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Ukrainian Stray Dogs and Cats Threaten Europe with Rabies

June 18, 2024 by Linda Gasparello Leave a Comment

Amid the war in Ukraine, an epic tale of another war in that country has been unfolding.

It is a tale of “tails,” which is what Ukrainians call their pet dogs and cats: a tale of a great-hearted man and woman who have been battling against the spread of rabies in Ukraine from the exploding stray dog and cat populations and to Europe, where the disease has been largely eradicated.

The great hearts are Dan Fine, a retired tech entrepreneur and founder of the Ukraine War Animals Relief Fund, who resides in Vancouver, British Columbia, and Krystyna Drahomaretska, 27, an architect-turned-manager of the Under the Sun animal sanctuary in Odesa.

Appearing on the PBS program “White House Chronicle,” Fine explained, “Ukrainians are a pet-loving people — some people had nine dogs. But when the Russians invaded Ukraine, over 8 million people were forced to flee their homes and abandon their pets. This resulted in over 1 million stray dogs and cats, and 65 percent of them weren’t sterilized.”

Foraging for food, the surging stray dog and cat populations are contracting rabies from foxes, wolves and other wild animals, whose populations are also surging, due to a wartime ban on hunting. “It’s a perfect storm,” Fine said.

Rabid stray dogs and cats are biting people. Rabies has the highest mortality rate  — almost 100 percent — of any disease on earth. “Bites from rabid animals affect children the most — 55 percent,” Fine noted.

In the spring of 2022, he went on his first mission to sterilize, vaccinate and microchip the stray dogs and cats of Ukraine. After treatment, many are returned to the streets because the animal shelters are overflowing — and were even before the Russian invasion. The Ukrainians, who are a religious people, don’t believe in euthanasia, he noted.

Fine teamed with Drahomaretska, who, along with other volunteers, caught the strays and transported them to clinics set up through his nonprofit Ukraine animal relief group.

Drahomaretska is nonchalant about the dangers of catching stray tails, even on the front lines. “I am the only female catcher on the front lines,” she said in the TV episode.

To catch stray dogs, she explained, she shoots them with a tranquilizer gun, and they run away. She follows them to wherever they drop, picks them up and carries them to her van.

While pursuing a tranquilized dog, she was injured by a landmine, and she is still on crutches. On another catch, she was bitten twice by a dog she was transporting to a clinic. And she had to go through post-exposure prophylaxis after some slime from a rabid dog got into her eye.

Over five missions, they sterilized, vaccinated and microchipped 8,200 dogs and cats. “That seems like a lot,” Fine said, “But you won’t stop this problem unless you do 500,000 over the next four to five years.”

To drive this mission forward, Fine said they need the investment of another organization. “There are about 200 unemployed vets in Ukraine. They could be paid and mobilized, but we can’t do that alone,” he said.

Fine hopes that “War Tails,” a documentary he and Tana Axelle, also a Vancouver resident, produced about the challenge of stopping the spread of rabies in Ukraine and into Europe, will draw the attention and support of the European Union. They have entered the documentary at the Seattle Film Festival, and they plan to enter it at more film festivals and to get it aired on television.

As Fine sees it, “Ukraine wants to enter the EU, and the EU wants them to enter. And the EU has animal and human health standards. So stopping the spread of rabies into Europe is in their interest.”

Somberly, he added that when the war ends and the rebuilding begins, “they will have to do a culling of millions of rabid dogs and cats. And all that goodwill will go away.”

Filed Under: Gasparello's Articles Tagged With: "War Tails", Dan Fine, Europe, Krystyna Drahomaretska, rabies, Ukraine, Ukraine War Animals Relief Fund

The AI Revolution Will Rival the Industrial One, and It Has Begun

June 15, 2024 by Llewellyn King Leave a Comment

A new age in the human experience on Earth is underway. It is an age of change as profound — and possibly more so — than the Industrial Revolution, when the steam engine introduced the concept of post-animal labor, known as shaft horsepower.

Artificial intelligence in this new age is infiltrating all areas of human endeavor.

Some things will change totally, like work: It will end much menial work and a whole tranche of white-collar jobs. Some things it will enhance beyond imagination, like medicine and associated longevity.

Some AI will threaten, some it will annihilate.

It will test our understanding of the truth in a post-fact world. The veracity of every claim will be subject to investigation, from what happened in history to current election results.

At the center of the upheaval in AI is electricity. It is the one essential element — the obedient ingredient — for AI.  Electricity is essential for the computers that support AI. However, AI is putting an incalculable strain on the electric supply.

At its annual meeting, the U.S. Energy Association learned that a search on Google today uses a tenth of the electricity as the same search on ChatGPT. Across the world, data centers are demanding an increasing supply of uninterruptible electricity 24/7. Utilities love this new business but fear they won’t be able to service it going forward.

Fortunately, AI is a valuable tool for utilities, and they are beginning to employ it increasingly in their operations, from customer services to harnessing distributed resources in what are called virtual power plants, to things such as weather prediction, counting dead trees for fire suppression, and mapping future demand.

Electricity is on the verge of a new age. And new technologies, in tandem with the relentless growth in AI, are set to overhaul our expectations for electricity generation and increase demand for it.

Fusion power, small modular reactors, viable flexible storage in the form of new battery technology and upgraded old battery technology, better transmission lines, and doubling the amount of power that can be moved from where it is made to where it is desperately needed are all on the horizon, and will penetrate the market in the next 10 years.

Synchronizing new demand with new supply has yet to happen, but electricity provision is on the march as inexorably as is AI. Together, they hold the keys to a new human future.

A new book by Omar Hatamleh, a gifted visionary, titled “This Time It’s Different,” lifts the curtain on AI. Hatamleh, chief AI officer for NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., says, “This time, it truly is different. … Witness AI’s awakening, revealing its potential for both awe-inspiring transformation and trepidation.”

Hatamleh organized NASA’s first symposium on AI on June 11 at Goddard. Crème de la crème in AI participants came from OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Qantm AI, Boeing and JP Morgan.

The consensus view was, to my mind, optimistically expressed by Pilar Manchon, Google’s senior director of AI, who said she thought this was the beginning of humankind’s greatest adventure. The very beginning of a new age.

A bit of backstage criticism was that the commercial pressure for the tech giants to get to market with their generative AI products has been so great that they have been releasing them before all the bugs have been ironed out — hence some of the recent ludicrous search results, like the one from this question, “How do you keep the cheese on pizza?” The answer, apparently, was with “glue.”

However, everyone agreed that these and other hallucinations won’t affect the conquering march of AI.

Government regulation? How do you regulate something that is metamorphosing second by second?

A word about Hatamleh: I first met him when he was chief engineering innovation officer at NASA in Houston. He was already thinking about AI in his pursuit of off-label drugs to treat diseases and his desire to cross-reference data to find drugs and therapies that worked in one situation but hadn’t been tried in another, especially cancer. This is now job No. 1 for AI.

During COVID, he wrangled 73 global scientists to produce a seminal report in May 2020, “Never Normal,” which predicted with eerie accuracy how COVID would affect how we work, play and socialize, and how life would change. And it has. A mere foretaste of AI?

Filed Under: King's Commentaries Tagged With: AI, Artificial intelligence, ChatGPT, electricity, Fusion, Industrial Revolution, NASA, Omar Hatamleh, Pilar Manchon, technology

Tech Giants Want In on Electricity, Google Has a Foothold

June 8, 2024 by Llewellyn King Leave a Comment

During the desperate days of the energy crisis in the 1970s, it looked as though the shortage was permanent and we would have to change the way we lived, worked and played to accommodate it.

In the end, it was technology that solved the crisis.

For fossil fuels, 3D seismic, horizontal drilling and fracking were used. For electricity, it was wind and solar, and better technology for making electricity with gas — a swing from burning it under boilers to burning it in aero-derivative turbines, essentially airplane engines on the ground.

A new energy shortage — this time confined to electricity — is in the making. There are a lot of people who think that, magically, the big tech companies, headed by Alphabet’s Google, will jump in and use their tech muscle to solve the crisis.

The fact is that the tech giants, including Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple and Meta, are highly interested in electricity because they depend on supplies for their voracious data centers. According to many experts, the electricity demand will increase exponentially as AI takes hold.

The tech giants are aware of this and have been busy as collaborators and innovators in the electric space. They want to ensure an adequate electricity supply and insist it is green and carbon-free.

Google has been a player in the energy field with its Nest Renew service. This year, it stepped up its participation by merging with OhmConnect to form Renew Home. It is what its CEO, Ben Brown, and others call a virtual power plant (VPP). These are favored by environmentalists and utilities.

A VPP collects or saves energy from the system without requiring additional generation. It can be hooking up solar panels and domestic batteries or plugging in and reversing the flow from an electric vehicle at night.

For Renew Home, the emphasis is definitely the home, Brown said in an interview.

For cash or other incentives (like rebates), participants cut their home consumption, managed by a smart meter so that air conditioning can be put up a few notches, washing machines are turned off, and an EV can be reversed to feed the grid.

Brown said that at present, Renew Home controls about 3 gigawatts of residential energy use —  a gigawatt is sometimes described as enough electricity to power San Francisco — and plans to expand that to 50 GW by 2030. All of it is already in the system and doesn’t require new lines, power plants or infrastructure.

“We are hooking up millions of customers,” he said, adding that Renew Home is cooperating with 100 utilities.

Fortunately, peak demand and the ability to save on home consumption coincide between 5 p.m. and 9 p.m.

There is no question that more electricity will be needed as the nation electrifies its transportation and its manufacturing — and especially as AI takes hold across the board.

Todd Snitchler, president of the Electric Power Supply Association, told the annual meeting of the U.S. Energy Association that a web search using ChatGPT uses nine times as much power as a routine Google search.

Google and the other four tech giants are in the electric supply space, but not in the way people expect. Renew Home is an example; although Google’s name isn’t directly connected, it is the driving force behind Renew Home.

Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners (SIP) has invested $100 million in Renew Home. Brown is a former Google executive, and Jonathan Winer is a co-CEO and cofounder of SIP.

As Jim Robb, the president of the North American Electric Reliability Corp., the congressionally mandated, not-for-profit supply watchdog, said recently on the TV show “White House Chronicle,” the expectation that Google will go out and build power plants is silly as they would face the same hurdles that electric utilities already face.

But Google is keenly interested in power supply, as are the other tech behemoths. The Economist reports they are talking to utilities and plant operators about partnering on new capacity.

Also, they are showing an interest in small modular reactors and are working with entrepreneurial power providers on building capacity, with the tech company taking the risk. Microsoft has signed a power-purchase agreement with Helion Energy, a fusion power developer.

Big tech is on the move in the electric space. It may even pull nuclear across the finish line.

Filed Under: King's Commentaries Tagged With: Amazon, Apple, Ben Brown, electricity, Google, Helion Energy, Meta, Microsoft, Renew Home, tech, Todd Snitchler

Five Things That Underlie the Anxiety That Is Gripping the Nation

June 1, 2024 by Llewellyn King Leave a Comment

They say Generation Z is a generation of anxiety. Prima facie, I say they should get a grip. They are self-indulgent, self-absorbed and spoiled — just like every other generation.

Yet, they reflect a much broader societal anxiety. It isn’t confined to those on the threshold of their lives. I would highlight five causes of this anxiety:

—The presidential election.

—Climate change.

—Fear of wider war in Europe and the Middle East.

—The effect of AI on everything, from job losses to knowing real from fake.

—The worsening housing shortage.

The election weighs on all these issues. There is a feeling that the nation is headed for a train wreck, no matter who wins.

President Biden and former president Donald Trump are known quantities. And there’s the rub. Biden is an old man who has failed to convey strength either against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or the pro-Russia movement in Congress.

Biden has led on climate change but failed to tell the story. He has been unable to use the bully pulpit of his presidency and layout, with clear and convincing rhetoric, where the nation should be headed and how he will lead it there.

And if his health should further deteriorate, there is the prospect of Vice President Kamala Harris taking over. She has distinguished herself by walking away from every assignment Biden has given her, in a cloud of giggles. She has no base, just Biden’s support.

Trump inspires that part of the electorate that makes up his base, primarily working people who have a sense of loss and disgruntlement. They really believe Trump, the most unlikely man ever to climb the ramparts of American politics, will miraculously mend their world.

More reprehensible are those members of the Republican Party who are scared of Trump, who have hitched their wagon to his star because they fear him and love holding on to power at any price.

You will know them by their refusal to acknowledge the last election was honest and or to commit to accepting the result of the next election. In doing this, they are supporting a silent platform of insurrection.

The heat of summer has arrived early, and it is not the summer of our memories, of gentle winds, warm sun and wondrous beaches.

The sunshine of summer has turned into an ugly, frightening harbinger of a future climate that won’t support the life we have known. Before May was over, heat and related tornados took lives and spread destruction across Texas and elsewhere.

I wonder about children who have to stay indoors all summer in parts of Texas, the South and West, where you can get burned by touching an automobile and where sports must be played at dawn or after dusk. That should make us all anxious about climate change and the strength and security of the electric grid as we depend more and more on 24/7 air conditioning.

The wars in Europe and the Middle East are troubling in new ways, ways beyond the carnage, the incalculable suffering, and the buildings and homes fallen to bombs and shells.

Our belief that peace had come to Europe for all time has fallen. Surely, as the Russians marched into Ukraine, they will march on unless they are stopped. Who will stop them? Isolation has a U.S. constituency it hasn’t had for 90 years.

In the Middle East, a war goes on, suffering is industrial and relentless in its awful volume, and the dangers of a broader conflict have grown exponentially. Will there ever be a durable peace?

Artificial intelligence is undermining our ability to contemplate the future. It is so vast in its possibilities, so unknown even to its aficionados, and such a threat to jobs and veracity that it is like a frontier of old where people feared there were demons living. Employment will change, and the battle for the truth against the fake will be epic.

Finally, there is housing: the quiet crisis that saps expectations. There aren’t enough houses.

A nation that can’t house itself isn’t fulfilled. However, the political class is so busy with its own housekeeping that it has lost sight of the need for housing solutions.

There are economic consequences that will be felt in time, the largest of which might be a loss of labor mobility — always one of the great U.S. strengths. We followed the jobs. Now we stay put, worried about shelter should we move.

This is, ultimately, the decade of anxiety, mainly because it is a decade in which we feel we are losing what we had. Time for us to get a grip.

Filed Under: King's Commentaries Tagged With: anxiety, Biden, employment, Europe, Generation Z, housing, Russians, summer, trump, Ukraine

Father’s Day Challenge — Neckties Are Out

May 25, 2024 by Llewellyn King Leave a Comment

I admire Ben Mankiewicz, the host of Turner Classic Movies. He is the man we all think we are in our dreams: handsome, urbane, authoritative, and oh-so-charming — a member of one of the great families of film, an aristocrat of that realm.

I would like to look like Ben; his job is appealing, too.

But wait, Ben has suffered a savage downfall. He isn’t the man he used to be to me. I nearly fell off the couch when I saw Ben, an inspiration to men, introducing a movie without his necktie.

Yes, Ben was open-collared in a suit, looking a little like an unmade bed, which is what most men look like when pursuing the current fashion of no necktie.

Shock Horror! Another bastion of masculinity has fallen.

The problem — and I aver this to be an unassailable truth — is men wearing dress shirts without ties look less than their best. If they have a bit of age on them, a lot less than their best.

The dress shirt, which hasn’t been replaced, is designed for a necktie, long or in a bow. Without the tie, men look diminished, incomplete, as though they had to leave the house without time to finish dressing.

Let me state that the necktie is indeed a useless piece of clothing, like other dress items of the past: spats, watch chains and detached collars. The passing of none of these do I regret — but ties? Cry, the lost masculine adornment of yesteryear.

The necktie was something a man could glory in. Tying a long tie and throwing the long end over the short end always gave me the same feeling as mounting my horse; when my right leg cleared the saddle, I knew something good was going to happen. A great day in the Virginia countryside, usually.

Ties were something to treasure; fine silk, splendid patterns, elegance written with restraint. Just long enough, just obvious enough, conveying refinement and masculine savoir-faire. Now, men are running around open-necked in shirts that weren’t designed to be worn that way.

Have a care for the great names in ties. Those who saved us on Father’s Day, Christmas and birthdays are losing money or gone to other pursuits. 

Have a care for Hermes, Liberty, Tyrwhitt, Brioni, Fumagalli, Brooks Brothers and all those who created lovely things for the neck out of silk, finely woven wool or linen.

Just the sight of the box lit up the male face, ensuring the giver some future preferment or an extra helping at the table. The power of the tie was formidable — as Omar Khayyam, the Persian poet, might have said, it could transmute life’s leaden metal into gold.

At least it kept Dad smiling through some de rigueur family events. Ever noticed how he slipped off to the bathroom not to engage the porcelain but to admire himself in the mirror with the new gift around his neck?

Not so long ago, great restaurants had spare ties for guests who showed up without them. Now that is over.

The last holdout I know of is the Metropolitan Club in Washington. I have been to two events there recently, and the hosts thought it wise to advise their guests on dress etiquette: ties and no white-soled shoes. But no cravats or ascots as well. Strange.

I hope the cravat or its cousin, the ascot, will come back vigorously. It will save those master craftspeople who dyed silk, wove wool and shaped their handiwork over canvas to adorn men’s necks of no practical value but so dressy, so uplifting, so defining.

Give a cravat, and tell the man in your life or your father, “You look like David Niven.”

Come to think of it, I bet Ben Mankiewicz looks stupendous wearing a cravat.

Filed Under: King's Commentaries Tagged With: ascot, Ben Mankiewicz, cravat, Dad, David Niven, dress shirts, necktie, Omar Khayyam

Three Environmental Organizations That Are Out-of-Step

May 17, 2024 by Llewellyn King Leave a Comment

Greedy men and women are conspiring to wreck the environment just to enrich themselves.

That has been an unshakable left-wing belief for a long time. It has gained new vigor since The Washington Post revealed that former President Donald Trump has been trawling Big Oil for big money.

At a meeting at Mar-a-Lago, Trump is reported to have promised oil industry executives a free hand to drill willy-nilly across the country and up and down the coasts and to roll back the Biden administration’s environmental policies. All this for $1 billion in contributions to his presidential campaign, according to The Post article.

Trump may believe that there is a vast constituency of energy company executives yearning to push pollution up the smokestack, disturb the permafrost, and drain the wetlands. But he has gotten it wrong.

Someone should tell Trump that times have changed and very few American energy executives believe — as he has said he does — that global warming is a hoax.

Trump has set himself not only against a plethora of laws but also against an ethic, an American ethic: the environmental ethic.

This ethic slowly entered the consciousness of the nation after the seminal publication of “Silent Spring” by Rachel Carson in 1962.

Over time, concern for the environment has become an 11th Commandment. The cornerstone of a vast edifice of environmental law and regulation was the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969. It was promoted and signed by President Richard Nixon, hardly a wild-eyed lefty.

Some 30 years ago, Barry Worthington, the late executive director of the United States Energy Association, told me the important thing to know about the energy versus environment debate was that a new generation of executives in oil companies and electric utilities were environmentalists, that the world had changed and the old arguments were losing their advocates.

“Not only are they very concerned about the environment, but they also have children who are very concerned,” Worthington told me.

Quite so then, more so now. The aberrant weather alone keeps the environment front and center.

This doesn’t mean that old-fashioned profit-lust has been replaced in corporate accommodation with the Green New Deal or that the milk of human kindness is seeping from C-suites. But it does mean that the environment is an important part of corporate thinking and planning today. There is pressure both outside and within companies for that.

The days when oil companies played hardball by lavishing money on climate deniers on Capitol Hill and utilities employed consultants to find data that proved coal use didn’t affect the environment are over. I was witness to the energy versus climate and environment struggle going back half a century. Things are absolutely different now.

Trump has promised to slash regulation, but industry doesn’t necessarily favor wholesale repeal of many laws. Often, the very shape of the industries Trump would seek to help has been determined by those regulations. For example, because of the fracking boom, the gas industry could reverse the flow of liquified natural gas at terminals, making us a net exporter, not an importer.

The United States is now, with or without regulation, the world’s largest oil producer. The electricity industry is well along in moving to renewables and making inroads on new storage technologies like advanced batteries. Electric utilities don’t want to be lured back to coal. Carbon capture and storage draws nearer.

Similarly, automakers are gearing up to produce more electric vehicles. They don’t want to exhume past business models. Laws and taxes favoring EVs are now assets to Detroit, building blocks to a new future.

As the climate crisis has evolved, so have corporate attitudes. Yet there are those who either don’t or don’t want to believe that there has been a change of heart in energy industries. But there has.

Three organizations stand out as pushing old arguments, shibboleths from when coal was king and oil was emperor.

These groups are:

The Sunrise Movement, a dedicated organization of young people that believes the old myths about big, bad oil and that American production is evil, drilling should stop, and the industry should be shut down. It fully embraces the Green New Deal — an impractical environmental agenda — and calls for a social utopia.

The 350 Organization is similar to the Sunrise Movement and has made much of what it sees as the Biden administration’s environmental failures—particularly, it feels the administration has been soft on natural gas.

Finally, there is a throwback to the 1970s and 1980s: an anti-nuclear organization called Beyond Nuclear. It opposes everything to do with nuclear power even in the midst of the environmental crisis, highlighted by Sunrise Movement and the 350 Organization.

Beyond Nuclear is at war with Holtec International for its work in interim waste storage and in bringing the Palisades plant along Lake Michigan back to life. Its arguments are those of another time, hysterical and alarmist. The group doesn’t get that most old-time environmentalists are endorsing nuclear power.

As Barry Worthington told me: “We all wake up under the same sky.”

Filed Under: King's Commentaries Tagged With: 350 Organization, Barry Worthington, Beyond Nuclear, Donald Trump, Environmnet, Green New Deal, National Environmental Policy, Silent Spring, The Sunrise Movement

A Commencement Address — Get Used to Rejections, We All Get Them Sometimes

May 10, 2024 by Llewellyn King 2 Comments

As so many commencement addresses haven’t been delivered this year, I thought I would share what I would have said to graduates if I had been invited by a college or university to be a speaker.

“The first thing to know is that you are graduating at a propitious time in human history — for example, think of how artificial intelligence is enabling medical breakthroughs.

“A vast world of possibilities awaits you because you are lucky enough to be living in a liberal democracy. It happens to be America, but the same could be true of any of the democratic countries.

“Look at the world, and you will see that the countries with democracy are also prosperous places where individuals can follow their passion. Doubly or triply so in America.

“Despite all the disputes, unfairness and politics, the United States is foremost among places to live and work — where the future is especially tempting. I say this having lived and worked on three continents and traveled to more than 180 countries. Just think of the tens of millions who would live here if they could.

“In a society that is politically and commercially free, as it is in the United States, the limits we encounter are the limits we place on ourselves.

“That is what I want to tell you: Don’t fence yourself in.

“But do work always to keep that freedom, your freedom, especially now.

“Seldom mentioned, but the greatest perverters of careers, stunters of ambition and all-around enfeeblers you will contend with aren’t the government, a foreign power, shortages or market conditions, but how you manage rejection.

“Fear of rejection is, I believe, the great inhibitor. It shapes lives, hinders careers and is ever-present, from young love to scientific creation.

“The creative is always vulnerable to the forces of no, to rejection.

“No matter what you do, at some point you will face rejection — in love, in business, in work or in your own family.

“But if you want to break out of the pack and leave a mark, you must face rejection over and over again.

“Those in the fine and performing arts and writers know rejection; it is an expected but nonetheless painful part of the tradition of their craft. If you plan to be an artist of some sort or a writer, prepare to face the dragon of rejection and fight it all the days of your career.

“All other creative people face rejection. Architects, engineers and scientists face it frequently. Many great entrepreneurial ideas have faced early rejection and near defeat.

“If you want to do something better, differently or disruptively, you will face rejection.

“To deal with this world where so many are ready to say no, you must know who you are. Remember that: Know who you are.

“But you can’t know who you are until you have found out who you are.

“Your view of yourself may change over time, but I adjure you always to judge yourself by your bests, your zeniths. That is who you are. Make past success your default setting in assessing your worth when you go forth to slay the dragons of rejection.

“There are two classes of people you will encounter again and again in your lives. The yes people and the no people.

“Seek out and cherish those who say yes. Anyone can say no. The people who have changed the world, who have made it a better place, are the people who have said, ‘Yes.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘Let’s try.’

“Those are people you need in life, and that is what you should aim to be: a yes person. Think of it historically: Thomas Edison, Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and Steve Jobs were all yes people, undaunted by frequent rejection.

“Try to be open to ideas, to different voices and to contrarian voices. That way, you will not only prosper in what you seek to do, but you will also become someone who, in turn, will help others succeed.

“You enter a world of great opportunities in the arts, sciences and technology but with attendant challenges. The obvious ones are climate, injustice, war and peace.

“Think of yourselves as engineers, working around those who reject you, building for others, and having a lot of fun doing it.

“Avoid being a no person. No is neither a building block for you nor for those who may look to you. Good luck!”

Filed Under: King's Commentaries Tagged With: Churchill, Edison, graduate, jobs, rejection, Roosevelt, success

The Trials of Celebrity Love, from Taylor-Burton to Swift-Kelce

Singer-songwriter Taylor Swift wearing Kansas City Chiefs red tee shirt, rooting for Travis Kelce, the football team's tight end and her boyfriend.

May 7, 2024 by Llewellyn King Leave a Comment

I wouldn’t know Taylor Swift if she sat beside me on an airplane, which is unlikely because she travels by private jet. If she were to take a commercial flight, she wouldn’t be sitting in the economy seats, which the airlines politely call coach.

Swift needs to go by private jet these days: She is dating Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, which is a problem. Love needs candle lighting, not floodlighting.

Being in love when you are famous is tough, especially if both lovers are famous. The normal, simple joys of that happy state are a problem: There is no privacy and precious few places outside of gated homes where the lovers can be themselves.

They can’t do any of the things unfamous lovers take for granted, like catching a movie, holding hands or stealing a kiss in public without it being caught on video and transmitted on social media to billions of fans. Dinner for two in a cozy restaurant and what each orders is flashed around the world. “Oysters for you, sir?”

Worse, if the lovers are caught in public not doing any of those things and, say, staring into the middle distance, looking glum, the same social media will erupt with speculation about the end of the affair.

If you are a single celebrity, you are gossip-bait, catnip for the paparazzi. If a couple, the speculation is whether it will be wedding bells or splitsville.

The world at large is convinced that celebrity lovers are somehow in a different place from the rest of us. It isn’t true, of course, but there we are: We think their highs are higher and lows are lower.

That is doubtful, but it is why we yearn to hear about the ups and downs of their romances; Swift’s more than most because they are the raw material of her lyrics. Break up with Swift and wait for the album.

When I was a young reporter in London in the 1960s, I did my share of celebrity chasing. Mostly, I found the hunters were encouraged by their prey. But not when Cupid was afoot. Celebrity is narcotic except when the addiction is inconvenient because of a significant other.

In those days, the most famous woman in the world, and the most beautiful, was Elizabeth Taylor. I was employed by a London newspaper to follow her and her lover, Richard Burton, around London. They were engaged in what was then, and maybe still is, the most famous love affair in the world.

The great beauty and the great Shakespearian actor were the stuff of legends. It also was a scandal because when they met in Rome, on the set of “Cleopatra,” they were both married to other people. She to the singer Eddie Fisher, and he to his first wife, the Welsh actress and theater director Sybil Williams.

Social rules were tighter then, and scandal had a real impact. This scandal, like most scandals of a sexual nature, raised consternation along with prurient curiosity.

My role at The Daily Sketch was to stake out the lovers where they were staying at the luxury Dorchester Hotel on Park Lane.

I never saw Taylor and Burton. Day after day, I would be sidetracked by the hotel’s public relations officer with champagne and tidbits of gossip while they escaped by a back entrance.

Then, one Sunday in East Dulwich, a leafy part of South London where I lived with my first wife, Doreen, one of the great London newspaper writers, I happened upon them.

Every Sunday, we had lunch at a local pub that served traditional English roast beef or lamb. It was a good pub — which today might be called a gastropub, but back then, it was just a pub with a dining room. An enticing place.

One Sunday, we went as usual to the pub and were seated right next to my targets: the most famous lovers in the world, Taylor and Burton. The elusive lovers, the scandalous stars were there next to me: a gift to a celebrity reporter.

I had never seen before, nor in the many years since, two people so in love, so aglow, so entranced with each other, so oblivious to the rest of the room. No movie they were to star in ever captured love as palpable as the aura that enwrapped Taylor and Burton. You could warm your hands on it. Doreen whispered from behind her hand, “Are you going to call the office?”

I looked at the lovers and shook my head. They were so happy, so beautiful, so in love I didn’t have the heart to break the spell.

I wasn’t sorry I didn’t call in a story then, and I haven’t changed my mind.

Love in a gilded cage is tough. If Swift and Kelce are at the next table — unlikely — in a restaurant, I will keep mum. Love conquers all.

Filed Under: King's Commentaries

National Labs — the Powerful Muscle in America’s Arm

Map of the U.S. with the locations of all the DOE National Laboratories

May 3, 2024 by Llewellyn King Leave a Comment

On May 1, the stars came out to play. The stars I’m referring to are the directors of five of the Department of Energy’s 17 national laboratories, who shone at a virtual press briefing presented by the U.S. Energy Association.

The virtual press briefing (full disclosure: I was the organizer) was, in a sense, historic. While they work closely together, the directors of the national laboratories don’t usually appear together, as there is typically no forum for them to do so.

“The labs,” as they are known collectively, are unique: a powerful muscle in America’s arm, little known outside their communities, and whose work is generally not well-publicized or understood.

I have been starstruck by the labs since I first encountered them in the 1970s, covering the energy crisis that erupted in the fall of 1973. Earlier that year, I had created The Energy Daily, so I was in the throes of writing about the crisis.

It is forgotten now, but the crisis was a tremendous threat to the nation and the world order. The energy shortage was as big a challenge as anything posed by the Soviet Union. It shook the country as nothing else had since the end of World War II. A shrinking economy was in prospect. In 1974 alone, 23 heads of state lost their jobs because of the economic chaos the crisis had unleashed.

The great weapons laboratories (controlled by the Atomic Energy Commission, a predecessor of the DOE), Argonne, Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos, Oak Ridge and Sandia sprung into action with a new mission: Solve the energy problem.

I visited all those labs frequently; for me, they were where science, engineering and poetry came together. Yes, poetry. Scientists can dream of a better world with some hope of bringing it about. The numerate dreamer has the edge over the purely literate dreamer.

The labs produced across the board. They were instrumental in the oil and gas fracking boom, making solar efficient and wind turbines competitive. They did pioneering work in geothermal and some technologies that weren’t ultimately needed, like coal gasification.

They were also instrumental in spheres as diverse as mapping the human genome and creating an artificial human protein.

Aside from their permanent role in nuclear weapons readiness and technological development, the labs, according to their leaders, are hard at facilitating the transition of electricity generation from fossil fuels to carbon-free fuels — the green future.

Here is a sampling of passions from the lab leaders at the May 1 briefing:

Martin Keller, director of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, was enthusiastic about the future and a new energy regime, which includes hydrogen, benefiting rural America in a “more resilient and dependable way.” He also warned that the labs face a continuing challenge in getting discoveries out of the labs and into the marketplace.

Kimberly Budil, director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, is an enthusiast for fusion power. She believes it is within 25 years of commercialization. Her lab has had outstanding successes with inertial fusion.

Steven Ashby, director of the Pacific Northwest Laboratory, looks at using artificial intelligence to integrate the increasingly complex electric grid. He pointed out otherwise that his lab was “particularly well-known for our expertise in chemistry.”

Stephen Streiffer, director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, spoke enthusiastically about small modular reactors and the future need for nuclear power. He said, “What is needed now is public-private partnerships to (financially) de-risk them.”

Claus Daniel, associate director for advanced energy technologies at the Argonne National Laboratory, said that to meaningfully impact the effects of carbon in the atmosphere, “we have to have life-cycle analysis.”

Another common theme was the importance of the labs’ work in electricity storage and finding substitutes for lithium, cobalt, copper and rare earths that come from troubled sources.

All of the directors emphasized the critical work the labs are doing in cybersecurity as a priority. Ruefully, PNNL’s Ashby said, “Hopefully, it won’t get a lot of press because we’ve succeeded.”

That might say much of what the labs do. When they succeed, it can be because they have found answers and exerted a silent hand.

Filed Under: King's Commentaries Tagged With: Argonne National Laboratory, Claus Daniel, Kimberly Budil, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Martin Keller, National Labs, National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Stephen Streiffer, Steven Ashby

New Iron Age of Electricity Storage Is at Hand

electricity

April 27, 2024 by Llewellyn King Leave a Comment

Since electricity was first deployed, there has been a missing link: storage.

The lead-acid battery was first developed in 1859 and has been refined to the effective, utilitarian box we have in cars today. Gone are the days when you sometimes had to top up the car battery with sulfuric acid and, often, distilled water.

These batteries, these workhorses, never made it far beyond their essential role in automobiles. Although early car manufacturers thought the future of the automobile would belong to electricity, it was the internal combustion engine that took over.

While battery research continues unabated – especially after the energy crisis which unfolded after the fall of 1973 — it wasn’t until the lithium-ion battery arrived in the 1980s that batteries became a transformative technology. From cell phones to Teslas, they have upended the world of stored electricity.

Lithium-ion was the clear winner. It is light and suitable for transportation. It has also been the primary battery for utilities which have been installing them at breakneck speed. But they are costly, and lithium is at the end of a troubled supply chain.

Batteries are essential to realizing the full potential of electricity generated from wind and solar. They provide power when the sun has set or the wind isn’t blowing. They can capture surplus production in the middle of the day when states like California and Arizona already have overproduction of solar power and it becomes negative energy, wasted.

Enter iron-air batteries. That is right: Iron with an “r,” which is the basic material in steel and one of the most plentiful elements on Earth.

Iron-air batteries use rusting as their central technology. In an iron-air battery, iron, water and air are the components. The iron rusts to discharge power and the rusting is reversed to charge the battery.

Form Energy, headquartered in Somerville, Massachusetts, will be shipping these revolutionary batteries to utilities late this year or early next from their manufacturing plant at the site of the old steel mill on the Ohio River in Weirton, West Virginia. This means transportation infrastructure for heavy loads is already in place.

Form Energy got started with two battery experts talking: Mateo Jaramillo, the head of energy storage development at Tesla, and Yet-Ming Chiang, a professor at MIT who devoted his career to the study of batteries, primarily lithium. Indeed, he told me when I met with him in Somerville, that he fathered two successful battery companies using lithium.

But clearly, iron-air is Chiang’s passion now — a palpable passion. He is the chief scientific officer at Form Energy and remains Kyocera professor of ceramics at MIT.

Chiang, Jaramillo and three others founded Form Energy in 2017. Now it has contracts with five utilities to provide batteries and appears to be fulfilling the dearest wish of the utilities: a battery that can provide electricity over long periods of time, like 100 hours. Lithium-ion batteries draw down quickly — usually in two or four hours, before they must be recharged.

An iron-air battery is capable of slow discharge over days, not hours. Therefore, it can capture electricity when the sun is blazing and the wind is blowing — which tends to drop in the afternoon just when utilities are beginning to experience their peak load, which is early evening.

Iron is very heavy so the use of iron-air technology would appear to be limited to utilities where weight isn’t a problem and where the need for long, long drawdown times are needed; for example, when the wind doesn’t blow for several days.

Jaramillo told me the company is well-set financially. It has raised $860 million and was given $290 million by the state of West Virginia,

The smart money has noticed: Early funders include Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos. Is a new Iron Age at hand?

Filed Under: King's Commentaries Tagged With: electric utilities, electricity storage, Form Energy, iron-air batteries

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