It wasn’t front and center at the climate change summit, COP26, in Glasgow, but it was whispered about informally, in the corridors, and over meals.

For politicians, it is flammable. For some religions, it is heresy. Yet it begs a hearing: the growth of the global population.

While the world struggles to decarbonize, saving it from sea level rise and the other disasters associated with climate change, there is no recognition officially anywhere that population plays a critical part.

People do things that cause climate change from burning coal to raising beef cattle. A lot of people equal a lot of pollution equals a big climate impact, obvious and incontrovertible.

In 1950, the global population was at just over 2.5 billion. This year, it is calculated at 7.9 billion. Roughly by mid-century, it is expected to increase by another 2 billion.

There is a ticking bomb, and it is us.

There was one big, failed attempt to restrict population growth: China’s one-child policy. Besides being draconian, it didn’t work well and has been abandoned.

China is awash with young men seeking nonexistent brides. While the program was in force from 1980 to 2015, girls were aborted and boys were saved. The result: A massive gender imbalance. One doubts that any country will ever, however authoritarian its rule, try that again.

There is a long history to population alarm, going back to the 18th century and Thomas Malthus, an English demographer and economist who gave birth to what is known as Malthusian theory. This states that food production won’t be able to keep up with the growth in the human population, resulting in famine and war; and the only way forward is to restrict population growth.

Malthus’s theory was very wrong in the 18th century. But it had unfortunate effects, which included a tolerance of famine in populations of European empire countries, like India. It also played a role in the Irish Great Famine of 1845-49, when some in England thought that this famine, caused by a potato blight, was the fulfillment of Malthusian theory, and inhibited efforts to help the starving Irish. Shame on England.

The idea of population outgrowing resources was reawakened in 1972 with a controversial report titled “Limits to Growth” from the Club of Rome, a global think tank.

This report led to battles over the supply of oil when the energy crisis broke the next year. The antigrowth, population-limiting side found itself in a bitter fight with the technologists who believed that technology would save the day. It did. More energy came to market, oil resources were discovered worldwide, including in the previously unexplored Southern Hemisphere.

Since that limits-to-growth debate, the world population has increased inexorably. Now, if growth is the problem, the problem needs to be examined more urgently. I think 2022 is the year that the examination will begin.

Clearly, no country will wish to go down the failed Chinese one-child policy, and anyway, only authoritarian governments could contemplate it. Free people in democratic countries don’t handle dictates well: Take, for example, the difficulty of enforcing mask-wearing in the time of the COVID pandemic in the United States, Germany, Britain, France, and elsewhere.

If we are going to talk of a leveling off world population we have to look elsewhere, away from dictates to other subtler pressures.

There is a solution, and the challenge to the world is whether we can get there fast enough.

That solution is prosperity. When people move into the middle class, they tend to have fewer children. So much so that the traditional populations are in decline in the United States, Japan, and in much of Europe — even in nominally Roman Catholic France. The data is skewed by immigration in all those countries — except Japan, where it is particularly stark. It shows population stability can happen without dictatorial social engineering.

In the United States, the not-so-secret weapon may be no more than the excessive cost of college.

You may have noticed that gift gifting was a bit more difficult this holiday season. Those two mighty standbys for the gift-givers, perfume, and neckties, have moved from the ‘always welcome’ list to the ‘What was he or she thinking?’ list.

Perfume – oh, that never-surprising but always-delighting gift – isn’t the gift it used to be. The problem is scent wearing by women has fallen off, as health concerns about volatiles in the air have grown and casual dressing, especially in the time of pandemic, is de rigeur.

Pity – luxury perfume was the unchallengeable gift. It was giving on the strength of  its brand, like Miss Dior or Chanel No. 5. Labels really counted in fragrance giving. You were ill-advised to try anything out of the usual. If you espied something called, say, Rocky Mountain Rose, you were advised to eschew it.

The best and easiest to give was Joy by Jean Patou. The fragrance advertised itself as “the most expensive perfume in the world.” Bingo! You couldn’t go wrong if you had the bucks. I used to give a small bottle of Joy to my office manager every year and was thanked with oohs and aahs, even though she knew what was coming. She explained that a woman’s real use of Joy wasn’t so much in wearing it (and she wore it with pleasure), but in displaying it – showing her friends how much her significant other loved her. I rush to say that wasn’t my role in her life.

Neckties were the perfect gift for the man who might have everything. A man couldn’t have too many, and a new one in the style of the day was genuinely welcomed to the sartorial collection.

The necktie is rapidly going the way of spats, detachable collars, and Homburgs, to oblivion.

So shed a tear for the necktie and its infinite giveability. You could play the brand game, but there was no need for that. An obscure neckwear maker, doing a good job with the silk or wool, would be just as fine an accoutrement, as a luxury name like Givenchy or Ralph Lauren. The outstanding exception to this rule was some fabulous work of art by Liberty of London. That would earn deep approval, a friendship cementer.

As a generalization though, an unknown name in neckwear was just as good as the names of the great designers. To those in the know, the best place to buy ties at a reasonable price is, for reasons unknown, at hotel gift shops. Good ties at great prices.

Ties were in their day so important that good restaurants and clubs had selections of ties to fix up men who came with – Shock! Horror! — an open-necked shirt. The proprietor of a famous Manhattan restaurant of yore, La Cote Basque, told me he wouldn’t serve a king if he wasn’t wearing a tie. La Cote Basque has long gone and so that poor man was never put to the test of facing down royalty.

I wear a bowtie. I have Tucker Carlson – yes, that Tucker Carlson — to thank for that change in my appearance, that bit of sartorial shtick. When I met Carlson, long before he found, as one writer said of someone else, the cramped space to the right of Rupert Murdoch, he was a funny, likable conservative who had just left a CNN talk show and authored an amusing book about the experience of being TV chatterer.

I had him as a guest on my television program, “White House Chronicle” on PBS. He was known as a bowtie-wearer and, as a joke, I donned one. I got so many favorable comments that I’ve taken to wearing them instead of the long, silk emblems of the once well-dressed man.

Shame, I say, on the retreat of perfume and the near extinction of the necktie. Women don’t smell so elegant, and men look unfinished.

I have seen the future of urban life and it wasn’t quite what I expected. It was whizzing all around me in New York City on a recent visit.

My wife and I were there to do that most Christmassy of things: See Radio City Music Hall’s Christmas Spectacular starring the Rockettes. It is great and you should see it if you can, but it isn’t what bowled me over.

What bowled me over figuratively and a couple of times almost literally was the new urban mobility.

I saw the future of city transportation, dashing all around me every time I ventured to cross a street. Like cities the world over, New York has installed bicycle lanes, but they have been taken over by what might be described as Space Age people-movers in astounding configurations.

These denizens of the new mobility hurtled by on electric bicycles,  electric unicycles, electric skateboards, electric, gyroscopic one-wheeled skateboards, and, of course, those ubiquitous electric scooters. I didn’t think it was the end of civilization as I have known it. Instead, I longed to be a good deal younger so I, too, could join the transportation revolution.

You may not like this new order, and almost certainly if you are over 50, you’re not ready for it. However, it is here, it is happening, and it is the first exciting thing in cities, perhaps since traffic lights.

The future of urban transportation isn’t what supporters of public transit, such as myself, have been advocating for decades: More buses and trains.

City visionaries, like Scott Sellars, city manager of Kyle, Texas, a small but rapidly growing city of 60,000 located between Austin and San Antonio, are looking beyond what they call “destination public transportation” to new ways of moving people or, more exactly, new ways of letting people move themselves.

Kyle has made the bold decision that the future of city transportation belongs not to buses and trains, but rather to ride-sharing companies. It has contracted for Uber to become the city’s main public transportation mode. Sellars explained the concept on Digital 360, a Texas State University weekly webinar on which I am a regular panelist.

Sellars told me Kyle has a subsidized contract with Uber to take care of those unable to afford its fares. Residents qualifying for assistance get a voucher and an app on their cell phones and can make any local journey for a standard $3.14. There are even vouchers for the unbanked. But there isn’t a way yet to use the service if you don’t have a cell phone or access to one.

To avoid having to take lanes away from cars, Kyle has been able to build an alternative system called the Vybe, which is 12-feet-wide and can accommodate all people-movers, including golf carts, bicycles, and all those electric-powered wheels which are now running around New York. There are charging stations for golf carts and other electric transporters on the Vybe. The Vybe runs most places people might want to go and doubles as a right of way for utilities of all kinds.

While many of us have thought the smart cities were going to be about super-electric connectivity, few of us realized the first tranche of city smartness would come with new forms of transportation, usurping or challenging the car, bus, and train.

The transportation revolution isn’t confined to the surface of cities. Elon Musk’s Boring Company continues to plow ahead with fast, subterranean tunnels, now being implemented in Las Vegas and studied in Los Angeles, Miami, and many other cities.

Look up, too. There is a profusion of companies working on drone-like, urban sky taxis which will whip you from your home to an airport or office tower.

Above the ground, on the ground, and under the ground, urban mobility is itself on the move. Hold onto your hat.

Every year, I write about Christmas. But none of my Christmas columns has given readers more pleasure than this one.

You will find them in any outlandish place: the misfits. They are the people Arthur Miller wrote a wonderful short story about in 1957, which was made into a less wonderful 1961 movie starring Marilyn Monroe.

The trouble with the movie was that Marilyn didn’t belong in it. The original story was simply about a group of men who didn’t make it in society and lived on life’s perimeter. They were classic misfits: men who had too many wives, too many bad love affairs, or too many drinks; or disgraced themselves variously in their professions or families, and sometimes their countries.

You will find the misfits in faraway places, like Nome, Alaska or Key West, Florida. And you will find them scattered in the Australian outback or hanging on in some corner of Africa.

That gets me to my tale.

My misfits were in a corner of Africa in 1957, in Ndola, which proudly called itself the commercial capital of Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia).

Ndola wasn’t a garden spot: No one picked up the atlas and said, “I want to settle in Ndola.”

In fact, Zambia wasn’t one of the parts of Africa that Europeans selected for settlement, like Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) or Kenya. People went to Zambia to mine the copper, to farm, or to trade — most people, that is. The misfits just gravitated there, much as I did, looking for a congenial place to hang out.

And what a bunch of misfits we were!

There was Percy Powys, the scion of a good family in Wales. His misfortunes, he said, began when he took a Piccadilly whore home for dinner. His parents decided he needed to make a new life in Africa; they shipped him off to Johannesburg.

Three wives, several executive jobs, and oceans of gin later, Percy was working in construction. A tough, weathered man of uncertain age, he always reminded me of Richard Henry Dana Jr.’s  description of one of the captains in “Two Years Before the Mast”: a man “made of steel and whalebone.”

Most misfits don’t have wives or girlfriends. The company of women is disturbing to them — a reminder of what they don’t have or what they had had too much of.

In this sense, Geordie (which is a regional nickname for a person who comes from Northeast England) was different. He had a wife, although nobody saw much of her.

Geordie sometimes worked on the railways. He had been a commando, a London bus driver, and a lot of other things. He had a seventh-grade education and the distinction of being the only one of the misfits who was blacklisted by the police in every bar in Ndola.

Geordie was a rough man with elegant taste: He loved Scotch, Italian opera, and chess — and he could combine all three. He would play a Verdi opera on his phonograph, play chess with me, and all the while consume prodigious quantities of tea laced with Scotch. The more he drank, the more he turned up the volume on his phonograph. Then he would grab me by the shoulders and shake me, yelling, “Do you believe that a human being could compose something so beautiful?”

Sometimes, at the latter part of the tea party, Geordie would become so consumed with his need to communicate the beauty of Verdi that he would go out into the street, grab an unsuspecting passerby’s wrist in a hammerlock, and drag the poor devil inside to listen to opera. It didn’t seem to be an effective way of spreading a love of opera, and often resulted in unpleasantness with the police.

Geordie was a serious misfit and one of the greatest men I have ever met.

There were others, like Peter Robertse, an Afrikaner who spoke with an Oxford accent and had been a Spitfire pilot in The Battle of Britain. His country had expectations for him in the diplomatic corps. But after Peter removed his pants at a diplomatic reception in Rome, he started down the long road to Ndola, where he worked intermittently in construction. At night, when he had drunk too much gin, he would relive The Battle of Britain and would rage on until he passed out.

Then there was my friend George Parkes, whom this tale is really about. He was an Armenian, who was built like a steel spring, and had a tremendous joie de vivre — a joy which had gotten him through one marriage and innumerable jobs in many countries.

At 35-years-old, George was full of schemes that didn’t quite come off. One of his schemes was to import dried fish from Lake Tanganyika and transport it to Ndola, where he would become a dried-fish millionaire. Another was to buy diamonds in the Congo and to transport them to Johannesburg, where they could be sold — all to be done without alerting the governments of the countries that lay in between.

I think it was just the romance of smuggling that appealed to George. At the time I knew him, he was selling cars.

As for me, I had set out to make my fortune in journalism. Unaccountably, I found myself laying drains in Ndola.

One day, George came to me in a state of high excitement. He told me that he had sold a car, and we had to celebrate with his commission.

But we wouldn’t celebrate in the raunchy dives of Ndola. We would drive to the next town, Kitwe, where we had heard tell there was a great French restaurant. And we would put on suits, abandoning the ubiquitous khaki which was our uniform.

What is more, George had a girl for the occasion: a beautiful English rose named Jean. She had followed a man from London to Africa only to find out that he had a wife. So, Jean was a sort of honorary misfit — and the only woman admitted to the company.

We bathed, we shaved, we took suits out of our closets that we hadn’t seen in a year. In a state of almost unbearable joy, we drove to Kitwe in a borrowed car.

All the way, George kept saying, “My father always said that Christmas is when you have five pounds in your pocket.” We had 15 pounds and it was Christmas, indeed.

We were much taken with the restaurant. We ate splendidly and drank French wines. We felt invincible, as one does on festive occasions.

And we were much taken with the idea of declaring Christmas whenever we wanted to. We tried to sing a carol, but we weren’t very successful. So, we took a different tack: I recited verses from “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.”

As our halcyon time wound down, a stranger stopped at our table and said, “I’ve never seen three people enjoying themselves so much. I’ve paid your bill. I had some luck myself today.” With that, he departed.

It was Christmas in spades. It was also July.

Richard A. “Dick” McCormack, a commanding figure in the energy industry for five decades, died last month aged 90.

When I first met Dick, I felt, “That is an executive; that is a leader.” It was a feeling I had no occasion to change after nearly 50 years of friendship and shared adventures.

We met, as I recall, at a press event in 1973 at the Georgetown Club in Washington. Dick was a young vice president at Combustion Engineering, then a major presence in steam technology and the burgeoning nuclear industry. The others were Westinghouse, General Electric, and Babcock & Wilcox.

It was a bustling, vibrant time for the nuclear industry. Dick, a Stevens Institute of Technology engineering graduate who had served as a Navy officer, was in the business of selling power plants.

Two of his sales stand out: the twin San Onofre nuclear reactors in California and the Ravenswood fossil fuel-fired plant in Long Island City, New York. Those sales were in the time of the energy crises and all energy was good.

Dick was tall and good looking in a man’s-man kind of way. His grin was emblematic of his whole can-do persona: It was the grin that made you feel everything was possible. The force of his presence was such that people wanted to be on his team, help with his projects, and be in his company. Dick made everyone feel important.

He was lured away from Combustion Engineering in 1974 to become president of General Atomic Power Systems Company, then owned by Gulf Oil and Royal Dutch Shell. Nuclear power was a hot ticket and the oil companies wanted in on it.

General Atomic was promoting gas-cooled reactors, and the future looked bright for what many believed would be a winning technology.

Nuclear power lost its sheen after the Three Mile Island accident in 1979. Dick left General Atomic and began a life as a serial entrepreneur, mostly in cutting-edge energy projects, including energy storage through chemical reactions, utility plant safety, and green renovation of homes.

His consulting included a massive study of gas-cooled reactor technology for the Department of Energy. I worked with Dick and David Fishlock of The Financial Times on the executive summary.

We worked together on two other projects. The first was an attempt to bring independent and dependable facts and analyses to the ongoing energy crisis in the 1970s. We conceived an energy institute which would be a repository of facts. Irrefutable truths.

It was a time of wild conspiracy theories about energy and its technologies. Ralph Nader, for example, said nuclear reactors could burst open like rotten melons. Others said there would be incredible mutations near reactors, with two-headed babies for starters. It was believed that the oil companies had flotillas of tankers lying off the East Coast, waiting for prices to rise. Also, it was believed that the oil companies were inhibiting water vapor technology that would double the mileage for any car.

Dick and I went about raising money for the institute. We visited C-suites of oil companies, electric utilities and their suppliers. We got turned down repeatedly, but Dick always cherished the idea.

I am glad to say that the DOE’s Energy Information Administration performs today much as we had hoped the institute would.

Another project of ours involved Dick’s desire to launch a newspaper in Hartford, Connecticut. I was a director and small investor.

Dick believed in whatever he was working on no matter its chances of success. Those who joined the newspaper project were swept along, including Harold Evans, the legendary editor of the British daily newspaper The Times. Those who joined the newspaper project were swept along, including Harold Evans, the legendary editor of The Times, the British daily newspaper. When I visited Evans at the newspaper’s offices in London, he said, “Any friend of Dick’s is a friend of mine.” He, too, had been swept along, although he knew little about Hartford or American newspaper publishing.

None of us regretted our investments or the hours we put into that project. Working with Dick was payment enough.

He ended his extraordinary career working in association with U.S. Generating. Throughout his life, he supported many charities and even helped resettle Syrian refugees.

He adored his wife and big family: five sons, one daughter, eight grandchildren, and five great-grandchildren. His namesake son worked for me in Washington as an outstanding editor and reporter on my newsletters. I count him as dear a friend as I counted his father.

In Dick, the energy world had a general who sometimes served as a foot soldier.

I’m not a fast reader. I don’t get through several books a day, as a friend of mine does when she is in the mood.

I read for the pleasure of occupying another world for a while — and because I read slowly, a book and I get together for stretches of a few days or even a week.

You won’t find me poring over those political books which come out like African dung beetles after cattle have passed by. I read lots of mysteries. I like these to be “destination” books that give you a geographical and cultural lesson while spinning toward the denouement and the apprehension of the perpetrator or perpetrators.

For example, American writer Donna Leon’s Inspector Brunetti books are set in Venice. These give you a guided tour of the city, practically tell you which vaporetto to catch.

Why mystery books? Because, as Elizabeth George, an American writer who sets her Inspector Linley books in England, told an interviewer, with those there is a beginning and an end. Things start with a crime and end when it is solved. Within that construct, you can spin a psychological story, a love story, a commentary on contemporary events, or whatever you want to say.

So many novelists write a wonderful book, but three-quarters of the way through, you feel the writer is struggling to end it: How to get the protagonists walking off into the sunset or handing off to the next generation?

No such problem for the mystery writer: Just solve the crime and send everyone home. You may have scaled heights of creative fiction on the way, but there is an end.

The characters in novels become my friends and I am sad to say farewell, but I would rather an orderly farewell than one that is unsatisfactory, drawn-out, and unconvincing.

Even the Australian novelist Liane Moriarty uses the mystery technique in her newest novel, “Apples Never Fall.”

I would like to turn mystery readers on to a master of the art of writing crime while commenting on many aspects of the human condition, like love and isolation, along the way.

She is J.L Doucette, a psychologist who uses her knowledge of the mind to inform her stories. She also uses Wyoming, where she used to live and practice psychology, to inform about the state — in my parlance, the destination.

Doucette’s protagonists, Dr. Pepper Hunt, a police psychologist, and Detective Beau Antelope live in Sweetwater County, Wyoming. They team up to solve some baffling cases. The author, who now is based in Rhode Island, has written three Dr. Pepper Hunt mysteries.

The depictions of Wyoming in her mystery series are very real and palpable: You feel you know this high desert and the White and Native American people who live there. You not only get the twists and turns of a good mystery, but you also get insight into the state.

I ask a lot of my mystery novels: I want a damn good yarn, nothing else will do. I want believable characters in believable situations, including believable crises. And I want to learn something.

In her Shetland series, British writer Ann Cleeves tells you a lot about Scotland, and even more about how the islands keep alive their Viking heritage with festivals and celebrations.

British writer Colin Dexter’s Inspector Morse mysteries, set in Oxford, are great on music, the university city, and the isolation of a man always alone and at war with the system.

Doucette’s main characters have the one thing that is important but not essential for a good mystery: unencumbered protagonists. Most mystery main characters are divorced, widowed, or by choice, like Beau Antelope, single. That hints at the possibility of romance.

There are great exceptions, like Maigret, Georges Simeon’s iconic French detective. Of course, Leon’s Brunetti is married with two children. I don’t find that convincing but, as I said, you can have anything you want in a mystery so long as the crime gets solved.

Doucette’s newest Dr. Pepper Hunt mystery, “Unknown Assailant,” does that in 297 pages. It is a good read and takes you to an absorbing destination: Wyoming.

If the Biden administration genuinely wanted to get serious about weaning the electric power sector from fossil fuels, it would get serious about nuclear — not just patting it on the head, as it is doing with the government equivalent of “There, there, baby.”

Nuclear was an early victim of the culture wars which started in the late 1960s, and it remains so to this day.

It is incredible that a source of power, a cutting-edge technology, should have been sidelined for more than 50 years because of fear, suspicion, ignorance, and politics.

In the late 1960s, nuclear power became the target of an environmental and political left lash-up. It became part of the environmentalist catechism that nuclear was an evil source of power and must be expunged from the national list of options. The political left didn’t so much as embrace environmentalism as environmentalism embraced the left.

Some environmentalists have had an epiphany, like the Union of Concerned Scientists, which was founded by Henry Kendall, an activist whom I knew well. We were friends who didn’t agree about nuclear. Now the Union of Concerned Scientists is pro-nuclear, but it was at the barricades against nuclear for decades.

It isn’t that the environmental movement doesn’t want to do the right thing. It does. But it has thought that it alone should decide what was right and good for the environment, and often it has been totally wrong.

The environmental movement turned the nation from nuclear to coal. In the 1970s and 1980s, environmental groups advocated for fluidized bed combustion coal plants. I remember them saying that coal eliminated the need for “dangerous nuclear.” I sat through innumerable meetings and had sparing friendships with anti-nuclear activists like Ralph Nader and Amory Lovins.

All presidents have said they favor nuclear power, even Jimmy Carter, who was the most reluctant and did huge damage to the United States’ position as the world leader in nuclear energy and technology. Carter wouldn’t say he was opposed to nuclear, but he did talk about it as a last resort and stopped the plans to build a fast breeder reactor. He also ended nuclear reprocessing, necessitating the disposal of whole nuclear cores, instead of capturing the mass of unburned fuel — thus creating a much larger waste disposal challenge, as well as the need to mine more uranium.

If you believe — and I do — what was said at the COP26 summit in Glasgow, Scotland, now is the time to fix the electric power industry. It can be fixed by building up nuclear capacity so that electricity can be the go-to, clean fuel of the future. It could replace fossil fuels in everything from cement making to steel production to heating buildings. That potential, that future, is awesome and possible.

Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm should ask her national laboratories to make recommendations on a nuclear power future, not to the detriment of wind and solar power, but embracing them.

Wind power is valuable. But depending on it is a little like having a trick knee: You never know when it is going to go out on you.

Europe has just learned that lesson the hard way. It is in the grip of a major energy crisis with electricity prices quadrupling and natural gas prices headed into the stratosphere as winter approaches. One of the causes of this crisis is that wind speeds through the summer fell to their lowest recorded levels in 60 years, with a total wind drought in the normally gale-wracked North Sea.

We won’t get to a carbon-free future unless we have a robust, committed plan to deploy state-of-the-art nuclear plants across the country. We built them in the 1960s and into the 1970s – 100 of them.

Granholm needs to declare a purpose and to pick the proven winner. It is nuclear, and it has been gravely wounded in the culture wars. She needs to rescue it – with word and deed.

Carbon-free electricity isn’t a final destination – it is merely a stop along the road to a time when electricity becomes the clean fuel of choice and reduces pollution in buildings, cement, and steel production, transportation, and other places and industries.

That is the glorious, transcendental future that Arshad Mansoor, president and CEO of the Electric Power Research Institute, sees. He revealed his vision on “White House Chronicle,” the weekly news and public affairs program on PBS which I host, on his way to the COP26 summit in Glasgow, Scotland.

Mansoor, who talks about the future with an infectious fervor, was joined on the broadcast by Clinton Vince, chair of the U.S. Energy Practice at Dentons, the globe-circling law firm, and Robert Schwartz, president of Anterix, a Woodland Park, New Jersey-based firm that is helping utilities move into the digital future with private broadband networks.

Mansoor outlined a trajectory in which electric utilities must invest substantially in the near future to deal with severe weather and decarbonization. For example, he said, some power lines must be undergrounded and many must be tested for much higher wind speeds than were envisaged when they were installed. Some coastal power lines must be raised, he said.

While driving toward a carbon-free future, Mansoor cautioned against utilities going so fast into renewables the nation ignores the ongoing carbon-reduction programs of other industries. Further, if utilities can’t meet the electricity demands of transportation or manufacturing, these industries will turn away from the electric solution.

“Overall, we looked at the numbers and they showed a huge national role in decarbonization for the electric utility industry,” Mansoor said. However, the transition is fraught. It must be managed, sometimes using more gas until the system can be totally weaned from fossil fuels, he said. An orderly transition is vital.

Clinton Vince said the electric utility world has experienced a lot of volatility from severe weather, due to climate change, to the Covid-19 pandemic, and cyber-intrusions. “If I were to boil down to one word what is vital for utilities, it would be ‘resilience.’ ”

Resilience is an ongoing utility goal: It is the ability of a single utility or a group of utilities to bounce back from adversity, often by restoring power quickly. Anterix’s Robert Schwartz said that with his company’s private broadband networks and the deployment of enough sensors, a utility could identify a power line break in 1.4 seconds, before it hits the ground.

One of the most exciting and revolutionary aspects of Mansoor’s thinking is that the consumer will become a partner in the electric utility future. They will join the ecosystem by providing load management assistance through smart meters, now installed in 60 percent of homes.

Mansoor thinks the nation’s 480,000 school buses, if electrified, along with private electric vehicles, can be used to store energy. This answers the concern many utility executives have about storage and the concern that a tsunami of electric vehicles will overpower electric supply in the coming decade.

Personally, I think the utilities should plan right now for the integration of electric vehicles into their systems. They should offer electric vehicle owners financial incentives for plugging in and sending their stored power to the grid.

Likewise, the utilities should provide rate incentives for off-peak electric vehicle charging. They could do worse than look at the algorithms which have made Uber and Lyft possible, unlocking value in the personal car.

The utilities could devise a flexible system whereby they pay for power when needed and give a price break for charging during off-peak hours, or when there is a surfeit of renewable energy. That is the kind of data flow that will mark the utilities going forward and stimulate demand for private broadband networks.

We, the consumers, will be partners in the electric future, managing our own uses and supporting the grid with our electric cars and trucks. That is Mansoor’s achievable vision.

A huge swath of American drivers and the electric utility industry are waiting for a pickup truck. Not just any pickup truck, but one that could change the way we get around and, for many, how we work.

The pickup truck which is expected to cause the earth to move is the all-electric Ford F-150 Lightning. Electric utilities are keeping a wary eye on it and so is an enthusiastic public, jamming Ford’s order books ahead of the arrival of the first trucks next year. Year after year, the gasoline-fueled F-150 has been America’s bestselling truck both for work and pleasure.

In Texas and much of the West, the pickup truck is more than a vehicle: It is a symbol of a way of life and the freedom of the open road. It fits the cowboy inheritance.

But it is also a vehicle for work. Many kinds of work depend on pickup trucks and the Ford F-150 is the leader. Dodge Ram and Toyota Tundra are right behind Ford in this extremely competitive and profitable market.

Builders, carpenters, painters, farmers, delivery services, along with others beyond enumeration use pickup trucks as the base of their business activity.

In Texas, they are preferred transportation for many individuals and families. With an extended cab, a pickup truck is a car with load-carrying capacity, having the ability to tow a boat, a horse trailer, or a camper with ease.

But they also are luxurious. The interior and the ride of the modern pickup truck is a thing of beauty, the automobile crafter’s art at its zenith. If you haven’t ridden in one, try it. You may never want to stoop to a car again or settle for an SUV, which is a halfway point to the glory of the American pickup truck.

With the Ford F-150 Lightning, workers will be able to plug electrical equipment like saws, pumps, and drills into their trucks.

But there is something else generating grand expectations: It is that the Lightning, if it works as advertised, will turn millions of skeptics into buyers.

All-electric pickup trucks will have a revolutionary impact, especially where driving a truck is the norm. For millions in the South and the West, the new pickup trucks will make electric vehicles socially acceptable, destigmatized. No longer will EVs be the effete preserve of the coastal elites.

That will be a breakthrough for EVs in general and will have a significant impact on the rate at which they are adopted and, consequently, on the rush to install charging infrastructure.

Still, there will be a range of issues. Ford says its basic Lightning will have a range of 230 miles and one with two batteries and additional horsepower, costing an additional $10,000, will get 300 miles. If the power-takeoff features are used for operating equipment, the mileage will come down.

Nonetheless, the Lightning is expected to streak across the automotive sky and supercharge the popularity of EVs. If the Lightning performs as expected, it will usher in a whole family of all-electric pickups. It will also speed an increase in demand, which the auto factories won’t be able to meet in the immediate future.

The utilities will have to get ready, too.

Texas, which has one of the largest, if not the largest, penetration of pickup trucks per capita, may be facing electricity shortages in the years ahead. Data companies have been moving to the state, putting a strain on electricity demand.

Andres Carvallo, a polymath friend, is a former electric utility executive and now is a principal at CMG Consulting and a professor at Texas State University. He points out the possible stress on electric utilities. “ERCOT [Electricity Reliability Council of Texas] is approximately an 80-gigawatt energy market at peak capacity today. There are around 22 million registered vehicles in Texas,” he says, “If they were all-electric and each had a 100-kWh battery, they would require 2,200 gigawatts to charge at the same time. So how do you manage the gap?”

Down the road, Texas and the rest of the country is going to need an awful lot of new, clean electricity.

Of course, there won’t be 100 percent deployment of electric vehicles for many decades, and they won’t all be charging at the same time. But this shouldn’t escape the electric utilities, who have to plan now for then.

When real men start driving all-electric rigs, things will happen — revolutionary things.