In nearly every city in the United States, and many around the world, bulldozers are busy making dreams come true: Leveling land for a single-family home on a lot.

Who doesn’t want a lovely home with a nice bit of land on some tree-lined street? It is the American Dream manifested in bricks and mortar.

Trouble is dreams can morph into nightmares. A growing nightmare across the nation is the incursion of homes onto farmland – land that will be out of production essentially forever.

All around Washington, I watched year after year for decades lovely farms in adjacent Maryland and Virginia being turned into suburbs — sometimes 70 and more miles from the city center.

It has been a simple tradeoff: There has been a relentless demand for single-family homes and builders see farms, usually family-owned, as ripe fruit ready for picking. When age is an issue, they almost always sell. Farming is a tough, 365-days-a-year undertaking, and a fat check at the end of a farming career is irresistible.

No villains here, but there are consequences. Mark Twain said, “Buy land, they aren’t making it anymore.” Sadly, Twain didn’t take his own advice and instead invested in the tech world of the day: He lost a fortune in a company that was trying to perfect the typewriter.

Farmers are special to me. They are the real renaissance men and women. They know a lot about a lot, from being able to gauge the pH levels of soil on their tongues to how to birth a calf, repair a tractor, or raise a barn.

They also know a thing or two about how the government works and filling out forms. They are regulated but have no guaranteed rate of return. They are as subject to the weather over their own land as floods around the world.

Businesses talk about being rewarded for taking a risk. Farmers take a risk with every seed they plant — and the returns aren’t guaranteed.

But, as Gail Chaddock, host, and producer of “No Farms, No Future,” a podcast of the American Farmland Trust, said, “You can’t blame the farmers, and you can’t blame the developers. But the land we’ll need for food production in the future is being taken.”

What is happening is the irreversible destruction of millions of acres of prime farmland every year. A reverence for farmland needs to enter the culture, she said.

No longer, however, is it just developers buying up farms. Farmland is now being sought by another kind of developer: renewable energy companies. They are buying it for large solar arrays. They also contract with farmers to install windmills which, while not taking so much land out of agricultural use, cumulatively take a lot.

But it is solar farms that are the real problem. Britain is thinking of legislating to prohibit the use of agricultural land for energy production. Other countries are waking to the realization that a field of shining solar collectors is not the same as a field of waving wheat or even lowly cabbages.

As over time we exported our manufacturing, we also have exported our food production. What was once raised on truck farms around the cities is now raised in neighboring Canada and Mexico, or as far away as Chile and South Africa.

There is no compelling reason to cover huge acreages with solar panels. Roofs, rights of way, and urban parking lots could be pressed into service. Railroad tracks cry out for a solar canopy.

Just because energy or housing is a higher economic use for land today doesn’t mean that it won’t have a higher future value, feeding future generations.

The nation’s electric utilities are facing revolutionary changes as big as any they have faced since Thomas Edison got the whole thing going in 1882.

Between now and 2050 – just 28 years — practically everything must change. The goal is to reach net zero, the stage at which the utilities stop putting greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide, into the atmosphere.

But in that same timeframe, the demand for electricity is expected to at least double and, according to some surveys, to exceed doubling as electric vehicles replace fossil-fueled vehicles and as other industries, like cement and steel manufacturing, along with general manufacturing, go electric.

Just eliminating fossil fuel alone is a tall order — 22 percent of the current generating mix is coal and 38 percent is natural gas.

Half of the generation will, in theory, go offline while demand for electricity soars.

The industry is resolutely struggling with this dilemma while a few, sotto voce, wonder how it can be achieved.

True, some exciting technological options are coming along: Hydrogen, ocean currents, small modular nuclear reactors, so-called long-drawdown batteries, and carbon capture, storage, and utilization. The question is whether any of these will be ready to be deployed on a scale that will make a difference by the target date of 2050.

There are other schemes — still just schemes — to use the new electrified transportation fleets as a giant national battery. The idea is that your electric vehicle will be charged at night, or at other times when there is an abundance of power, and that you will sell the power back to the utility for the evening peak when we all fire up our homes and electricity demand zooms.

That is just an idea and no structure for this partnership between consumer and utility exists, nor is there any idea of how the customer will be compensated for helping the utility in its hours of need. It is hard to see how there will be enough money in the transaction to cause people to want to help the utility as besides the cost of charging their vehicles, the batteries will deteriorate faster.

The ongoing digitization of utilities means they will be able to better manage their flows and to practice more of what is called distributed energy resources (DER), which can include such things as interrupting certain nonessential users by agreement.

David Naylor, president of Rayburn Electric Cooperative, bordering Dallas, says DER will save him as much as 10 percent of Rayburn’s output, but not enough to take care of the escalating demand.

Like many utilities, Rayburn is bracing for the future, expecting to burn more natural gas and add solar as fast as possible. It is also upgrading its lines, called connectors, to carry more electricity.

The latter highlights another major challenge for utilities: Transmission.

The West generates plenty of renewable power electricity during the day, some of which goes to waste because it is available when it is not needed in the region, but when it would be a boon in the East.

The simple solution is to build more long-distance transmission. Forget about it. To get the many state and local authorizations and to overcome the not-in-my-backyard crowd, most judge, wouldn’t be possible.

Instead, utilities are looking to buttress the grid and move power over a stronger grid. In fact, there isn’t one grid but three: Eastern, Western and the anomalous Texas grid, ERCOT, which is confined to that state and, by design, poorly connected to the other two, although that may change.

Advocates of this strengthening of the grid abound. The federal government is on board with major funding. Shorter new lines between strong and weak spots would go a long way to making the movement of electricity across the nation easier. They would also move the nation nearer to a truly national grid. But even building short electric connections of a few hundred miles is a fraught business.

The task of the utilities — there are just over 3,000 of them, mostly small — is going to be to change totally while retooling without shutting off the power. The car companies are totally changing, too. But they can shut down to retool. Not so the utilities. Theirs must be a revolution without disruption, the light that doesn’t fail.

Once at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco, I went to check in, and when I reached for my wallet it wasn’t there. The clerk said that I wouldn’t be able to check in without a credit card.

I explained that I had, mercifully, in another pocket, enough cash to pay for the stay. Reluctantly, they took more than enough of it for the two days and made a big point of telling me not to sign for even a cup of coffee.

Nowadays, I doubt they would accept my cash deposit.

Real people carry credit cards. Non-people — a subspecies of the American customer — are without. Woe to those.

Today there are more of these non-people because one of the lasting effects of the COVID pandemic is that cash is out, and plastic is all. No plastic, no go.

Hotels, airlines and even coffee shops have gone cashless. Ostensibly, this is because it is healthier. Truthfully, they don’t want to be bothered. Cash is a problem; credit is easier. In fact, from the vendor’s point of view, cash sucks, credit is cool.

At a large hotel in Orange County, Calif., where I am attending a conference, I tried to buy a coffee at Starbucks. “I don’t take cash,” said the barista, primly. “Just credit cards and room service.”

This caused me to wonder again about the legions of Americans who don’t have credit cards, some of whom don’t want them, but most don’t have credit or have been turned down.

If we have a recession, which now seems inevitable, there will be more people without credit and immobilized by the post-COVID realities of the plastic-favored world.

Cash on hand won’t save them. They are the unbanked, a lesser order of our citizenry.

For starters, millions of the working poor are mostly without credit. It is hard to worry about the niceties of credit when you struggle to get food to the table for the family.

In this new world, the cardless also are immobilized.

Consider what being without plastic means: You can’t make a reservation on Amtrak or an airline. You must go to an airport, as airlines no longer have free-standing ticket offices. Then you will learn that you must use a reverse ATM to buy a card with cash to buy a ticket. Amtrak still takes cash, but you must go to the railroad station.

The first consequence is, in most cases, you will pay a lot more if you try to buy the ticket on the day of travel. Those tempting “book now and save” ads are only for credit card holders.

You can’t get to the railroad station or the airport on a ride-sharing service because they work only with credit cards.

So the luckless, who probably don’t have plastic because of financial problems, will pay more because they will be paying mostly at the last minute, and they will be charged to convert their cash to plastic at the airport. These travelers won’t be able to buy a drink or internet service because that requires you to file a credit card before you board.

It is an old story: the poor pay more. Now they may not be allowed to pay with the currency of the land.

An odd byproduct of the move to plastic is a further blow to privacy. Cellphones and security cameras have already stripped away much of our privacy. Will the fact that this very morning I bought a latte and a croissant with a credit card cause me to be inundated with internet advertisements for designer coffee and pastry?

What would the deduction be by a suspicious partner if the credit card bill showed two lattes and two croissants?

Bring back cash. It was universal, left no record, and was preferred by merchants. Now they don’t want it, even for a coffee.

EDINBURGH, Scotland — These are trying times for the British, as I am finding on a visit to Scotland with a brief foray south into England. All isn’t right with their world, and there are expectations that the winter will be the hardest to bear since the long-ago days of the end of World War II.

The price of everything is up with inflation at 10 percent and predicted to top that by as much as double.

Compounding that, there is a sense that nobody is in charge. The new prime minister, Liz Truss, has had a disastrous beginning with a revolt of the rank and file of her own Conservative Party. She has had to eat her words and, according to the New Statesman, has had the worst imaginable beginning for a new prime minister. Truss seems to have abandoned traditional conservative principles and that, together with her own wobbly trajectory, has the party worried.

The centerpiece of doubt about the prime minister is a mini-budget that her chancellor of the exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng, introduced just after she was elected to the leadership. It called for more spending and a cut in the top income tax rate from 45 percent to 40 percent.

This was supposed to encourage business, but even diehard conservatives couldn’t justify a lot of new spending — needed to ease the burden of energy costs — while slashing revenue. Rather than making businesses happy, the proposal sent the pound into a free-fall and the markets into turmoil.

According to her many critics, Truss did a U-turn, a maneuver she has done often in her career.

Another misstep happened as the Conservatives assembled in the central English city of Birmingham for their annual party congress: The prime minister refused to guarantee that social spending would be linked to the cost of living.

Complex social obligations in Britain are lumped together under the rubric “benefit.”

“No, no, no,” cried the party, including cabinet members. Benefits had to be indexed to the cost of living.

But not all of the mess is of Truss’ making. Things were in sorry shape when the party sacked the previous prime minister, the notoriously articulate but incompetent Boris Johnson.

The economy was faltering, labor unrest was building, and issues such as education, health care, immigration and the Northern Irish border demanded strong, deft leadership.

The result has been that the Tories, as the Conservatives are called, are between 14 and 30 points behind the opposition Labor Party in the polls, and they are expecting a drubbing in the next election in two years unless Truss can pull things together. The somber mood in Birmingham suggests that gloom will turn to doom.

The Truss government is set to subsidize heating costs this winter, which promises real hardship across the board, from pubs closing at a record rate to middle-class households digging out the woolies.

The primary fuel for making electricity and home heating is natural gas, which has increased tenfold over historical levels because of Russia’s war in Ukraine. The subsidy isn’t disputed, but it will take British borrowing to new levels even as interest costs are soaring — an ugly combination.

Another open issue is how to fix Britain’s beloved National Health Service, which has fallen into institutional disrepair. Waiting lists are longer than they have ever been, even for minor procedures, and successive management shakeups haven’t solved the problems. Yet the health service remains the most popular government program in Britain, and Truss will have to produce something more than Band-Aids for the NHS if its failures aren’t to be, albeit unfairly, laid to Truss.

Another headache for the embattled prime minister is that organized labor is on the march again. Strikes, euphemistically called industrial action in Britain, are back. The railroads are being hit, and there is some sense that the bad old days when Britain was the Sick Man of Europe, before Margaret Thatcher, may be returning.

There is a backstory that isn’t being aired much in the largely Conservative British newspapers: the huge, self-inflicted wound of Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union, known as Brexit. Its effects are everywhere, and there is a complicity in not pointing this out: We voted for it, and we own it. It wasn’t a party vote, so Brexit remains a common guilt.

Long after Truss has gone, Brexit will remain the guiding fact of Britain’s place in the world. A place less certain than at any time in its long history.

Winston Churchill used to advise young people to read “Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations,” the oft-updated compilation of brief quotes from just about anyone who said something memorable. Of course, Churchill added more than a few of his own. He may have added more to the storehouse of aphorisms than any writer since Shakespeare.

But others have been no slouches. If you want to go back a bit, Napoleon wasn’t unquotable, and such writers as George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde were prolific with wit and wisdom served up in brevity. Mark Twain was a treasury of quotable sayings all by himself. In our time, Steve Jobs has made some pithy additions, and Taylor Swift, in her lyrics, has some arresting and quotable lines.

The quote, to me, is distilled wisdom in a few words, often funny, whether it came from Dorothy Parker, Abraham Lincoln or the Beatles. A picture may be worth a thousand words, a quote believed to have been first formulated by Henrik Ibsen, but a well-chosen aphorism is worth many more than a thousand words.

So, it is thrilling to know that Victoria Yeager, widow of Chuck Yeager, aviation’s greatest hero, has collected his sayings into a book, “101 Chuck Yeager-isms: Wit & Wisdom from America’s hero.”

Yeager came from the small town of Hamlin, W.Va. Even today, it has a population of just over 1,000. Being from one of West Virginia’s famous hollows, Yeager said of it, “I was born so fer up a holler, they had to pipe daylight in.”

When the town erected a statue of Yeager, he said, “There wasn’t a pigeon in Hamlin until they erected a statue of me.”

The journey began modestly with Yeager joining the Army as a private after high school and led to his success as a fighter ace with 11.5 kills — one involved another U.S. aircraft and, hence, the half — but Victoria Yeager told me there were more not officially recognized. She said he may have shot down as many as 15 German aircraft over Europe.

Shot down himself over France in 1944, the Germans watched his parachute float down and went out to find him. Yeager said, “There ain’t a German in the world that can catch a West Virginian in the woods.” And they didn’t.

In an interview for “White House Chronicle” on PBS, Victoria told me that Yeager always insisted that there be fun in everything, whether it was aerial fighting, flying through the sound barrier, or flying aircraft that might kill him. “You gotta have fun in life, whatever I did, I always included fun,” he said.

Yeager, Victoria said, maintained critical aircraft like the X-1, in which he broke the sound barrier himself. That way, he knew and there would be no excuses. He said, “In the end, or at the moment of truth, there are only excuses or results.”

Victoria told me the impression given in the movie “The Right Stuff” of Yeager as a reckless daredevil who rode a horse up to his aircraft, took off, and broke the sound barrier was pure Hollywood. Yeager was a consultant to Tom Wolfe during the writing of the book “The Right Stuff” to ensure accuracy. In fact, Victoria said, it was on the ninth flight that he broke the sound barrier. It is true that the horizontal stabilizer on the plane wasn’t working, but Yeager was able to control the plane with a manual trim tab, she added.

Yeager fought in World War II because it was his duty to fight, as he saw it. After being shot down, he wanted to keep fighting; when the military wanted to send him home, he appealed the decision all the way up to Gen. Dwight Eisenhower and won the right to fly in combat again. He said of duty, “You’ve got a job to do, you do it, especially in the military, when I was picked to fly the X-1, it was my duty to fly it, and I did.”

Yeager’s philosophy may have been summed up in this quote, “You do what you can for as long as you can, and when you finally can’t, you do the next best thing; you back up, but you don’t give up.”

That is the spirit that kept Yeager flying for pleasure until his death at 97.

In our carping, whining, blaming times, it is a tonic to read the thoughts and something of the life of a real hero. Thank you, Victoria Yeager, for assembling this book.

The wreckage from COVID continues to litter our lives. We work differently, play differently and are entertained differently.

For all I know, romance isn’t how it was. How can it be? So many fell in love, or just into dating, at work. When Zooming at home, that doesn’t quite cut it.

Customer service of all kinds has been laid waste. Excuse the bitter laughter, but what was for a while called the service economy was sent packing by COVID, as companies in droves found out they could serve less and get the same money.

Let us start with the airlines. If you have had the misfortune to take a flight, you are as likely suffering from your own brand of PTSD. You may get counseling at the YMCA or find a support group online.

First off, booking online. This isn’t for the faint of heart. Some people aren’t computer-wise but don’t think you can call the airlines and get help. That is so last century. You had best find one of the few independent travel agents still in business. This person, you soon learn, will book you on Expedia and charge you a fee for doing the obvious. What price hassle reduction?

The TSA security infuriates us all. More so since COVID, because no one wants to put on the uniform when they can get work where everyone doesn’t hate them.

It didn’t have to be this way. If the airlines and their friendly regulator, the FAA, had just put locks on cockpit doors after the first hijackings in the 1950s, chances are there would have been no 9/11, no TSA, and I could keep my shoes on and TSA hands off. If you like being patted down, get a dog.

Then there is the cash conundrum. On banknotes, it says, “This note is legal tender for all debts public and private.” Not anymore. Try using cash at the airline counter. Not since COVID do they take it. I saw a sad situation when a young woman, already pulled up short for having to pay for checking her backpack, was told to convert her cash into a credit voucher at a machine, which has suddenly appeared near the check-in — for another fee, of course. Friendly skies, eh?

Once you have paid extra for luggage, extra for a marginally larger seat, extra to board early, and extra for Wi-Fi, you might think all is well, and it is time for the boarding scrum. No way. The flight is canceled. No pilot. To my mind, that would be a critical job in aviation, and if you have the temerity to run an airline, you might want to have a few extra pilots. Soon, the airlines may ask passengers to pop forward and handle the controls — for a fee, of course.

Banks responded to COVID by closing branches and putting ATM machines in parking lots.

Maybe you have tried to pay your credit card bill when it is already in arrears because the bank card company has stopped sending out paper bills without telling you? Next thing is they are calling you in the middle of dinner to tell you that your credit is being damaged by your being tardy paying. “No problem,” you tell the recorded voice, which has just ruined dinner.

Don’t do that unless you have half a day to spare because you don’t call the bank and speak to someone — it used to be a person, but they are now a “representative” who has just crossed the border and sent to a call center by a Southern governor. They know enough English to tell you they are trying to collect a debt, not solve your problem because you don’t have the paper bill.

You give up. You don’t care about your credit score anymore. You read this person the information from your check and ask them to take the money and do something unsanitary with their card. Over? Hell no. Later, you will get a letter from the “customer relations team” telling you impolitely that your check didn’t clear because you gave them the wrong routing number.

Hotels also have jumped at the opportunity to stick it to you since the COVID outbreak. You have to beg to have your room cleaned, even though you pay hundreds of dollars a night. More begging for towels. When you complain about how you are being treated, they say this is for your safety due to COVID.

The hospitality industry is reeling from COVID. Yes. Reeling it in.

“Journalists can be so good at reporting others, but are seldom good at reporting themselves.”

That is what my friend Kevin d’Arcy, a distinguished British journalist, wrote in an article titled “Living in Interesting Times,” published recently on the website of the United Kingdom Chapter of the Association of European Journalists.

D’Arcy, who has worked for major publications in the U.K. and Canada, including The Economist and the Financial Times, argues, “The biggest change is that the job of journalism no longer belongs to journalists alone. To some extent, this has always been true but largely because of social media, the scale is touching the sky.

“This matters for the simple reason that the public lacks the traditional protection of legal and social rules. There is nobody in control. … The common realm is sinking fast.”

So true. But his argument raises the question: Is journalism itself doing its job these days?

I usually eschew any discussion about journalism — its present state, imagined biases and its future. Dan Raviv, a former correspondent for CBS News on radio and television, told me in a television interview, “My job is simple: I try to find out what is going on, then I tell people.”

I have never heard the job of a journalist better explained.

Of course, the journalist knows other things: the tricks of the trade, like news judgment; how to get the reader reading, the viewer watching, and the listener listening and, it is hoped, keep their attention.

Professionals know how to guesstimate how much readers, viewers and listeners might want to know about a particular issue. They know how to avoid libel and keep clear of dubious, manipulative sources. But journalism’s skills are fading, along with the newspapers and the broadcast outlets that fostered and treasured them.

Publications are dying or surviving on an uncertain drip from a life-support system. Newspapers that once boasted global coverage are now little more than pamphlets. The Baltimore Sun, for example, in its day a great newspaper, once had 12 overseas bureaus. No more.

Three newspapers dominate: The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and The New York Times. They got out in front and owed their position to successfully pushing their brands on the internet early. Now they have advertising revenue and even more revenue from the introduction of paywalls.

Local news coverage may come back as it once was, but this time through local digital sites. I prefer traditional newspapers, but the future of local news appears to be online.

A major and critical threat to journalism comes from within: It is a dearth of talent. You get what you pay for; publishers aren’t paying for talent, and that is corrosive. Newspaper and regional TV and radio salaries have always been abysmally low, and now they are the worst they have been in 50 years. This is discouraging needed talent.

For more than 30 years, I owned a newsletter publishing company in Washington, and I hired summer interns — and paid them. Some of the early recruits went on to success in journalism, and some to remarkable success.

Later, I got the same bright journalism students — young men and women so able that you could send them to a hearing on Capitol Hill or assign them a complex story with confidence.

The most gifted, alas, weren’t headed for newsrooms but for law school. They told me as much as they were interested in reporting, they weren’t interested in low-wage lives.

Most reporters across America earn less than $40,000. Even at the mighty Washington Post, a unionized newspaper, beat reporters make just $62,000 yearly.

To tell the story of a turbulent world, you need gifted, creative, well-read people committed to the job. The bold and the bright will not commit to a life of penury.

To my friend Kevin, I must say, if we can’t offer a viable alternative to the social media cacophony, if we have a second-rate workforce, if the news product is inadequate and untouched by knowledgeable human editors, then the slide will continue. Editing by computer is not editing. I appreciate editing, and I know how much better my work is for it.

The journalism that Kevin and I have reveled in over these many decades will perish without new talent. Talent will out and, I hope, provide the answers that our trade needs.

The Uber model is changing America. First it made a business out of the family car. Then it made a business out of the spare room or vacation house.

Soon it might make a business out of the roof over your head.

That is the dream of a group of hugely successful entrepreneurs who see roofs as the next big monetization of a widely held capital asset.

This group, which at present chooses to remain anonymous, believes that with the right communications network and smart computer linkage, the nation’s sun-trapping roofs could become a new source of electricity and, if connected to in-home batteries, a virtual power plant of scale and reliability.

What Uber did for ride sharing and what Airbnb did for lodging, these entrepreneurs believe could be done for the electric utility industry.

One of them told me, “A network can be many different things, but in the context of a network of potentially millions of solar rooftops, it means virtually real-time capture and analysis of billions of data points. Only a wireless network, using the latest broadband technologies – similar to those that support our smart phones – can handle that workload.”

Rewind the clock to when solar cells became generally available: Utilities encouraged their use and bought electricity from customers when it was generated, not when it was needed.

At the same time large solar plants began to be developed and owned by the utilities, which worked better for them, and they soured on rooftop solar.

In talking to utilities, I find them to be cool-to-indifferent to rooftop solar but enthusiastic about solar central station generation, particularly if linked with battery storage. Mostly, utilities like solar generation because of its predictability.

The idea of hooking together a vast network of millions of solar panels on roofs with their own batteries puts demand back in the hands of the utilities, giving them the flexibility of having a great new resource.

Also, like the Uber model, there would be variable pricing: In a crisis or a high-demand situation, the utility or the system operator would order power from homeowner batteries at surge prices, benefitting all. Owners of solar rooftop and battery setups would become “citizen solarizers.”

The concept of a vast, on-demand, virtual power plant isn’t entirely speculative. Brian Keane, president of SmartPower, told me that what might be a frontrunner is already being tested in Connecticut.

“All residential customers who choose the ‘Connecticut Green Bank’s CT Storage Solution’ option receive the generous, upfront rebate incentives for agreeing to have their battery drawn from every weekday afternoon during June, July, and August, as well as on high-need ‘critical’ days on the weekends, in September, and for a handful of days during the winter months. Customers will get a payment each year based on the amount of electricity that is drawn from the battery,” Keane explained.

The development of a national virtual power system would enhance something that is happening quietly, which is what I call the “buttressing of the grid.”

It is what might be seen as the tacit acceptance that the grid isn’t going to be rebuilt in any substantial way, but it will be buttressed by new generation and limited new transmission. Uberizing rooftop solar could be an important part of this buttressing – and a gift to the nation both as a source of clean power and citizen involvement.

It remains to be seen whether regional solar networks would be subject to regulation by the federal government or by the states.

Going forward, a rooftop solar installation might be more than a convenience for a household, and a way of signaling green virtue.