: Los Alamos, Sandia and Lawrence Livermore. They compete, they overlap, sometimes they duplicate, but they provide a kind of defense in depth against scientific favoritism.

Pluralism and diversity have a place in government, even if the critics cry “waste.”

Some years ago at an Aspen Institute meeting, the economist Irwin Stelzer, a passionate free-marketer, clashed with James Schlesinger, an economist, historian and former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, secretary of defense and secretary of energy. Stelzer’s argument was that the private sector was better and more efficient at research.

Brilliant as Stelzer is (I have known both men for about 40 years), that round went to Schlesinger who listed effortlessly more than a dozen government-funded inventions, from the Internet to the aero-derivative gas turbine. He made the case for government sufficiently well-funded to do the job.

My case is less sophisticated. We keep asking more of government even while we say we want less.

Even the government has not been able to invent a plausible free lunch. So, pay up.

On Tax Cuts, GOP Should Think like Business

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Mythology in Washington holds that when it comes to economics, Republicans know best. The root of this myth is another myth, which goes like this: When it comes to business, especially small business, Republicans know best.

All of this doesn’t matter until you get to taxes, when the Republicans, buttressed by their mythological understanding of these things, believe they know best.

And what the Republicans believe they know best is that when you cut taxes, everything gets better: Government shrinks, business booms and tax revenues go up.

It’s not that there aren’t shards of truth here; it’s just that everything has to be in the right conjunction to get one or all of these benefits.

Business doesn’t go along with these myths but, like everyone else, it hates paying taxes, so by and large it endorses the Republican position.

The thing is, business believes in a more durable truth: price.

Price means revenue, and business, therefore, believes and practices aggressive pricing. When business needs to exceed the gap between cost and revenue, it increases the price. If the market refuses to pay the price, business exits that market or fails.

Sometimes, however, and increasingly in these hard times, business pulls a con. It lowers or maintains the price, but adds other charges to gain income. The airlines are doing this. The banks make as much or more on fees than they do on consumer loans. Catalog companies do it with “shipping and handling” fees.

Publishers have experimented more with price than most businesses, and their conclusion is to stay on the high side. If the market rejects your high-priced publication, so be it.

I’ve spent a lifetime studying pricing in publishing. All I’ve learned is this: Defend your price.

In London, Rupert Murdoch engaged his Times in a costly price war with Conrad Black’s Daily Telegraph. In the middle of fierce cost-cutting, Murdoch’s camp, with more resources, was triumphant.

Cheap papers were selling.

But when it was all over, the relative positions of the publications had not changed by much and millions of British pounds had been lost. The hope had been that the victor, Murdoch’s papers, would gain so many more readers that they could make up the circulation revenue losses with higher advertising rates. It didn’t work.

Taxes are different, the GOP has averred. Not really. If they’re too high, they will stifle business, choke enterprise and cause businesses to go offshore. Clearly, marginal rates that exceed some magic number (well south of 50 percent) would stifle business.

At one point after World War II, they reached 90 percent in Britain with disastrous results and a few comical ones. The titled, moneyed families fled to Kenya and Rhodesia and the show-business types took up residence in Switzerland. Actor David Niven and playwright Noel Coward were among these.

Now that the tax cuts enacted in the early days of the George W. Bush administration are about to expire, it may behoove us to examine these with a question: What would business do? Things looked pretty bright when these cuts were enacted with the prospect of years of surpluses. But that was before 9-11, two big wars and a recession.

Therefore, if you looked at the tax issue from a boardroom point of view, the unanimous decision would be to go for the revenue and review the result later. Boardroom-loving Republicans ought to know this.

In business, they laugh at people who believe that lower prices automatically will produce compensating revenue. The joke goes something like losing a little on everything and making up with volume.

Many years ago, I had lunch with George Will and Trent Lott. All three of us were speakers at the American Petroleum Institute’s annual meeting in Houston. At the time, Lott and Will agreed that we were an under-taxed country, given the demands on government.

Back then, Republicans thought like business people.

 

Where Are the Dog Days of Yesteryear?

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The Greeks started the whole thing by calling sultry summer weather “Dog Days,” blaming it on the brightest star in the sky besides the Sun, Sirius, also known as the Dog Star. But it was the Romans who really took it seriously: They sacrificed brown dogs to appease the rage of Sirius and ameliorate the weather.

Now, could it be that the Dog Days in Washington are a thing of the past?

The weather has been foul enough, but where is the cessation of news? Where are the soft, feature articles masquerading as news that marked the metaphorical Dog Days? Where are the lesser politicians trying to get noticed for bills they have introduced that will died in committee?

It used to be at this time of year, when Congress was preparing for its long summer recess, things just slowed down, practically flat-lined. Washington emptied; the traffic thinned; no reservations were needed in restaurants; and clubs, like the Metropolitan and the Cosmos, opened their doors to non-members.

While there has been some summer flight, the journalistic and political intensity continues apace. Not only is this an election year, but the whole structure of political reporting has been revolutionized.

In a time of journalistic agony in most publications, political reporting is booming, fed by new technologies and cable news. Well, that is on the surface; out of sight, the furnace is fed by money, lobbying money.

If you want Congress to pass legislation favorable to your interests, or not to pass something unfavorable, then you hire a slew of lobbyists. They, in turn, place “advocacy” ads and the political media are off to the races. These ads appear on air, on line, on paper and on our doorsteps. Some media outlets charge hefty subscription fees, like Congressional Quarterly and National Journal, others are given away. But all seek and promise to lift the veil of secrecy in Washington.

The reporters—for Roll Call, The Hill, The Daily Caller, and hundreds of blogs clustered around publications and television channels, mainstream newspapers and wire services–slice, dice, puree, chop, blend, mix, pound, julienne, mince, whip and, sometimes, flavor the news. But mostly they feed the rapacious, 24-hour news cycle by blowing the slightest slip of the tongue, the smallest infraction of decorum, the inadvertent utterance into national events.

The remarkable new entry in the field is Politico, which exploded on the scene with the considerable fortune of Robert Allbritton, chairman and chief executive officer of Allbritton Communications, which owns television stations in Washington and elsewhere. As an example of innovative multi-platform publishing, it is an exemplar.

The impact in the surge in political reporting across the board is questionable: too many peas of news in mattresses of words. There is no time to investigate, and none to ponder. Better to be first and wrong than second and right.

One result of the swelling ranks of political reporter is politicians have clammed up. It is unwise for them to say anything that has not been vetted by their staffs. Hence, their infatuation with social media.

Here in high summer, one realizes that the glorious lazy, hazy Dog Days are a thing of the past; a time to do that interview you had put off, to try to be little more creative with your writing, to talk the bureau chief or editor into an off-beat story. No, instead, hundreds of political reporters are looking for something, anything, to fill today’s void. Was a congressman seen with a pretty woman (Damn, it is his daughter!)? Did a senator misspell something on her Facebook page?

It is this frenzy for faux news that brought us stories like Acorn, Shirley Sherrod, and the endless sightings of President Obama with known socialists? Whew!

Bring back the ancient Dog Days, but spare the brown dogs.

Obama and Cameron: Pretending To Be Pals

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I cannot look at British Prime Minister David Cameron without feeling that he has been made from an Identi-Kit, and that they just missed the perfect likeness. The hair is from a Vidal Sassoon catalogue; the face from an exhibition of Dutch masters; and the body from, well, the ranks of the well-fed but not fat.

This sense that Cameron is a made-up man came back to me in the East Room, when President Barack Obama welcomed him to the White House as both men gave their first joint press conference since the prime minister was elected.

With just four questions from pre-selected reporters, it is stretching it to call these events press conferences; and the lack of enthusiasm for the format was shown by the empty media seats.

Anyway, the purpose of the event was to convince the media that Cameron and Obama are on the same page of the hymnal. Everybody knows they are not. They are divided by four not-unsubstantial issues.

They tried hard to sound like chums. They wore almost identical dark suits and blue ties. They called each other by their first names: It was “David” this and “Barack” that.

There has been a steady growth of informality at the White House, but this was a new mile post. One British reporter -presumably for the benefit of his American colleagues -actually addressed Cameron as “Mr. Prime Minister.” That is a form of address peculiarly American and never heard around the British Parliament. The British prefer to believe that a title determines the form of address. So it is simply, “Prime Minister, could you tell us …”

Cameron tried to set the stage by writing an article that appeared that morning in the Wall Street Journal. In it, he redefined the “special relationship” and called for the British to be less sentimental about it.

Underlining their differences, Cameron and Obama share something that is not helpful: neither of them is an Atlanticist.

Unlike many British Conservatives, Cameron has not been seduced by the United States. He did not spend a year at a U.S. university and has not peppered his talk with mention of the American example.

Likewise, Obama is one of the least Eurocentric of American presidents. He, too, did not spend time at a British university, as did Bill Clinton. He even offended many by banishing a bust of Winston Churchill from the Oval Office.

We do not know whether the public coziness extended into two days of talks between Obama and Cameron, but the policy differences are wide.

First, there is the global economy. Obama and his advisers believe too much austerity now will lead to a second recession and catastrophic deflation. So much so that Obama wrote to his partners in the G8 urging them to stimulate, not strangle, their economies.

But Cameron, keenly aware of the fate of Greece and the downgrading of Irish debt, has put forward an austerity budget and asked his departments to come up with possible cuts in staff and expenditures of 25 and 40 per cent, respectively. The real pain will not be felt until the cutting begins in the fall.

Second, there is the delicate matter of BP. Obama does not mind if the oil giant is squeezed so much over the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico that it has to be sold off to, say, an American company. Cameron minds a lot.

Then there is the release of Abdel Baset al-Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber, by the Scottish government. Americans want an inquiry into whether there was a deal to release al-Megrahi to protect British business interests in Libya, possibly involving BP. Cameron, who opposed the release at the time, thinks it is a closed issue. But he has already been pressured into a review.

Finally there is the case of Gary McKinnon, the computer genius with Asperger’s syndrome, who hacked into Pentagon and NASA computers after 9/11. The United States wants him extradited for trial here and Cameron is under pressure on grounds of humanitarianism and sovereignty not to oblige. Obama says it is a legal not presidential matter; Cameron raised it anyway.

His “special relationship” might not be Obama’s cup of tea.


Batteries Are the Shocking Truth about Electric Cars

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Can white elephants come in green?

President Barack Obama flew to Holland, Mich., on Thursday to attend groundbreaking ceremonies for a new lithium-ion battery plant, which the White House advertised as an example of federal stimulus grants at work and a gateway to a clean-energy future.

Great stuff — if you don’t look too hard.

Indeed, the Holland plant, effusively hailed by Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm as creating 300 jobs, and 62,000 “green” jobs down the road, will produce batteries in America.

But Compact Power Inc., which received $151 million from a federal stimulus program to open the $303 million plant, isn’t American and neither is its technology: It’s a subsidiary of the giant South Korean conglomerate LG Chem, and its technology is Asian.

Also that age-old bugaboo for electric cars — range and battery life — is still a work in progress. General Motors says its Chevy Volt will go up to 40 miles on a single charge and will have a range-extending, gasoline-assist feature. Nissan’s fully electric car, the Leaf, will have a 100-mile range. Ditto Ford’s electric Focus. Much depends on driving conditions.

Lithium-ion batteries are way ahead of traditional lead-acid batteries in power and weight, but they aren’t perfect. As yet, the best battery is far from being a competitor for a tank of gasoline.

There’s a back story here. The most obvious narrative is the need to create jobs in Michigan, and the hope is that electric vehicles will bolster car production there.

More obscure is the administration’s belief that a brave, new clean-energy America can produce jobs and reduce the output of greenhouse gases. In Obamaland, windmills will turn silently through the night, while millions of fully electric cars get their batteries topped up in driveways and garages.

A green and pleasant land is just a few million batteries away and, by Jove, the Department of Energy is on the job. It has $2.4 million to spend on electric car infrastructure. The department is helping to bring on nine battery plants, including the one in Holland. It’s also promoting charging stations.

Some small facts: These batteries are still so expensive (about $16,000 apiece) that any fully electric car, or near so, requires subsidies down the line to get the price down to where ordinary people will buy them in quantity. The only fully electric vehicle on the market today, the Tesla, is a sports car that costs over $100,000 and is aimed at the well-heeled greens of Hollywood.

While official retail prices for the Ford, Nissan and GM models haven’t been announced, estimates are in the range of $30,000 to $35,000. Federal tax credits are likely to trim several thousand dollars for many buyers.

Batteries have stood in the way of electric cars for more than a century. In the early days of motoring, electric cars covered short distances and held promise. But while internal combustion engines revved ahead, batteries languished.

But the dream of an electric car never died, though the batteries frequently did. In the 1970s, the U.S. government spent lavishly on battery research, including lithium and aluminum air batteries. There are dozens of ways to make batteries, but all have their disadvantages: weight, disposability, life, rate of discharge and market indifference.

If you want everything you get today on a car — electric windows, air conditioning, electric seats, multiple lights, highly variable loads and easy refueling and, maybe, towing capacity — you need a hell of a battery

We have, so to speak, been shocked by presidential energy enthusiasm before. Jimmy Carter believed in liquids from coal and launched the ill-fated Synthetic Fuels Corp., and George W. Bush went hog wild over ethanol — and those expectations are being trimmed daily.

I’ll buy a hybrid and wait, if it’s OK with Obama. –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate


 

Cautious Obama is Hurting Future Oil and Electricity Supply

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From somewhere–inside the White House or the Department of Energy–President Obama is getting some pretty awful advice. It’s bad enough that he’s been persuaded that there’s a Nirvana Land of windmills and sunbeams in the future of electricity. But much more gravely in halting drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, he’s committing a fearsome folly.


If exploration and drilling in the Gulf doesn’t resume and gets caught up in punitive new rules, Obama, or his successor, will find the price of gasoline high (probably more than $5 a gallon) and military action against Iran will be proscribed.


It goes like this: After 18 months the supply of replacement oil from the Gulf dries up, due to the normal decline in production from old wells. Very soon, this loss exceeds 1 million barrels a day and begins to increase the world oil price,


World oil production today is 86.5 million barrels per day; of this, the United States gulps down an amazing 20 million barrels per day. This delicate balance, helped by the global recession, keeps the price bouncing between $70 and $80 per barrel.


Worst case is not only do we lose production in the Gulf, but any global upset–such as military action in Iran–will stress this oil production-demand balance further. Result: price rises. Political solution: none.


The folly of the Obama action is that every new hole drilled in deep water is going to be safer-than-safe.


There’s a well-known pattern: Disasters produce an aftermath of safety. The nuclear industry thought it was safe before the Three Mile Island meltdown, but it went back to the drawing board and produced new institutions for safety monitoring and study, as well as revised the very idea of defense in-depth.


The Obama caution is the danger, not the possibility of another spill.


The second energy disaster in the making is with electricity. The Obama administration has signed on to a vague idea, pushed by environmentalists and post-industrial schemers: It goes by the appropriately loose title of “alternative energy.”


In real-world terms, alternative energy can be narrowed to some solar

and wind. In fact, the only mature technology is wind. It works fine when the wind is blowing. The heat wave in the Eastern states in the past week makes the point: The wind doesn’t blow when it’s most needed.


There’s nothing wrong with wind, except that its most passionate advocates often favor it not for its own sake but for what it is not: nuclear power. Paranoia over nuclear power–always the first choice of the world’s utilities, if all things are equal–is a part of the cultural-political landscape in America.


Faced with this, the Obama administration has saddled up two horses and invited the nuclear industry to ride both as they diverge. It has thrown away the $11 billion spent on the first national nuclear-waste repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, even as it has offered loan guarantees for new reactors.


Coming down the pike is a surge, a really huge surge, in electricity demand as plug-in hybrid cars and pure electric cars are deployed.


The plan–if you can call it that–is that the load of new uses will be spread by “smart meters” on the “smart grid,” and this will direct or coerce consumers to charge their cars in the middle of the night.


Fat chance. If consumers were that financially or morally conscious, they’d long since have cut their electric loads and driven smaller cars.


Want to be politically unpopular? Start telling people when they can refuel their cars. That’s known around the Tea Party circuit and elsewhere as government intervention.

Do you take yours with sugar? –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

The Brits to America: No Hard Feelings, Chaps

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Light the candles, fire up the grill, cue the fireworks — a birthday party is in the air. A nation’s birthday. To wit, America’s birthday, 234 and still young!

My friend and colleague Martin Walker, a famous British columnist and author, likes to remind audiences that the Fourth of July is not a time for him to be downcast about the American War of Independence. “I celebrate solid British yeoman farmers taking up arms against a German king and his German mercenaries,” he says.

Quite so.

Historically somewhat accurate, too. Like so many English monarchs, George III was of German descent, in his case Hanoverian. Also, the British administration, short on troops of their own, happily fielded Hessian mercenaries to fight the Colonists.

After the war, these men were demobilized in the states — a British habit that accounted for my paternal grandfather’s taking up involuntary residence in South Africa at the end of the Boer War.

Anyway, Walker isn’t the only Briton in modern times to embrace America and to make a life here — and a good one at that. I, too, am of the British persuasion; and I feel a remote connection to the left-behind Hessians because I live in a Virginia stone house constructed by some of them. They had brought with them skills beyond war-fighting, and applied those skills in building up the nascent nation in which they found themselves immigrants of necessity. By the way, it’s a great house. Danke schon.

There are hundreds of thousands of Brits in America — no one really knows how many because of their differing legal status. They are to be found all over, but are concentrated in southern Florida and Southern California. As Noel Coward wrote, “Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun.” Dallas also is popular; and, for other reasons, New York is well supplied with Brits. If nothing else, they have to be there to oversee the transplantation of their plays to Broadway.

These wandering sons and daughters of Albion are among America’s greatest boosters, led by a coterie of journalists, known without derogatory implications at home as “hacks.” The dean of these was, without doubt, the late Alistair Cooke, who spoke lovingly about America for nearly 60 years in his weekly broadcasts of “Letter From America” for BBC radio.

The late Henry Fairlie lighted the way for British opinion writers in the America. Besides Martin Walker, these now include Gerard Baker; Tina Brown and her husband, Harry Evans; Christopher Hitchens; Andrew Sullivan; and Sebastian Mallaby.

What is it that the British expats so like about their American cousins’ homestead? Probably, it’s the sense of possibility that permeates American life. It’s what has made the word “America” a metaphor for hope, going back to the English poet John Donne in 1595.

And there is mobility. In America, one can lose one’s way in Baltimore and get a fresh start in Albany, Providence, Tampa, St. Paul or any other city. In Britain there is London; and if you lose your place in London, you may never recover.

Also in America, the Brits enjoy a special minority status. We have a terrible sense of superiority, making us immune to insult.

What do the Brits in America complain about? They complain about the lack of pubs and a pub culture; the lack of public transportation; and, above all, the lack of public health care.

And what do we give our hosts in this promised land as a thank-you gift? Well, we don’t whine. In a time when everyone is apologizing for transgressions in history, we’ll be celebrating our defeat this Fourth of July, choking down thin beer and reveling in thick, grilled rib.

Happy Birthday, America. Cheers!

 

The Man Who Was The Economist Dies

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Norman Macrae, who died on June 11 in London at the age of 86, looked into the future and saw it was good. So it should have been. He worked hard to make it so.

Macrae was one of the intellectual giants of latter part of the 20th century, who ceaselessly opposed all forms of collectivism, communism, socialism, statism and group think. But unlike his American contemporary and fellow philosopher of the right, Milton Friedman, Macrae was a journalist; and as such he was influenced by what he saw, as well as what be believed.

One could say that as a philosopher, Macrae was more of a journalist and as a journalist, he was more of a philosopher.

Macrae had unique gifts and found a unique home in which to exercise them, The Economist—a magazine that resolutely calls itself a newspaper. He worked there for just shy of 40 years, and the glove fit the hand perfectly.

Macrae was not the kind of reporter who kicked down doors looking for smoking guns, nor was he likely to waste time and space speculating whether a politician would or should apologize for some slip of the tongue or judgment. Instead Macrae, without pomp, actually tried to find out where the world was going.

He tackled such enormous issues as world health and education, and he found the trends that would change things permanently, far more than posturing politicians could or would do. He predicted the computer workstation, the collapse of communism, and the privatizations of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.

Macrae added ideas to his times, corrected drift and exulted in the human condition. He even coined a few words like “telecommute,” “stagflation,” “intrapreneur” and possibly “privatize.”


In a seminal two-part survey for The Economist, published in September 1962, Macrae noted the economic rise of Japan, enabled by the Japanese way of working in teams. That was a collectivism he embraced. That was also the journalist in Macrae, triumphing over the ideologue.

Macrae came to his hatred of state control honestly: His father was the British consul in Moscow from 1936-38, and he witnessed Stalin’s purges in the embassy compound.

Macrae suffered and benefited from The Economist’s practice of not using bylines. While he was saved from the ranks of celebrity journalists and their airs, he was not known to the world he affected.

For 23 years, Macrae was deputy editor of The Economist. But he was more. He was its, heart, soul and visionary.

It was Macrae who joyously referred to The Economist as the world’s newspaper, which indeed he helped it to become. Macrae was such a giant in a forest of giants that the magazine broke its own rules and gave him occasional bylines.

For a man of the world, Macrae was quintessentially English and quite eccentric. After his beloved wife Janet Kemp died, I was talking to him on the telephone, and he accosted me with this information: “My skillet is broken. You know, there are no ironmongers left in London.”

“That is right, Norman. You railed against first-world countries maintaining obsolete skills and technologies,” I said.

“But, Llewellyn, it is such a small repair; and it is a good skillet. You could probably fix it,” a comment that was followed with a volley of high-pitched laughter.


I said, “I’m not flying to London to fix your skillet.”

The great man conceded: “I suppose not.”

Macrae, a big man physically, was great company. Actually, he was great in many ways.

 

Nuclear Blast from the Past Might Fix Oil Spill

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Steven Chu, the secretary in charge of the Department of Energy, needs to get the agency’s historian on the phone. Then he needs to have a word with the directors of the nation’s three top weapons laboratories: Los Alamos, Sandia and Lawrence Livermore.

A side call should go to the Department of Energy’s office at the Nevada Test Site.

If he had made those calls, Chu, a physicist, might have been less swift to reject the nuclear option on stemming the oil hemorrhage in the Gulf of Mexico. We do not know why the idea of nuclear intervention was rejected out of hand. Was it Chu’s choice or did word come down from the White House that there would be no nuclear blast under the gulf? My guess is that the White House made the call.

Although the Soviets claimed they used a nuclear blast to tame an out-of-control gas well that burned for three years, the real expertise in using nuclear detonations for civil engineering resides in the DOE.

From 1958-73, the Atomic Energy Commission—later subsumed into the DOE —had a very active civil engineering program called Operation Plowshare. The program grew out of the national exuberance for all things nuclear that prevailed in the 1950s and into the 1960s, when public opinion began to turn and enthusiasm for government science wilted.

Initially Operation Plowshare (named for the biblical injunction to beat swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks) fathered some pretty radical ideas, like using controlled nuclear blasts to lower mountains. Others included widening the Panama Canal, building a new Central American canal though Nicaragua, and carving a new bay in Alaska. Finally, the project’s goal was narrowed to stimulating natural gas production.

In all there were 27 detonations, most of them at the nuclear test site in Nevada; but there were two in Colorado and two in New Mexico. Every test had its own name and the size of the charge ranged from 105 kilotons (code-named Flask) to 0.37 kilotons (code-named Templar).

The last and most ambitious test, which took place outside Rifle, Colo., and was code-named Rio Blanco, consisted of three linked detonations of 33 kilotons each. The technique mirrored conventional blasting with sequential charges. And the idea was that gas would be driven from cavity to cavity, concentrating it for extraction in the last cavity.

Radioactive contamination of the gas doomed the whole idea. But what worked were the detonations themselves.

A good deal is known, somewhere in the archives of the DOE and its laboratories, about how to detonate safely underground and what happens when you do.

Three things happen after a detonation: an area becomes vitrified, a much larger area is reduced to rubble, and there is a cavity into which much of the rubble falls. Sounds like what you want in the Gulf of Mexico, eh?

At the time of Operation Plowshare, most of the data was classified. Much of it has since been made available to an apathetic world.

Driven by a complex mixture of guilt over creating nuclear weapons and real enthusiasm for the science, there is no doubt that silly things were undertaken in the early days of civilian nuclear experimentation. But that does not mean that the devices did not work or that the science was deficient. Or that it cannot be used for better purposes today.

President Obama and BP have said that the best minds are working on engineering solutions to the Gulf disaster. So it seems strange that the truly high-tech one has received short shrift.

I covered the last three years of Operation Plowshare as a reporter, and I never heard a whisper that any of the 27 detonations failed. It was the mission that was in doubt.

As for lingering effects, the government has issued natural gas drilling licenses within three miles of some experiments, and in one case within a mile of where the nuclear blast took place years ago. Apparently, nothing to worry about.

Institutional memory is a terrible thing to waste. –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 

Bill Gates and the Energy Research Dilemma

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There is an idea that has been around for a long time, at least since the fall of 1973: All that stands between the United States and an abundant energy future is a lack of spending on research and development.

It is as though the Knights Templar could find the Holy Grail, if only the pope would commit just a few more resources to the hunt.

Tens of billions of dollars have been spent, many of them fruitlessly; and some advances have been made, not the least in the kind of drilling technology that enables us to drill miles below the sea floor in the Gulf of Mexico. (Oops!)

Much else has been researched and not come to market. Wind and solar have taken giant strides, but still require tax breaks and subsidies. Nuclear energy through nuclear fission has been researched, even as its deployment has slowed. Worldwide hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent on nuclear fusion with nothing to show for it. Other programs have gone by the board, from coal liquefaction to magneto hydrodynamics and ocean-thermal gradients.

The thing about energy research has been that there are many promising lines, but seldom a big success.

On Thursday, a new set of highly qualified persuaders came to Washington to exhort the government to increase energy research and development funding from $5 billion to $16 billion a year, and to set up new organizations to channel and manage basic research on energy.

Some of the nation’s industrial savants, including Bill Gates late of Microsoft, Jeff Immelt of General Electric and Ursula Burns of Xerox, appeared at a press conference here as members of the American Energy Innovation Council. The chairman of the group, Chad Holliday of Bank of America, told the press: “Up until now energy investments have gotten short shrift.”

That is debatable. The problem with energy research has not been that it has been shortchanged, but that it has often been directed at the wrong thing; it has often been diluted or spread out for political purposes. Farmers want ethanol research, coal states want carbon management, and the populous Eastern states want carbon-free energy — so long as it is not nuclear.

The group of industry captains is not looking at the political, social and economic divides that have negated so many past endeavors. Just when the nuclear industry was ready to enter its long-expected renaissance in the 1990s, it was broadsided by new gas turbines. If the carbon in coal can be safely sequestered, does that solve the environmental problems of ripping it out of the ground?

R&D always produces something of interest and often of value, but not always what it was directed toward. At the press conference, Xerox’s Burns said that innovation needed to be managed, and that the CEOs of the group knew that from experience.

Actually, the experience of Xerox itself may belie that. The original copying machine technology nearly perished for want of sponsorship and was finally saved by not-for-profit Battelle Laboratories. Later, when many of the innovations that made the rise of Microsoft, Apple and Cisco possible were developed at Xerox’s California computer laboratories, the company did not know what to do with them. But Bill Gates did. These two should talk.

The great Bell Labs produced optic fiber and the transistor, but did nothing with them. Management is a lovely business when it controls but in so doing, it stifles.

If you want innovation, first get rid of the managers; second, get on bended knee before the bankers.

A new attitude toward energy is needed, but first it is a good idea to know where we want to go.

With the catastrophe in the Gulf, our energy future is again in flux. The trusted has become dangerous, and the dangerous may again be trusted. –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate