White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

The ‘New Weather’ Reality Will Change the Nation, Defy Politics

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I have never done political consulting. So it was novel to me when a candidate in the midterms asked me what he should be worried about in 2027. I repeated what Harold Macmillan, British prime minister from 1957 to 1963, is believed to have said, “Events, dear boy, events.”

Actually, I had a little list of crises that I have been gathering and which will come to bear on the political establishment — and we the people. Topping the list is one that is already at hand: the climate, which I call the “new weather.”

We have had weeks of atmospheric disturbance resulting in catastrophic floods, power outages, flight cancellations, oppressive heat and fires. Weather disruptions have been the first or second stories on the networks’ evening newscasts, pushing back the news on the wars in Iran and Ukraine, as well as news from the White House.

Television stations like to tell viewers they have “news you can use.” The new weather is news that will abuse you. It knows where you live and it may call. It has called in Europe and across North America. It is a new reality.

The Southwest is parched and the Colorado River, that life channel, is running dry, severely affecting people in seven states. It also affects the food supply, as much of farming depends on the river’s bounty. Even Mexico receives some of the dwindling Colorado River water supply under a treaty with the United States.

Hundreds of thousands have lost power for hours or days, and others may be choosing between keeping the air conditioning on and spending on other necessities.

Sustained heat of over 110 degrees is a killer, and electricity for air conditioning is a lifesaver. Every year, more than a thousand people die of heat.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports the number of heat-related deaths nationwide. The worst year was 2023, with 2,325 deaths, as measured by death certificate analysis.

But heat-related fatalities are hard to collect. I would wager that the real death toll is much higher.

Liberal politicians will blame the fossil fuel industries — coal, oil and natural gas — for continuing to drive up greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere; conservatives will blame regulation and lack of infrastructure building. Local politicians will attack the data centers and the utilities.

President Trump has called global warming a hoax. But “say it ain’t so” doesn’t work when it is too hot for kids to play outside or streets are rivers, and when the flow of food from farm to supermarket is interrupted.

Huge infrastructure projects will be proposed at a time when there is a growing awareness that the budget deficit is out of control and there is no way America will grow out of it on its present tax trajectory.

If my candidate makes it to Congress, he will find it easier to say no to new expenditures than it is to say yes to new taxes.

Nonetheless, effective pipelines will be proposed to move water from water-rich areas to water-starved states. Some of those, like Texas, drunk on its recent Mecca-like effect on business, will have difficulty accepting that people won’t come if there is no water and inadequate electricity.

Heat, not economics, could curtail the North-to-Southwest flow of people, which has been the population realignment in recent years.

How to live with the new weather will definitely be a new priority that politicians will find difficult to address. It doesn’t fit behind a political slogan. It does favor infrastructure repair and enhancement, from boosting the electric grid to planting water-frugal crops to serious concern about where people live and how they pay their electric bill — a matter of keeping cool and staying alive.

But for the political establishment, other issues are forming, each competing with the weather for attention. For a start, there is integrating artificial intelligence into our economy without severe disruption, dealing with a broken healthcare system, and providing care that is beyond the reach of people facing higher prices for other survival services and products, like electricity and water.

Easier to say your opponent is a rascal, the other party is fascist or communist, and to worry about the use of AI on cellphones in classrooms.

We all have the weather to deal with, Democrat or Republican, and it is still an issue for governance.

How U.S. Natural Gas Came Back from the Dead

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The Trump administration is proud of America’s dominance in natural gas. The nation is the world’s largest producer and a net exporter.

We produce a quarter of the world supply of the fuel, which has become fundamental to electricity production. Forty-three percent of our electricity is generated from natural gas. According to the Energy Information Administration, it is followed by renewables, between 24 percent and 30 percent, depending on the season; nuclear is at just over 18 percent; and coal a little above 16 percent. Hydro, wood, geothermal and oil make up the rest.

The natural gas success represents a confluence of technologies, collaborations, leadership and commercial courage over more than 50 years. It is a remarkable story of the coming together of a resource, the politics that govern it, the technologies that liberated it, and the machines that use it.

I had occasion to reflect on this when visiting the Rayburn Energy Station in Sherman, Texas. The plant represents a significant move into natural gas-fired generation by the Rayburn Electric Cooperative, which is the power supplier to four distribution co-ops northeast of Dallas.

Panda Power Funds LP built the original plant, which began commercial operations in August 2014; Rayburn bought it in 2023.

The original combined-cycle gas plant consists of two Siemens combustion turbines and one steam turbine, producing 758 megawatts of baseload power. Siemens built these turbines at their plant in Charlotte, N.C.

At an adjacent site, Rayburn is building a station that will have 10 peaking “black start capable” turbines, each rated at 57 MW, which Siemens is building in Sweden. Black start refers to the ability of the turbines to start without external power. That way, they can help restart other generators after a power failure.

Taken together, the installations in Sherman represent the virtues of natural gas: a small environmental footprint, speed of construction, security of fuel supply, reliability, and modularity, meaning units can go out of service for maintenance without isolating the generating station.

No one issue or technology can claim credit for today’s natural gas boom. It is the happy confluence of events and technologies that has saved the day for the electric industry.

In 1977, the fledgling Department of Energy declared that natural gas had no future. Jack O’Leary, the first deputy secretary of energy, told The Energy Daily’s Richard Myers to stop asking about natural gas as it was “a depleted resource.”

With the technologies of the day, that was true. However, the picture was also complicated by a regulatory burden, with gas divided into “intrastate gas” and “interstate gas,” and into “old gas” and “new gas.”

It took the actions of three presidents — Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush — to finally untie the regulatory knot.

Likewise, the tech breakthroughs that changed gas from an orphan fuel into coal’s heir took many years.

The oil industry had been experimenting with angled drilling since the 1920s. However, it was horizontal drilling in the 1980s that ushered in a new era in gas extraction with the advent of hydraulic fracturing. This met with new turbine designs that owed much to aircraft jets, and had been pioneered by the Navy for small ship propulsion.

Hydraulic fracking had been tried for years by the oil industry. It took 20 years of trial and error, mostly by the Houston-based Mitchell Energy & Development Corp., to perfect it with development of a better fracking fluid, a new mud pump, and a better drilling bit. Also, 3D seismic enhanced the accuracy of finding gas. The Energy Department worked closely with the developers of these new technologies.

The Rayburn Energy Station is emblematic of what is happening nationwide as utilities face up to rising electricity demand and limited options.

Rayburn President and CEO David Naylor is enthusiastic about the full range of generation options and has embraced distributed generation — which links solar, conservation, demand-side load management, residential batteries and consumer participation to create what is known as a virtual power plant. However, gas was Rayburn’s immediate option, as it is for many utilities.

While Alex O’Brien, the manager of the Rayburn Energy Station, has a penchant for nuclear (he, like many of the plant’s staff, is a veteran of the Nuclear Navy), he understands the immediacy of gas.

Rayburn broke ground on its new peaker turbines this year, and they will be up and running in 2028. In utility terms, that is overnight.

Environmentalists have been critical of natural gas as a greenhouse gas-emitter. In New England, they have blocked pipeline construction. The resulting shortage in the region has been acute, so much so that liquefied natural gas must be imported, at a price, sometimes from Europe.

Until new nuclear power arrives, the utilities are looking to a mix of renewables and natural gas: the fuel that came back from the dead.

Foreign Aid That Works — the Malawi Story

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In 2005, Gordon Brown, British chancellor of the exchequer, later prime  minister, was in Washington, seeking to raise $50 billion annually in  additional international aid for Africa.

I hosted a press event for Brown at the National Press Club, and I  asked him how all this money would get to the people who needed it?

“We’ll give it to the right people,” he said crossly.

I told him I had seen foreign aid stolen, diverted and spent by the agencies that were supposed to deliver it on pet projects and themselves.

But there is another way, and it is working in the small, peaceful and democratic Southern African country of Malawi.

An organization called GiveDirectly has been handing $550 to every  adult — men and women — in villages with no strings attached. It is  estimated that for every $1,000 disbursed, there is an economic impact  of $2,400.

This differs radically from foreign aid that has poured into sub-Saharan Africa since the end of colonial rule. Normally, this is passed on to a local government agency or a non-governmental organization and has been earmarked for a school, a hospital, water supply or famine relief. Often, this has led to bureaucratic delays and high overhead costs.

The aid organizations, mostly from North America and Europe, haven’t  always earned plaudits. I have heard them described as “cheap tourists”  and worse.

Another source of friction has been the tendency of aid workers to  impose their values on recipients — for example, promoting green  technologies or Western dietary preferences.

“We are flipping the traditional aid logic on its head. Rather than  us figuring out what people need and having a kind of one-size-fits-all  approach, we are saying people are the best placed to say what they need and what will be best for their circumstances,” Grace Jackson,  GiveDirectly country director for Malawi, told me and my co-host, Adam  Clayton Powell III, on the television program “White House Chronicle.”

“What we can do is to provide the tools, i.e. cash, so they can go ahead and do what is the most important and most useful to them,” she  added.

Everyone over the age of 18 in a village gets the money delivered via a phone wallet, and if the villager doesn’t have a phone, Jackson said  GiveDirectly provides one.

They also make sure there is a viable local financial entity with enough money on hand to pay out as villagers require it.

I believe this approach works well because of the nature of  subsistence life in rural Africa, typified by village life in Malawi. It is wrong to think of poverty in the African countryside, and it is  extreme, the way we think of urban poverty in America.

Rural people in Malawi — and a majority of its 22 million people are rural — simply have nothing. I repeat, nothing. They have few clothes, no shoes and no food security.

They survive by subsistence farming, mostly growing corn, which, with an occasional protein, is their diet. They have to eat all year on what they grow.

Yet families hold together as do the villages. Often, grown children live with their parents and help with the farming, generally done with simple hand tools. In the nothingness there is order.

The Malawi experiment is working, lifting whole villages above the international poverty line. Jackson, who is English, said the money was used in various ways. People bought more land, got medical attention, paid school fees or pooled the money for big things like electrification.

Recently, the program has received a $150 million boost from the Canva Foundation, the charity established by billionaires Melanie Perkins and Cliff Obrecht, co-founders of Canva, a popular graphic design tool.

GiveDirectly was created by MIT and Harvard students as a giving circle, based on their studies of the efficacy of charity programs. It was formalized in 2012. The organization hasn’t just helped the needy overseas, it has also handed out aid in the form of debit cards to U.S. disaster survivors.

The idea of letting the recipients of the aid decide how to spend it  may appeal to conservatives and incline them more favorably toward  foreign aid, especially if it is entirely derived from the private  sector.

By the way, Gordon Brown’s grand scheme never got off the ground.

Is Rubio Starting a Nuclear Arms Race in the Middle East?

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The Trump administration has announced and appears to be crowing over an agreement with Saudi Arabia to help the kingdom not only to build nuclear power plants but also to enrich the uranium fuel.

There is no reason for the Saudis to enrich uranium. There are plenty of willing suppliers of enriched uranium and more are coming online.

Besides, it has always seemed curious that Saudi Arabia, with its huge fossil reserves and its abundant, reliable sunshine, should want to stress its industrial infrastructure with a nuclear power program when it clearly doesn’t need it. We are at war with Iran not because of nuclear power, but because it refuses to abandon its enrichment ambitions.

Enrichment raises the potency of uranium fuel by increasing the amount of the fissile isotope Uranium-235.

Today’s generation of light water reactors — the workhorses that provide about 20 percent of U.S. electricity — use uranium that has been enriched by 3 percent to 5 percent. The uranium for the new small modular reactors will be enriched by about 20 percent.

Weapons-grade enrichment is generally considered to be uranium that has been enriched by over 90 percent. But Ernie Moniz, who was secretary of energy in the Biden administration and is a nuclear physicist, told a conference organized by the Earthshot Foundation on June 8 that “you can make a pretty good bomb” with 60 percent- enriched uranium, a reference to the Iranian stockpile that we are trying to destroy.

I have been covering nuclear power — and by extension nuclear proliferation — for more than 50 years. For most of that time, Saudi Arabia has hankered for nuclear power and enrichment. The question is why.

When I began my coverage, there was great fear of nuclear proliferation — that more countries would get nuclear weapons. Those who have, in that time, are Pakistan and North Korea. China acquired a weapon in 1964.

Israel has never declared itself nuclear-armed, but the arms control community believes it has a weapon and that the United States helped it get one years ago.

The original nuclear weapons nations, the United States, Russia, Britain and France, held the technology close and were loath to see any country step in that direction.

Making civilian nuclear power available to the world has been a plank of U.S. foreign policy since President Dwight Eisenhower launched the “Atoms for Peace” program in 1953.

One of the beneficiaries of that program was Iran. In fact, before the Iranian Revolution of 1979, American companies, led by Bechtel, the giant engineering firm, were set to build reactors across Iran.

America’s global nuclear policy was, de facto, nuclear civilian power, yes, nuclear enrichment, no. It was pretty sensible and has worked well. Now it is set aside.

The U.S.-Saudi Arabia deal comes at a time when many nations would like to start down the weapons path. The wars in Ukraine and Iran are a stark inducement to go nuclear.

If Ukraine hadn’t given up its nuclear weapons, would Russia have invaded? Almost certainly not. If Iran had a proven bomb, would Israel and the United States have attacked? I think not.

Nonetheless, every nuclear weapon is a threat to world security. The danger isn’t only that desperate or ambitious countries will use them aggressively, but also that the danger of accidental detonation is ever-present.

The United States and the Soviet Union were so concerned about this that they shared safety technology. For example, when we developed an insensitive TNT for the trigger of a nuclear device, we shared this with the Russians. Neither side wanted a thermonuclear war triggered by someone dropping a weapon off a forklift.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio would seem to be so busy that he hasn’t had time to read up on the history of proliferation.

Rubio, declared about the U.S.-Saudi Arabia deal, “Suffice it to say that any agreement that we are going to make with any country in the world on civil nuclear is going to be one that will have safeguards in place to ensure that it can’t be turned into a weapons program.”

Rubio might want to take a few minutes to ponder these three things: How it is that we came to be at war with Iran, how Iran started with civilian power and went on to weapons, and how safeguards were bypassed.

Saudi Arabia’s neighbors in that volatile region will soon be at Rubio’s door looking for nuclear power — and enrichment. First up, expect Turkey, then Egypt.

If Congress approves Rubio’s deal, then a nuclear arms race in the Middle East is more or less assured. Is there a worse place to have that happen?

Soft Power, the Secret Sauce of the British Empire

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When President Trump, on the first day of his second term, closed the U.S. Agency for International Development and began dismantling the Voice of America, he also severely curtailed what had been America’s soft power dominance in the world.

With those actions, we abandoned something of inestimable value: the ability to project Americanism, our ideals. Trump retired an entire diplomatic system that had served the United States well since we more or less inherited it from the British.

Soft power was codified as a concept by the late Harvard professor Joseph S. Nye, Jr. in four books published between 1990 and 2023.

While Nye made soft power his own — he coined the term in 1990 — and wrote, lectured and testified before Congress about it, he never totally convinced conservatives what a valuable weapon it was in the national armory.

The proof of that is in the current administration’s indifference to diplomatic and social muscle, and its lack of a mechanism to talk to the Iranian people in Farsi, their language.

Nye believed an important part of soft power was our educational system, and U.S.-educated foreign students going home and spreading the good news about America.

I believe, although it was never thought of that way, that soft power was one of the things that kept the British Empire together. I saw it in action in Africa as colonial rule waned.

James R. Schlesinger, who served as chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, director of the CIA, secretary of defense, and secretary of energy, was a friend of mine throughout his public career and afterward. The one question he asked me constantly was how the British Empire was able to hold together with so few troops spread across so much of the world.

Schlesinger, a former history professor, wondered how those lessons might be applied to America in the late 20th century.

I told him that it was a combination of the hard power of the Royal Navy and British Army but also, importantly, of the then-unnamed soft power.

Take the massacre in Amritsar, in the northwestern Indian state of Punjab. This occurred on April 13, 1919, when a local British commander in the Punjab feared a meeting in a garden might turn violent and opened fire without warning on thousands of unarmed civilians. Official figures reported 379 dead and 1,200 injured; Indian estimates exceed 1,000 deaths.

This massacre hardened Mahatma Gandhi’s attitude to British rule over the subcontinent. His initial reaction, on hearing of the slaughter, was disbelief that the British would do such a thing. He had bought the soft-power assertion of British values, of decency.

Winston Churchill, then serving as the minister of war, told Parliament early the next year that the shooting was “unalterably monstrous.”

I tried to explain to Schlesinger over many evenings, over many years, what I had seen growing up in British Africa as the essence of British soft power.

To me, it boiled down to a kind of moral posture, a determination to project British justice as inviolate, British exceptionalism as a moral force, and a general admirable state of decency. The term soft power hadn’t yet been created, but it was the essential ingredient in British colonial administration.

When American commanders sought the “hearts and minds” of the Vietnamese, they might well have said they were seeking to establish “soft power.” But it was too late.

The concept of soft power and how it blossomed for America has wilted under the Trump administration. The posture now is that economic and military power are how we project influence and authority.

Ironically, while I think Nye did something of great value in identifying and promoting the concept of soft power, he and I didn’t enjoy a warm relationship. He had been President Jimmy Carter’s point man for nuclear disarmament and had favored an end to nuclear reprocessing as well as other aspects of the U.S. nuclear ecosystem.

In 1977, we debated in London, and the argument got so intense that we spilled into the street, shouting at each other.

A British Immigrant’s Defense of Immigration

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Migration, people moving to new lands, is as old as human history, and as fraught. Today it is a global problem complete with layered hypocrisy, cruelty and, always, hope among those on the move. War and extreme poverty collude in driving people to seek a livable future.

There is no simple solution, no slogan that encompasses a fair and reasonable course of action for the receiving country.

I moved from a British African colony, Southern Rhodesia, to the homeland, Britain, when that was our birthright, and to America a few years later. I did that because it was the place I wanted to be, the happening place, the place of all possibility and challenge.

I didn’t plan to stay, and now it is more than 60 years later. And, yes, I was elated to become a citizen.

In those days, if you were British, immigration was no harder than filling in some forms and swearing that you weren’t a communist and wouldn’t live in “moral turpitude” when you got to America. That reprehensible state wasn’t described.

To me, America was more than a country; it was, and remains, a state of mind.

At its best, America is generous, caring, open and empathetic to the world and its hurts. Yet, how human a country! It is replete with hideous mistakes from the Palmer Raids, to McCarthyism and the Red Scare, to the Vietnam War. The gash of slavery hasn’t healed, and racism has left its mark.

America’s genius is that it realizes itself as a work in progress. 

Our major weakness, it always seemed to me, was the obverse of our strength: wishing our ways on others; wanting them to see the light we see. 

Like so many others, my attitudes are conflicted, hypocritical and without a simple, elegant defense. About 30 years ago, I first raised the issue of immigration’s effect on the nation. My concern then was that Spanish was becoming a second language. If that were to happen, I feared the country would enter into the same debilitating, two-nation status that has divided Canada and Belgium.

Also, I have argued against the way immigration has left its mark on Europe, especially from North African migrants who have set up enclaves where there is no attempt to integrate and where their religion has maintained them in isolation; angry minorities in their urban strongholds. That undermines the value of the journey both to the migrant and the host country.

I have come to believe that Spanish isn’t the threat it appeared at that time, and that our ability to absorb and prosper as a result of immigration is at a real and present danger of being wasted, denying us the talent flow that has made us a beacon to the world.

Never forget that every deportation is a human disaster: a life and a family sent into an unknown purgatory.

Recently, I had a weeklong stay at a Rhode Island hospital and marveled at doctors who were from distant lands, including Iran and Arab countries. In the late reaches of one night, I had a crisis. My room was flooded with nurses and their assistants, all helping and caring. From their accents, I was certain that at least four of my angels weren’t born here. I was glad of them.

Just as I am glad that we lead the world in high tech and, at the apex of its leadership, sit immigrants. They dominate at the top tech behemoths.

Not every immigrant has added to America’s greatness; some have brought with them creeds that are hard to accommodate, some have brought crime. Overall, each wave of immigrants has lifted America and its people to new heights.

From those early settlers to the German filmmakers, to the Scandinavians who planted the Great Plains, to the Irish who have informed our culture, to the Italian builders, to the German filmmakers, who came in the 1920s and 1930s and created the Hollywood we know and treasure, to the Jewish refugees from Europe who gave us everything from great music to the magic of Broadway, to high science and lifesaving medical research.

When I first arrived in New York, I wrote to a friend, “This is an extraordinary place, less of a mixing bowl and more of a stew, where all of the ingredients remain intact and yet work together in a kind of wondrous unity.” I wouldn’t withdraw or amend a word of that more than 60 years later.

People move because they aspire to a better life for themselves and their families. Grabbing those who slipped in and sending them to all they sought to leave behind is, to this grateful immigrant, un-American.

We are a big country, big-hearted, too, and we have room for these big contributors to our future.

The Birth of a New Reactor: Thorium Past and Present

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If you are designing a car from scratch, there are certain essentials to begin with. You need to start with the wheels on the corners, for example.

But when it comes to building a nuclear reactor, things are different. There are hundreds and maybe thousands of ways of doing it. The constant is that you need fissionable fuel and a moderator to collect the heat and manage the neutron flux.

That embarrassment of choice — now reflected in the number of small modular reactors (SMRs) vying for market acceptance — may be why thorium reactors, which began with promise, have been left on the shelf.

The nuclear establishment, goaded by the Nuclear Navy’s Adm. Hyman Rickover, wanted light water technology. That is what the first 100-plus U.S. civilian reactors employed.

At the dawn of the civilian nuclear age, it was a straight contest between two fuels: uranium and thorium. Thorium is fertile but not fissile: It can’t start a chain reaction unless it is triggered by a small amount of the isotope uranium-235.

Once this happens, thorium becomes uranium-232 and fizzes wonderfully with a steady stream of neutrons, producing heat in the moderator, which is where the first steps in making electricity are taken.

That heat is captured to create steam that turns a turbine.

Thorium was used in part in the first power-producing, commercial nuclear reactor: the 60-megawatt Shippingport Atomic Power Station in Beaver County, Pennsylvania. With three different fuel assemblies, it ran for 25 years, starting in 1957. It used solid fuel, which was to become the standard for civilian nuclear power.

Meanwhile, at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, under its director, physicist Alvin Weinberg, work went ahead on what would become a legendary fast-breeder thorium reactor, using a liquid fuel embedded in molten salt. It went critical in 1965 and operated for five years before it was closed by the Atomic Energy Commission (forerunner of the Department of Energy) in a political move.

A fast reactor uses extra neutrons to create new fuel and burn up radioactive waste. The process is akin to perpetual motion — but isn’t, of course.

Now a charismatic nuclear engineer, Yash Patel, founder and CEO of AMReactor, is planning to bring thorium back as a viable future option for space exploration, power generation and, eventually, ship propulsion.

Patel told me that his reactors – he has designs for a microreactor (under 20 MW) and for a SMR (250 MW). The planned reactors are molten salt-moderated, thorium-fueled fast reactors.

He believes they will not only be cheaper, but will also operate better than the SMRs now entering the market.

Patel’s plan for Austin-registered AMReactor is to outsource as much of the fabrication as possible.

A fast reactor is called a breeder reactor because it generates more neutrons than are needed to produce fission, and these transmute waste into additional fuel.

Patel went to school in California and while looking for a career, a break came that changed the trajectory of his life. He got an internship with NASA at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. There he worked on Curiosity, the plutonium-fueled Mars rover. His nuclear love affair, he told me, was “complete and instant.”

From NASA, he went to Texas A&M and graduated in nuclear engineering. He was well along with his PhD, when a family illness caused him to abandon it.

Patel lists two great blessings in his life. “The first was that I moved to America from India. The second was attending Texas A&M. That was another wonderful break.”

After a stint in biopharma, where he prospered, Patel started designing reactors in all his waking hours along with a friend, D’mitri Scott, now the chief technology officer at AMReactor.

Patel said the numbers didn’t work for their plans until they switched to thorium. It was a eureka moment.

There followed a period which he likened to Bill Gates and Steve Wozniak working on the first computer operating system. The two young men were obsessed and inspired by what they believed was extraordinary. “Our girlfriends, now our wives, saw very little of us. We sometimes worked all night,” Patel said.

With thorium, they found all they were looking for: a stable source of reliable power that was safe, couldn’t melt down, and was able to handle most of the fission products.

And it was proliferation-proof because of the presence of intense gamma radiation, which made it hard to process, steal or divert. “Thorium was the winner,” he said.

A new reactor is on the way.

 

Air Conditioning Costs Threaten Summer of Sun Belt Catastrophe

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The summer of our discontent is at hand. When I asked a professional weather forecaster what we might expect this season, he said, “Hades.”

That was as disturbing as everything else in this disturbing year.

America has a summer culture. You could say the whole of the Northern Hemisphere has one, but there is a special reverence, a profound intimacy that Americans have with summer. It is a happy place for healing hurts, meeting old friends, making new ones, and the extraordinary joy of just basking, even romancing.

The British usually make jokes about summer. One goes, “I missed summer. I went to a movie and when I came out, it was over.”

Clearly, they aren’t making jokes like that this summer when temperatures have set records and forced people to do extreme things to cool off. Untold deaths have resulted.

The French have always had their own reverence for summer and, as a nation, down tools in August and head to the beach, often in the South.

They, like the British, are suffering in the current heat wave because there isn’t a lot of air conditioning — almost none in homes and a limited amount in public buildings. Only one in five British homes has air conditioning. In France, there is more in the south, but not in the north around Paris. It was never needed.

I have been in London when it is hot, but not as hot as it has been so far this summer. Sitting in a theater in London in summer was excruciating, made the more so because Britain is humid.

Anyone who lives in America’s coastal regions, especially the South, knows the awful combo of heat and humidity.

Deaths from heat in Europe are widespread and are still being reported.

Air conditioning has shaped America for the last seven decades. It has made living with year-round comfort possible in the South, the Southwest and the West.

If it weren’t for our ability — with enough electricity — to reverse the climate in places like Florida, Texas and Arizona, the migration from the north wouldn’t have happened. Once there was air conditioning, people felt they could live comfortably anywhere in the nation.

Even so, all isn’t well. Indeed, this may be the summer of catastrophe, and deaths from heat and uncontrolled fires. The prognosis isn’t good.

The impending social pushback was pointed up by my colleague Herman K. Trabish, writing in Utility Dive. He was attending the Edison Electric Institute’s annual meeting in Las Vegas in early June, and wrote in a brief, “Protesters shouting affordability claims and chanting slogans interrupted a speech by NV Energy President and CEO Brandon Barkhuff.”

Trabish continued, “The confrontation shows the extent to which rising energy costs have stoked public anger, raising pressure on utilities and their regulators.”

The protests were directed at a demand charge approved by the utility commission that wouldn’t take effect until next year, but it opened deep anxiety in southern Nevada about the cost of electricity in weather that is getting hotter and hotter.

Protest leader Leslie Vega said, after the protesters were escorted out of the meeting, “In Las Vegas, one of the fastest-warming cities in the country, you cannot live without electricity.”

Vega’s remarks might well reflect a truth for the whole of the South, Texas and the Southwest. Cheap electricity has been a factor in the migration of tens of millions from the northern states. It was never mentioned; it was just there.

Now the price of electricity is rising inexorably as temperatures appear to rise with equal, threatening vigor.

The natural response from those facing disaster in the heat zones will be to blame the electric utilities and the ubiquitous data centers. There will be calls to nationalize investor-owned utilities like NV Energy, and calls will go out to curb utilities that are already publicly owned, including rural electric cooperatives and those owned by towns and cities.

Additionally, residents in many states with wildfire exposure will, from time to time, have their power cut off entirely for periods to reduce the risk of new fires caused by sparks from line shorting. That will cause new anger.

Most of the world accepts that extreme weather, now common, is associated with global climate change, which is blamed in part on greenhouse gas emissions. That isn’t accepted by the Trump administration, which favors further use of greenhouse gas-producing fossil fuels. The president has said that global warming is a “hoax.”

Hot people have short tempers. They can be expected to have something to say as they suffer, and death tolls rise.

The New Media: A Pea of News in a Mattress of Words

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Journalism is choking on the low-hanging fruit.

Every day hundreds of newsletters and podcasts flood inboxes. These are almost entirely concerned with political goings-on in Washington.

But this isn’t to say that journalism is alive and well. In fact, this is a symptom of journalism’s straitened times.

Mostly, there is just a pea of news in a mattress of words.

The web has made the delivery of journalism cheap and easy, but it hasn’t helped with the high cost of covering the news, of sending reporters to see what is happening in the courts, the state houses, and overseas; or in science and technology, which so affect modern life.

It also hasn’t enabled news organizations to spend months on an investigation that may or may not pay off.

Instead, every minuscule development in politics is treated as a big, breaking event, and is analyzed exhaustively.

Analysis is substituting for reporting. The actual snippet of reporting is often attributed to a newspaper like The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times, or one of the news services, say, Reuters.

Analyzing nothing much doesn’t change it to something.

Much of what is rushed out as news wouldn’t get past an old-fashioned editor like Jim Michaels of Forbes, who I am told, in that magazine’s print heyday would chide reporters, saying, “You’re telling me things I already know.”

The ease of distribution and recording has also caused blogs with attendant webinars to sprout across the news ecosystem. Much of it is in the form of analysis, more and more analysis of less and less.

The big new entry in my inbox is magazines which were once monthly or weekly, but have joined the frenzy with daily newsletters. These include The Economist, The New Yorker, The Spectator, The Atlantic and even Vanity Fair.

I subscribed because they were weekly or monthly. I didn’t want a daily gusher.

There is also a plethora of digital-only publications — the best in my inbox is ProPublica, which manages original reporting.

The big ones which are, almost, substitute newspapers but are heavy on political coverage include Politico (which is broader) and Semafor. A new entry, NOTUS, is staffed by former Washington Post reporters. So far, it is heavily political.

I remember when people bought the Post for the Style section and its other goodies, not just its hometown industry of politics.

A further indication of the news drought, despite the torrents of words, is how many of the new dailies are quoting what was said on television. Time was when no print outlet would deign to do that. It was expected for television to pick up from the newspapers, not the other way round.

There was a reason behind the old pecking order: Broadcasting needs to have people say things in front of a camera or a microphone. By contrast, print’s best stories come from sources who are keen not to be identified, let alone go on television or radio.

In today’s vengeful times, unidentified sources are essential, to be used sparingly, but nonetheless essential. The reader has to depend on the high standing of the platform and the integrity of the byline to judge the truthfulness.

There is no doubt that the tumultuous politics that began when Donald Trump entered the arena have been good for cable news stations, which have morphed into political channels, shamelessly partisan. The politics have also been good for newsletters and blogs.

But will that be true after the Trump era? The strictly conservative New York Sun reports traffic to MAGA websites is down dramatically.

To escape the virtual political overload, I reach for the three heavyweights among newspapers: The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and, though diminished, The Washington Post.

What the bulk of the press, from weeklies to big city papers to the new digital entrants, need is a sound source of income so that they have the money to do the job, to weed out local scandal, corruption and abuse, and to develop entertaining writers.

You get what you pay for and in the news business, since it lost its advertising revenue to the likes of Google, you are getting political froth: opinions about the news — most days the same opinion with shadings of difference from many publishers.

Yesterday, I counted 19 of these offerings in my inbox. I gave up on the breathlessness and read a book.

Via AI, an Ancient Roman Historian’s Account of Trump II

19th-century etching of Suetonius, author of "The Twelve Caesars"

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Via AI, an Ancient Roman Historian’s Account of Trump II

If the Roman Emperor Caligula were alive today, you can bet that he would cheer the UFC fight on the South Lawn of the White House, which President Trump is hosting to mark his 80th birthday, and the nation’s 250th anniversary.

Caligula, who reigned from 37-41 AD, hosted lavish spectacles and games for his birthday and other occasions at Roman venues. According to the Roman historian Suetonius, author of “The Twelve Caesars,” these celebrations were notorious for their extravagance and cruelty, including instances where he forced senators to run alongside his chariot for miles or ordered spectators thrown into the arena.

There are many parallels between the twisted Caesar’s reign and the Trump administrations.

For some fast fun, I asked Gemini, Google’s AI assistant, to write an account of Trump’s second administration in the style of Suetonius, whose juicy history of Julius Caesar and the first eleven emperors of the Roman Empire is one of the only sources of Caligula’s horrid reign.

Here is the slightly hallucinatory result:

The Life of Donald the Second Ancestry and Early Omens

He was born of the lineage of the Trumps, a clan enriched by the building of great monuments and towers of glass. His father, Fred, had amassed vast wealth in the provinces of New York, which the son multiplied through daring spectacles and the renaming of structures after his own image.

Before his second elevation to the principate, many omens appeared. It is said that a leaden bullet grazed his very ear during an oration in the fields of Pennsylvania, yet he arose bloody and defiant, shouting to the crowds to fight. This escape was viewed by his followers as a sign of divine favor from Mars himself.

The Second Ascent to the Throne

Having once held the supreme power and lost it to the elder statesman Joseph of Delaware, Donald did not retire to quiet contemplation. Instead, he waged a relentless four-year campaign from his seaside villa at Mar-a-Lago, which resembled an imperial court.

In the Year of the Ballot, he routed the faction of the Democrats led by the priestess Kamala, securing not only the electoral college but the popular vote of the entire Republic.

His return to the capital was celebrated with grand spectacles, and the Senate was quickly filled with his most loyal tribunes.

The Purge of the Bureaucrats and the New Court

Upon re-entering the White House, his first decree was the systematic dismantling of the “Deep State,” which he likened to a hidden cabal of corrupt patricians.

  • He stripped thousands of public servants of their protections, replacing them with fiercely loyal clients.
  • He appointed Elon, a wealthy maker of celestial chariots, and Vivek, a young merchant, to oversee a new commission to hollow out the treasury’s waste.
  • He banished traditional magistrates and elevated loyal praetorians to head the legions and the courts.

Habits, Vices, and Public Spectacles

In his personal conduct, Donald retained the eccentricities of his first reign, though hardened by age and past grievances.

He eschewed standard imperial dispatches, choosing instead to govern by electronic edicts broadcast at all hours of the night to millions of citizens.

  • Diet: He disdained the refined banquets of the elite, preferring the charred flesh of cattle and the sparkling syrups of the West.
  • Amusements: He spent his days on manicured lawns, striking small white spheres with iron clubs, surrounded by courtiers seeking his favor.
  • Temperament: He rewarded absolute loyalty with high honors, but those who crossed him were subjected to public mockery, branded with insulting epithets, and cast out into political exile.

Foreign Tributes and Border Walls

Toward foreign nations, Donald acted with the unpredictability of a capricious deity.

He demanded heavy tribute from the allied kingdoms of Europe, threatening to withdraw the protection of the Republic’s legions if they did not pay.

He placed vast tariffs upon the silks and wares of the Seres (the Chinese), initiating a fierce war of merchants.

At the southern frontier, he renewed the construction of his massive wall with frantic energy, boasting that he had successfully stemmed the migration of the barbarian tribes.

The End of the Reign

As his second term drew to its close, the Republic remained deeply fractured, split into warring factions that could no longer agree on the truth of things.

Some viewed him as a savior who restored the golden age of the Republic, while others whispered in fear of an absolute monarchy.

Having fulfilled the constitutional limit of his rule, he prepared to pass the mantle to his chosen Caesar, James David of Ohio, ensuring his shadow would loom over the state for generations to come.