White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

The Electric Revolution Is About To Upend Transportation

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Connie Francis sang about “Where the Boys Are” in 1961. Well, the bright boys and girls are flooding into transportation. It is the place of cutting-edge invention: not cell phones, they were so last year; not computers, they were, er, so last century. The smartest students leaving university may well find the adventure of creating in transportation.

A science-led revolution is in the making in transportation. Leading this revolution is the electric car. It is no longer a drawing-board dream. It is here and gaining market share, albeit miniscule at present.

The surge to electric-powered transportation goes beyond the Tesla and Elon Musk — although Musk has been a catalyst. All manufacturers are now making or investigating electric cars. But the electric car is only a beginning: buses, trucks, trains, boats ships and even airplanes are in the mix.

China is throwing government and private resources into an electric future. France, Britain and eight other countries have declared that they will ban the internal combustion engine by mid-century. Volvo has said that it will stopmaking fossil fuel-powered cars.

At the extreme end of the electric car excitement are automated vehicles. These have caught the imagination — and the dollars — of Google and Uber. But Detroit is also is coming to realize that it has to go electric. General Motors has paved its way with the EV1 and the Volt. Others are scrambling.

The political pressure behind the urge to go electric is clean air, reduced noise and, for many countries, the end of a huge oil bill.

One hundred and forty years after Thomas Edison first perfected a light bulb, electricity is once again a major disruptive technology – and not just on the surface of the Earth. Electric aircraft are in design with short-haul, small-load passenger versions flying in Dubai. Mighty Boeing has teamed up with innovative JetBlue to work on an electric-powered aircraft, although these might have to wait for much better electric-storage batteries than now exist.

Naysayers are quick to point up the inadequacy of batteries — lithium ion are the workhorses in this revolution — and the difficulty of charging them.

These arguments point up a fork in the road for electric enthusiasts: Will the future depend on today’s charging technology where a car has to be tethered to the charging apparatus by a wire, or will electromagnetic fields be used in inductive charging, eliminating the wire? This is known as Wireless Power Transfer (WPT).

Enthusiasts see WPT charging in two ways: either a plate set in a driveway or parking lot with the vehicle at rest or a strip in a roadway which can charge vehicles in motion – a grander idea. If the latter is successful, it opens the way to smaller batteries in lighter vehicles, cheaper trucking.

The disruption is going to be very large.

Gas stations would largely disappear or be very few. Automobile technicians might want to look for alternative employment, as will, eventually, many truck drivers.

The search for new batteries is frenetic and international. New, longer-lived batteries will, in large measure, determine the rate of growth in the more advanced electric vehicle applications.

Another big imponderable is who will provide the electricity? There is a general assumption in the electric utilities that they will do this. But will they? The new owners of the charging networks may choose to make their own with wind, solar and small modular nuclear reactors.

What will the role of government be? Local government will have to deal with the road-use issues. But what of the federal government? It has always been involved in transport. As Peter Morici, the economist and columnist, points out, it stimulated the railways with right-of-way grants and the airlines with mail-hauling contracts. Will it find a similarly elegant way to stimulate the flow of electrons into transportation, and a whole new way of getting ourselves and our stuff around? Maybe it will be led by the military: the Navy wants electric ships.

No wonder the best minds out of colleges and universities are getting wanderlust.

Photo: SAN ILDEFONSO, SEGOVIA, SPAIN – SEPTEMBER 24, 2017: Car charging station for self-sufficient and first photovoltaic panels in Europe. it is also free. Juan Enrique del Barrio / Shutterstock.com.

The Case for the Eight Hundred Thousand Innocents

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Pity the “Eight Hundred Thousand.” Pity those who came here as the children of parents who moved illegally to the United States. Pity them for every day they walk in dread: Will they be deported if President Trump loses in his power play with Congress over their future? Them or the Wall.

They, these children, some adults now, live in a place uniquely dreadful as they go through each American day — the only days most of them know or can remember. Pity them as they go about their business of school or work, speaking the only language many of them know: English.

Pity them as they wonder if they will be forced, by brutal deportation, to start life over in country in which they may be truly aliens. Not so bad for those from Ireland or Australia, where they will be accommodated by enlightened governments, but those are the small minority.

Think, instead, of those who must go back to the poverty and war, the deprivation and violence, the sheer horror of a life so harsh we cannot with ease imagine it. That is what awaits them in much of Latin America, Africa and parts of Asia and the Middle East.

The illegals committed what is only a misdemeanor in law and tried to improve their own lives and dared to hope for work, food and shelter in the United States. They hoped for more for their dependent children. They shared the same motive that has always brought people to these shores: the dream of a better life.

Unwanted migration is a huge global problem. The desperate vote with their feet. Ironically, illegals have one of the qualities prized in our culture: enterprise. It is not easy to get here and it is not easy to live in the shadows.

But must the children of illegals also live in the shadows, fearing the knock on the door that ends their hope? Must the iniquity of the fathers, as it says in the Book of Exodus, be visited upon the children?

The administration has worked mightily to demonize all illegals, to brand them as murderers, rapists and job-snatchers despite study after study showing illegals to be more law-abiding than the citizen population. Yet Trump is set on deportations and triggering a season of fear in the migrant community.

The knock on the door is one of the terrifying sounds that echoes down through history, a knell of horror for the oppressed. When the state — whether it was the Roman state, the Inquisition state, the Nazi state, the Soviet state or the apartheid state — comes a-calling, it is a time of unmitigated fear.

To hold the “Eight Hundred Thousand” hostage to Trump’s other immigration demands is callous and supremely cruel. He has claimed sympathy for the children who are here through no fault of their own, but his subsequent actions belie that.

Is the president’s only motivation to undo, with pathological fervor, everything that President Obama did? Is the human cost to have no entry in his ledger?

If the deportations begin to include the Dreamers, then there will be shame aplenty to go around. Shame on the Republicans in Congress, who mutter privately against the Trump excesses but do not act, perhaps out of fear of Twitter ridicule. Shame on the evangelical churches, who preach family values but are silent on the tearing apart of parents and children, husbands and wives, mocking all that they profess to hold dear.

There is an economic case for considering the issue of illegals, who are here and contributing mightily. But the moral and human case for the children — these innocents who have adopted us — is prime. Time to adopt them.

To leave the “Eight Hundred Thousand” in limbo is to tear the cloth of our decency.

I get regular cascades of emails that ask: What is it they do not understand about “illegal”? I ask: What is it they do not understand about “innocent child”?

 

Photo: Berkeley, CA – September 05, 2017: Unidentified participants protesting Trump rescinding DACA,. Approximately 200 demonstrators gathered in UC Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza and marched down Telegraph Avenue. SHEILA FITZGERALD / SHUTTERSTOCK.COM

Looking for the Next Big Thing: Innovation’s Rocky Path

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Innovation is the hot word in the business press and in academia. Business itself, maybe less so. If business is profitable and secure it would rather grow through acquisition than innovation.

There is a public sense that innovation is on a tear; that new ideas are bursting forth irrepressibly. Possibly not.

At a recent exhibition of early stationary steam engines in Rhode Island, I was struck by the inventiveness and the variety of these machines, but mostly by the diversity of the manufacturers. These were the inventions, the innovations that powered the Industrial Revolution. They were being improved and deployed in ever greater numbers until electricity — that big game-changer, that supernova of invention — came along to disrupt everything again.

Likewise, it is impressive to look at the early days of automobiles. Hundreds, if not thousands, of manufacturers, hoping that they had found the forward route and that route was the one that would survive.

Aviation, the same story.

The impediment to these kinds of diverse inventions and modifying innovations is often just the size of corporations.

The early years of computers were a time of incandescent creativity, followed quickly by innovations. But the inventors succeeded too well and instead of there still being thousands of entrants, the early winners hold hegemony over the industry. They have moved from innovators to rent collectors, from white-hot invention to comfortable, corpulent middle age very fast. Include in this list of those who went from eureka beginnings to cautious management: Microsoft, Google, Amazon and probably Uber.

Commercial success came too quickly and hegemon, as it always does, followed; then sclerosis through size.

It can be seen as a replay of what has happened in other industries, where success has led to growth and invention has given way to preservation.

Those who opposed — and lost — the merger McDonnell Douglas and Boeing did so because they feared that Boeing, which had upended aviation not once but twice with the 707 and the 747, would lose the heart it once had for such bold and risky innovation. Big organizations are inherently hard of hearing.

Computing also has become a hegemon in its own way. The adventurous money, the best minds and the great universities all are centered on Silicon Valley and what has become celebrity technology.

But other technologies are coming on quietly, most notably additive manufacturing, colloquially known as 3D printing. It is moving very fast and has gone from manufacturing simple things to making very complex nuclear fuel, aviation parts and even human body parts. It could be the next big thing.

But what about the next little thing?

Step forward an imaginative television program running on 200 public broadcasting stations. It is called “Make48” and it is a reality show with a difference. Its CEO Tom Gray says one should think of the annualized, eight-part series as a cross between “Shark Tank” and “How It’s Made,” two very successful commercial cable television shows that cater to the latent creative, entrepreneurial spirit often daunted by the complexity of thinking up a product, making it, financing it and getting it to market.

Make48 seeks to solve those problems, or most of them, by recruiting teams of inventors who, at the Kansas City Art Institute, are supplied with experts to show the creators how to manufacture their creations in 48 hours. The product can be in any material: metal, wood, plastic, rubber — you name it. But it has to be made in front of television cameras in 48 hours. Then three winners get the professional help in marketing the products, getting them on store shelves, TV sales programs and online shopping. The whole suit of needs met.

The program is supported generously by chief sponsor Stanley Black & Decker, and by The Grommet, QVC, Duck Tape and others, who are looking outside for new products. Always the hope that the next Walkman, safety razor or Post-it is waiting to be created and taken to market. Last year’s winners were modest: a kitchen sink stopper or bath plug, a series of color-coded food preparation surfaces to prevent cross-contamination, and a laser-aiming device for men and boys using toilets.

Who knows whether a big winner, like the electric screwdriver, will come forth, but mighty oaks do start as acorns.

 

Photo Credit: Make48 LLC

Welcome to the World of Unintended Consequences — Tax

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An open letter to the tax writers of Congress:

Even us laymen, us non-economists have opinions about taxes. We pay them. We also benefit from loopholes and are punished for being not rich enough to have investments that lighten the tax load.

Those at the bottom of the tax ladder seem to pay their taxes with more equanimity than those at the top.

For more than three decades, I operated a small business. Over the years, I employed hundreds of people and all were keenly interested in what they would be paid, but none — not one ever — asked what their take home pay would be or how that could be finagled, as with benefits. In business parlance, they were interested only in the top line, not the bottom line.

By the same token, other small businesses seemed to be unbothered by taxation, although they all relied on accountants to get them the best deal. Taxes were not a subject that came up in in our trade association meetings. T.J. Zlotnitsky, a member of the progressive Patriotic Millionaires, told me that he and other very successful businesses were not crippled by taxes and saw them as a necessity — a cost of being in business, if you will. Billionaire Warren Buffet and economist-actor-writer Ben Stein echo that view.

But big business, unlike small business, and its agents from trade associations to their lobbyists, believes that tax rates are the problem. Take the issue of U.S. companies whose offshore subsidiaries earn profits that are retained in foreign countries to defer paying U.S. corporate tax. It is an act of Republican theology that this money would come back instantly to the United States if the tax threat were removed and that it would be invested in new enterprise, plant and products here.

It is as likely that this money will be used to buy back stock. There are plenty of companies right here in the United States sitting on billions of dollars, not investing them either here or overseas. Explain, please.

Perhaps tax rates, assuming they are the effective rate that will be paid (seldom the case), should be thought of in terms of pricing. Pricing is a whole science, possibly an art. There is a sweet spot in pricing where buyers and sellers agree.

For President Trump and Congress to say that sweet spot is 20 percent for corporations and 35 percent for individuals is arbitrary. Despite company “inversions,” where they move their domicile to tax-friendly countries, corporations, as measured by earnings, are doing nicely, thanks.

It is true that high tax rates discourage investment and lead to capital flight. But there are glaring exceptions: Why are companies flocking to high-tax Massachusetts rather than low-tax New Hampshire?

My own guess is that the sweet spot is between 25 percent for corporations and 30 percent for individuals. I expect to be disabused.

New York, by national standards, is heavily taxed, but businesses and people are pouring in. Explain perceived value, please.

Yet after World War II, when taxes really were too high in Britain, many moneyed people, including almost all the film stars, established residences in Switzerland to escape confiscatory taxes: 90 percent was just too much for the likes of Noel Coward and David Niven. Ninety percent was a sour spot, very sour.

Then, there is the highly speculative issue of how tax reduction will trigger growth. It is an argument that would not pass the loan committee at the local bank: the idea that increasing debt now will lead to huge growth later. Take a piece graph paper and draw an ascending line, make no provision for recession, war or, as now, acts of God. Is it believable?

Finally, there is the vexing question of estate taxes, which — with fiendish cleverness — the opponents have labeled “death taxes.”

The fact is that if you remove or reduce these, you guarantee less revenue. But, more important, in a time when the economy has created many billionaires, you risk the creation of super class of Americans, rich in perpetuity and growing richer with even the most conservative investments: a feudalization of the United States.

Is that the America which is great (again)?

Taxation is all about unintended consequences.

Talking Heads Are the Salt and Fat Diet of Television News

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Guess you’ve noticed: There are no politicians on the politics-obsessed cable news channels. Instead, there are journalists talking about politicians and politics; rafts of journalists organized into “panels” to comment, in seconds, on events.

Twenty years ago, it was different. So much so that I started a television program with the avowed intention of letting the public see who was writing the political news in the newspapers. We are still on the air, but with fewer journalists commenting.

In that seemingly distant time (which was, in reality, not very long ago), the principal political talk shows were “The McLaughlin Group,” under the pioneering John McLaughlin; “Inside Washington,” formerly “Agronsky & Company,” with Gordon Peterson; and the long-lived “Washington Week in Review” with Ken Bode.

They were weekly, half-hour programs and mine, “White House Chronicle,” joined the roster as a distant “also ran.” We aimed at introducing print journalists to a TV audience. Other programs had set round tables that included Tribune Media’s Clarence Page, because he was a delight to work with — as we found on our program — and because he was informed and entertaining.

Women were fewer and they were led by Elizabeth Drew of The New Yorker, Eleanor Cliftof Newsweek, Cokie Roberts of NPR, and syndicated columnist Georgie Anne Geyer.

Cable news meant CNN, then still trying to be magisterial.

Fast forward and television is chock-full of journalists talking about the news in what is now a staple of cable television; and rather than occupying half an hour a week these “panels,” as the hosts call them, are on pretty well 24/7.

The New York Times publishes under the slogan “All the News That’s Fit to Print.” On television, it’s all the news that can be talked about — and they do, endlessly. I think that is pretty entertaining and most of the talking heads seem to have really good sources; they are on the news — all the politics that can be talked about. It is the fat and sugar diet of TV.

What is missing are the subjects. Few members of Congress, with the exception of the leaders, are seen or talked about by name on television. They have been cleared from the television politics smorgasbord. Even the talking heads do not name them. The ubiquitous panelists talk about “my sources” or “a conservative congressman” or “a Democratic member.” No names. No faces.

There are reasons aplenty for this. One, now that there is more party discipline, except for people like Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, it is known what the party the line will be: It is there in the talking points — and that makes for little news and boring television.

Another is that while journalists go for instant analysis, a cable television staple, politicians are scared of “stepping in it.” Search technology is so fearsome now that almost anything any politician says can be retrieved and put on the screen. That is fodder for future “gotcha” moments. The late Tim Russert of “Meet the Press” was a master of this. “In 2003, you said” and there it was, right on the screen, the politico making a regrettable remark.

Also, there is always the question of what the public wants (ratings to the TV industry). The public appears to be more interested in journalists debunking political leaders than the nuts and bolts of legislation or even what is happening in, say, science or the rest of the world. Salt and fat gets the eyeballs.

The late Arnaud de Borchgrave lamented that in his day, aspiring reporters longed to be foreign correspondents, now they yearn to cover Capitol Hill and the White House. Ralph Nader — who was once a prized “get” in the parlance of television bookers — has just issued a paper regretting the dominance of political chatter in the news space. Maybe he will be asked to talk about it on television, but it is unlikely.

On the upside, there are some awesome new talents, and more women in the Washington journalistic firmament — even if some of us like it when journalists, in the words of radio veteran Dan Raviv, just set out to “find out what’s happening and tell people.” No salt, no fat, just the facts.

Electricity Can Help Africa’s Growing Population Crisis

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A population catastrophe is in the making in Africa that could engulf the world, Europe first. The United Nations predicts that between now and 2050 the populations of 26 African countries are expected to at least double their current size. Nigeria will overtake the United States to become the world’s third most populous country in 2050.

By the year 2050, according to the United Nations, annual increases will exceed 42 million people per year and total population will have doubled to 2.4 billion. “This comes to 3.5 million more people per month, or 80 additional people per minute. At that point, African population growth would be able to refill an empty London five times a year,” Britain’s Guardian newspaper calculates. Poor Africa, with so little to support a doubling population, is on its way to new horrors of food shortage, lack of jobs and misery.

This is not just crisis for Africa but very much one for Europe, and in time one for other countries.

African migrants, fleeing broken societies and imminent famine, have been crossing the Mediterranean in rickety craft, flooding Europe. This flood will grow and it will be joined by people seeking survival from deeper in Africa; not just from the north, but from the center and the south.

Desperate people move. Take the Royhinga refugees, walking with what they can carry from Myanmar to Bangladesh: a journey from unsafe to unwelcome. It is already happening in Africa and it will dominate in future.

India, which knows something about population explosions (the population there has grown from 400 million, when the British pulled out in 1947, to 1.3 billion), has looked for a way of improving expectations as a means of population stabilization. Their solution has not been droves of family planners with suitcases of condoms, but rather a bold, high-tech solution: electricity and lots of it.

In New Delhi, this strategy was explained to me by a professor at the University of Delhi. As an American, I was aghast at the poverty and the minimal lives lived by tens of millions. Almost verbatim, this is what I was told, “We have a solution to this misery: an electric grid. When we electrify a village, everything changes. Someone gets a television — maybe an old black-and-white one, but Indians are good at keeping things running — and then expectations go up, hygiene improves, and birth rates go down.”

He added, “It works.”

That, maybe, is why today India is one of the leaders in building electric capacity of all kinds, including an ambitious nuclear program.

Electricity provides a solution in Africa, but much of the installed electric capacity is old, serves only urban areas and dates back to the colonial era.

In Africa and South America, I have seen electricity transform lives. An electric supply leads to the ability of villages to move basically from the Iron Age to the Ion Age.

I saw this acutely in my childhood in Africa. An electrified village can keep its food supply from rotting, grind its grain instead of shipping it to a mill, allow local businesses to get a footing, and limit family size. But mostly the young, whether through television or radio, are inspired to greater expectations, to horizons beyond the squalor and poverty that has been their inheritance.

The European media have been covering the African population flood with intensity, particularly the BBC. Yet much of this has had a hand-wringing quality.

As we see the lethality of electricity failure in Florida, following Irma, we again get a sharp lesson in the value to human life of electricity, unique in service to human kind.

If Africa is not to become a huge and permanent humanitarian crisis, affecting the whole world, it needs to get in on the electric solution. Ideally, this should be first with the fuels available: sun and wind. These are peculiarly suited to Africa: poor, desperate Africa where people hurt so much, every day.

 

Photo: ACCRA, GHANA – MARCH 4, 2012: Unidentified Ghanaian people at the market in Ghana. People of Ghana suffer of poverty due to the unstable economic situation. Credit: Anton_Ivanov / Shutterstock.com

Washington’s New Dance Craze — the Perplexity Quickstep

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After more than six months of vilifying, ridiculing and laughing out loud at President Trump, Washington is getting down to realizing that he is the president — and he will not be gone, by some miracle, in the morning.

Ergo it is time for companies, lobbyists and Congress to find a mechanism to work with Trump or around him. It might be described as a dance: the perplexity quickstep. Fleet feet are essential.

Business is treading with increasing alarm and tentativeness. Lobbyists are seeking White House sources for steps guidance. And Congress is tripping over new choreography.

A lot of business leaders thought that Trump, himself a businessman, would see government from the Oval Office as though he were still sitting in the corner office. They believed he would seek the best path forward, going for the main chance and strategizing how to get there. Instead, the business community — from the chairmen of some of the largest companies, with whom I have spoken, to those of small- and medium-size companies — is flummoxed, reviling Trump in private and seeking advice from a variety of Washington gurus on what to do going forward.

Business people, who think they understand cause and effect, cannot find a pattern that suggests the president has any understanding of that relationship. Business hankers for certainty, Trump for adulation. Business worries about the bottom line, Trump about the television commentariat. Business people who want to get a point of view across to the president are trying to get on television — particularly on the morning shows on Fox.

The trade associations, among the most effective lobbies in Washington, are working under the old rules while trying to learn the new dance steps. So they continue to “applaud” Trump appointments and to “congratulate” administration policy. Business and its lobbyists truly hope for lower corporate taxes and for loosening of regulations but they worry about the future of trade and trade agreements — and the concept that America can pull back all its overseas commitments. “America First” is a harbinger of bad things to come for global companies.

Many CEOs, including Elon Musk of Tesla, Tim Cook of Apple and some other bold Silicon Valley C-suiters, have criticized Trump and quit his advisory committees. This has earned them public plaudits, but in doing so they have reduced their ability to affect things. Many others ask, “With Trump, isn’t it better to be on the inside, as close to the president as possible?” Trump is said to believe the last person with whom he spoke.

In Washington’s new dance, the hope is that when the music stops, you are the one standing next to him. You cannot do this if you have taken off to California in high dudgeon.

Many corporations are in the awkward position of needing good relationships with the White House because they are involved in government contracting — and most large corporations are, even as they like to denounce government. Less government, more contracts is the dichotomy of the business-government relationship.

So many corporations with interests in Washington are learning the perplexity quickstep: two quick steps to the right, two quick steps to the left, and circle to the rear. Dance near Trump and he might heap praise on you. Dance far from him and he might come after you for manufacturing overseas. Like his own party and the press, business waits for the new choreography which often arrives by Twitter in the early morning.

This was a week to marvel at the perplexity quickstep: Trump decided on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Program, or DACA, putting the fate of nearly 800,000 young undocumented immigrants in lawmakers’ hands before undermining the whole effort by tweeting that if Congress did not act in six months, he would insert himself back into the process. Then he danced the GOP right off the floor and cut a deal with the House and Senate Democratic leaders, Nancy Pelosi of California and Chuck Schumer of New York. Dizzying.

 

Photo: President Donald J. Trump, First Lady Melania Trump, Vice President Michael R. Pence, and Second Lady Karen Pence, dance with service members at the Salute to Our Armed Services Ball at the National Building Museum, Washington, D.C., Jan. 20, 2017. The event, one of three official balls held in celebration of the 58th Presidential Inauguration, paid tribute to members of all branches of the armed forces of the United States, as well as first responders and emergency personnel. (DoD photo by U.S. Army Sgt. Kalie Jones)

Existential Fear of Climate Change Reshaping Policy

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Almost every word that can be used to describe a disaster has been used to describe the one that has befallen Houston. But there is one that hasn’t been used yet: seminal. It means a work, event, moment or figure strongly influencing later developments.

The flooding and near destruction of Houston and the Gulf Coast is such an event. It will influence public policy for decades to come.

First, there is going to be the gigantic national job of rebuilding the nation’s fourth-largest city — and quite possibly abandoning large parts of it. It will affect property values in flood-prone cities, like Miami, New Orleans, New York and Tampa, Fla. It will result in urgent calls for the construction of new flood barriers, or the beefing up of those that already exist in cities like Providence, R.I., and New Bedford, Mass.

Going forward, there will be a new existential threat felt in the United States: climate uncertainty. It will not matter whether the Houston disaster is linked to the burning of fossil fuels. What will matter is that the warnings of dramatic changes in climate will have an influence they have not hitherto had.

The sky has fallen.

The aberrant weather — which has not only wrecked Houston and Beaumont, Texas, with flooding but also agriculture in much of Sub-Saharan Africa with severe drought — now will be a real concern to Americans. We will start to take notice of floods in faraway places.

Leaving aside whether human activity is contributing, climate uncertainty will move to the very front of the national agenda, and it will influence our politics and sensitize us to the warnings of scientists. Those who have thought climate change to be some kind of liberal scheme to punish big coal, big gas and big oil will get short shrift in the court of public opinion.

President Trump went out on a limb, urging more coal production, trashing the Paris climate accord, disbanding the federal advisory panel for the National Climate Assessment, shrinking the Environmental Protection Agency and undoing its rules, including the Obama-era Clean Power Plan. But the Houston disaster may have him climbing back.

There will be other changes affecting public policy as the nation moves forward. A debt ceiling increase without a shutdown is now assured: No one in Congress or the White House will want stories of Federal Emergency Management Agency employees being furloughed while people are still in shelters in and around Houston — and where they might be for a very long time.

There might be a change ahead for Trump’s plan, still vague, for a tax overhaul. Large tax cuts may not be appealing to Congress as it contemplates the enormous new costs for cleanup, demolition and construction along the Gulf Coast, and for fortifying coastal cities.

Texas will be seeking and getting masses of federal aid. With its powerful congressional delegation and political friends at all levels in the Republican Party, Texas will be hard to deny. It is going to be all Texas, all the time on the news and on Capitol Hill for weeks and months, even years.

Meanwhile huge flooding in Bangladesh, India and Nepal will help to buttress climate fear. According to the United Nations, The New York Times reports, at least 41 million people in those three countries have been directly affected by flooding and landslides resulting from severe monsoon rains this summer; and more than 1,000 have died in floods across South Asia.

This will increase the pressure on the Trump administration to make climate a policy priority. If the president won’t, Congress will; and it will be because of Houston. New electric generation — wind, solar and possibly nuclear — and electrified cars and trucks will be the winners.

It’s no longer the economy, stupid. Now it’s the climate, stupid — and it will be for decades. Something truly seminal has happened.

 

Photo By The National Guard – Texas National Guard, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=61978542

Elon Musk and the Power of Celebrity

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Agents of change are not always welcome. Seldom, in fact. Take Elon Musk, unquestionably an agent of change and not universally celebrated by his peers.

The public loves Musk who has promised them pollution-free solar power, electric cars, space travel and an underground, intercity transport system called “Hyperloop,” in which they will be whisked in vacuum tubes on magnetic cushions at more than 800 miles an hour. He has created The Boring Company to build the tunnels for the system.

More, Musk has attacked artificial intelligence and its use in weaponry as a threat to humanity. In this, he has fed into the general unease about artificial intelligence: Frankenstein becomes our master.

Recently, the chairman and chief executive officer of one of the largest electric utility holding companies, unloaded on me about Musk, accusing the inventor of being “dishonest,” “lying” and using fraudulent data in pushing SolarCity, his rooftop solar company. Also recently, a nuclear scientist with creative credentials denounced Musk to me as a showman, a media darling, a hoax and someone who had used too much government money, particularly at SpaceX, his reusable rocket company.

The automobile industry wishes Musk had stayed in his native South Africa rather than beginning a student odyssey, which saw him studying in Canada and at Stanford University before making his first fortune with PayPal.

It is true that Musk has used some debatable numbers. Three years ago, he told the Edison Electric Institute annual meeting that more electricity from solar panels could be generated from a nuclear power plant site than from the nuclear plant. That was a huge blooper: the equivalent of saying the economy of Liechtenstein is larger than that of the United States.

One expects people whose whole life is tied up in math, from rockets to electric cars, to get their sums right. Yet Musk glides on, like some blithe spirit, changing things as he goes. Changing them in fundamental ways.

And we should applaud his progress.

The arguments over Musk creations end up as a battle between technological incrementalists and a disruptor. His critics are incrementalists, moving forward slowly and steadily.

Incremental change is the compound interest of technology. Look no further than today’s automobile to see how it has improved and changed incrementally over the years.

Then look to Musk and his Tesla: it is standing the automobile industry on its ear. So much so, The Economist magazine has heralded the death of the internal combustion engine.

Change agents can be unsung heroes. James Watt was when he was creating the condenser that made steam power viable, and Bill Gates when he was writing the original Windows operating system, and Mark Zuckerberg when he was playing around with Facebook.

But by and large, hero inventors get the job done faster and with more ease. All the cited inventors found hero status later, but they might have gotten there faster with the public cheering them on — and loosening the financial strings — if they were known names with which to to begin.

Wall Street is cool to unsung inventors and cannot control itself when a name inventor goes to market. That is why Tesla has a larger market cap than General Motors, why Apple is the largest company in the world, and why Elon Musk and other celebrity inventors will shape our future faster and more dramatically than a lot of quiet evolvements.

Woe betide the technology-based industry that lacks a celebrity, a Pied Piper, to conquer the public imagination. Exhibit A might be the nuclear industry that has achieved incredible things in making clean electricity through high science, but languishes today. Its last hero was Adm. Hyman Rickover in the 1950s.

The book on celebrity invention could be said to have been written by one of the greatest American inventors: Thomas Edison.

He knew the power of a headline. His rival Nikola Tesla, less so.

 

Photo: Elon Musk and Chris Anderson at TED 2017. Credit: Steve Jurvetson under Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)

Oh, America, My Adopted Land, What Are You Doing to Your Special Self?

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When I arrived on these shores in 1963, I wrote to a friend in London from New York, “We had America wrong. It is not a melting pot but rather a fruit salad. Spanish-speaking youths sell pizza on Broadway. Italian and German men drive taxis. All the doormen — they stand in front of the better blocks of flats — seem to be Irish. Black men and women do menial work: They are less obvious and not prospering.”

Those were the days when integrating the South was being bitterly fought and I, for one, thought that the soaring rhetoric of Martin Luther King could heal as well as inspire.

The most overt racism I saw in the North was not in New York or Washington but in Baltimore. At a bar beloved by the editorial staff of the Baltimore News American on Pratt Street, a major commercial thoroughfare at the time, an African-American man came in for a drink. The owner, a Polish-American, was on his feet in seconds, telling the man that the bar was in fact a private club, but he could sell him a bottle to go. The would-be patron took this clear lie quietly and left. My colleagues at the newspaper, including an African-American editor, were not interested in protesting the incident.

Race is probably baked into my consciousness, as I was born and raised in the British African colony of Southern Rhodesia. I grew up in a society in which some dreamed of a multi-racial future and others leaned toward white supremacy. In the end, after independence, Robert Mugabe made a mockery of democracy and civil rights for white and black citizens; his rule has been an equal opportunity horror.

When King was shot in 1968, Washington and Baltimore erupted in riots. I would not call them race riots, but they were riots of protest, of angry people who felt they had had enough. I walked through some of the worst rioting in Washington, and later drove through burning sections of Baltimore.

Rather than being threatened as a white man in black communities that were gripped with looting and fire-setting, there was an almost eerie politeness, a concern among the rioters for my safety. Richard Harwood, father of the CNBC correspondent, wrote about this, these manners, in The Washington Post.

It struck me then that the United States could survive even in its worst struggles if it could keep its manners, its sense of the other fellow’s well-being.

Nelson Mandela said that hate has to be learned. What he did not say, as far as I know, is that people love to hate. When hate is sanctioned, as it was in Nazi Germany or in endless Russian pogroms against the Jews, it becomes a creed and a way of seeing everything.

The selection of Barack Obama not as an African-American but as the Democratic presidential candidate was a high point. It made me very proud to be an American, of having been accepted in an exemplary place. It told the world that the United States, for all of its history of slavery and prejudice, was an ascendant society; Ronald Reagan’s “shining city on a hill.”

In Dublin, I chastised an Irish journalist for criticizing a less-than-lovable newscaster as a “Protestant prick.” What had the man’s religion to do with it? In America, I said, we would not add religion to the epithet.

I was lunching with a Malaysian publisher at the National Press Club in Washington when he declared for all to hear, “The only straight thing about a Chinaman is his hair.” I was appalled and said so. We would not have said that, not in recent decades, because of the restraint of brotherhood, the sense of ascendance and the manners of a people from many places who live together.

Now an American president, Donald Trump, has whistled up tribalism, rationalized the unacceptable through false equivalence. And America, as an ascendant place, is in question, the delicate weave of its social fabric under stress.

John Donne, the metaphysical English poet, wrote nearly 400 years ago of “America” as hugely desirable place. He also warned, “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” Even more so in a diverse nation held together by the knowledge that any other course, any tribal hatred, diminishes the whole construct; or, to me, contaminates the fruit salad with rotten produce.

 

Photo: NEW YORK CITY – JUNE 28: Commuters in subway wagon on June 28, 2012 in NYC. Credit: PIO3 / SHUTTERSTOCK.COM