White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

The Shadow of 1914

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The new year is beginning with the shadow of an old year flitting around the retina of our consciousness. That year is 1914; the year that Europe was convulsed in the world's worst war – 9 million dead.
 
It was also the war from which the world never fully recovered. In its destruction of the old order in Europe, World War I laid the blueprint for the rest of the century; its emancipations and its enslavements, its triumphs and its horrors.

The century following World War I has been a century in which blood and ideas have flowed freely. As a consequence of the war and the Treaty of Versailles which ended it:

1. The Russian Revolution ushered in communism, and later the Cold War.

2. Britain and France carved up the Middle East with boundaries that created new countries, such as Iraq and Saudi Arabia, without regard to the promises that had been made to the Arabs during the war or regard for their sensibilities.

3. The Ottoman Empire fell, making way for modern Turkey.

4. The Austro-Hungarian Empire fell, changing the face of central and eastern Europe.

5. Monarchical rule ended in Europe.

6. Germany was so emasculated by the peace that the ascent of Adolf Hitler was possible.

7. Mechanized war was perfected with industrialized killing by gun, bomb and, for the first time, aircraft was unleashed.

8. The combatants lost the cream of their crop of young men, many of who would have risen to affect the 20th century after the war. The consequences of the loss of a generation of a young men can be speculated upon, but not calculated.

9. The stage was set for the United States — which played a decisive role in the war from the spring of 1917 on, but was not as deeply affected as the European powers — to become the dominant nation in the later part of the 20th century and to this day.

10. The social order throughout Europe began to liberalize. Its feudal underpinnings would remain until World War II, but there was a loosening of the old bonds of class across Europe.

11.  Women were beginning to share their gifts with society.

12. African colonies were taken from Germany and handed to Britain for a kind of safe-keeping, but not for the imperial expansion that Britain had been enjoying for two centuries. Britain, France, Portugal and Holland remained the colonial powers — Britain's possessions were many times greater than the rest put together.

13. Fury at the colonial system was building, especially against British control of what are now India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. The beginning of the end of the colonial concept had begun, but it had many hurdles and another world war to go before it all ended in an avalanche of independencies.

 
World War I began with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian throne and his wife, Sophie, in Sarajevo. The Balkans were the tinder for the war, but the fuel was everywhere: it was the growth in nationalism and its arrogance; a lack of enough understanding of what a modern war would look like; militarism in many countries, and especially in Germany, where the high command found a fatal friend in Kaiser Wilhem II.
 
As tensions in Europe escalated, the players scrambled for allies and these alliances led to the broader war. For example, the German High Command did not think that Britain would join the war, despite Britain's commitments to France and Russia: It thought Britain could and would remain neutral.
 
The great myth of the time was that the European powers were so intertwined in their trading relationships that war would cost too much and so peace was secure. Yet all the ingredients of combustion were present in 1914, and they were abetted by a lack of great leaders in all the countries that would fling themselves at each other.
 
It was a time of crushing mediocrity in European governance. That may have been the real cause of the world's greatest, most terrible miscalculation, 100 years ago: a leadership vacuum. Beware. Happy New Year. –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate


 

Christmas Is Winning the ‘War’

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The sinister forces that are supposed to be vanquishing Christmas, in what is called the “War on Christmas,” are in retreat. In fact, they are celebrating it.

Across secular Europe the creches are on display and decorations adorn street lamps. In most towns and villages, the central square is transformed into a Christmas market with a skating rink and stalls selling good things to eat and, even better, to drink. A million amplifiers blast carols in many languages. More traditional carolers go door to door.

Across the United States Christmas fever has been building, like the strains of Maurice Ravel's “Bolero,” since Thanksgiving. It is humanity's greatest festival; a wonderful collective indulgence, a surrender simultaneously to our profound and trivial selves.

The “War on Christmas” is an argument advanced by commentators on Fox Cable News that centers on skirmishes over the First Amendment. Fox actually publishes on the Internet a map of sites where it believes the forces opposed to Christmas are in hand-to-hand combat with the defenders of the Baby Jesus. Really!

The crux of the argument from the “war” people is that Christmas is a religious celebration that has been taken over by the ungodly. In fact, historically, it is an ungodly festival that was taken over by Christianity. It was a pagan festival that became a Christian festival and adjusted to the lands where it spread—and to the religious intensity of the time.

There is no mention of snow in the Bible; but thanks to Northern and Eastern Europeans, snow is part of Christmas. In hot Africa and India, shop windows are decorated with cotton wool and children sing “Good King Wenceslas” with the acceptance that snow is part of their Christmas, too. Yes, people who have never seen snow can dream of a white Christmas. That is just part of the great cultural snowball that is Christmas.

There is a silliness attending those who persist in believing that forces of atheism, secularism, and all the other religions, especially Islam, are out to rip the religious soul out of Christmas. Not quite. In Islam, Jesus is a prophet and a messiah and to be a believer, you must accept him. Others love the story of the nativity without accepting it as a threat to their beliefs.

One of the joys of Christmas is that it is such a wondrous bundle of beliefs, cultural agglomerations and ethnic inclusions that to strip out any of them is to do violence to the best time of year all over the world. Charles Dickens' masterpiece “A Christmas Carol” may embody the Christian spirit, but it features ghosts; Father Christmas comes from a union of German and Nordic mythology with the first Christian saint, Nicholas, who was known for his gifts to the poor. The old man who lives at the North Pole is now a global figure – incidentally, Megan Kelly — of many ethnicities. There is an Indian version, a Turkish version and a Brazilian version of him. I doubt any of these three is thought of as Caucasian.

Christmas is a festival of many splendors: decorations, from Russian icons to tinsel made in China; flora, from fir trees and mistletoe to ferns, in tropical climes; food, from German stollen to Mexican bacalao; music, from Bach to Broadway.

Much of the argument nowadays is about Christmas greetings, “Merry Christmas” versus “Happy Holidays.” My father, who read the King James Bible every day, had never read the U.S. Constitution, never heard of the separation of church and state, and who lived all his life in British Africa, used to say, “Season's Greetings” or “Compliments of the Season.” His argument was that “not everyone is a Christian, but everyone has Christmas." Quite so. Merry Christmas. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 

 

 

 

 

The Mandela Doctrine and McCain’s Heresy

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What does one do about John McCain? Why can he not play the senior statesman? He is a veteran who has endured more than anyone should endure during his imprisonment in North Vietnam. He is a Churchill scholar. He has been a distinguished senator, a worthy presidential aspirant and a powerful voice for many causes.
 
But he cannot help himself: the ill-considered statement is his trademark. Without knowing anything about the situation on the ground in Syria, McCain was foursquare for American intervention. Now he said President Obama shaking hands with Cuban President Raul Castro was akin to Neville Chamberlain's shaking hands with Adolf Hitler.
 
McCain knows much more about the events of 1938 than this cheap shot suggests – I have heard him hold forth in front of the Churchill Society on the unfolding of the Third Reich's European strategy. So he knows better than to compare Obama's handshake with Castro to Chamberlain's grasp of Hitler's contaminated paw.
 
It is little understood these days in the United States how few were Chamberlain options, and how he owed it to the British people to forestall war until they were somewhat more ready to fight it. That is why Churchill joined the cabinet — and why, at the time, he accepted Chamberlain's action.
 
But that is not the point. In his way, McCain's remark trashes the Mandela doctrine, laid out in “Long Walk to Freedom,” Mandela's 1995 autobiography: “If you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy. Then he becomes your partner.”
 
Mandela's stature grew as his personal serenity and sense of high moral purpose began to be known not only outside Robben Island, but also inside the prison as he began to affect his jailers.
 
Mandela was schooled by the Methodist missionaries, who educated him to persevere and to seek peace; to turn the other cheek. This was one part of his inner strength. The other came from his birth as a nobleman of his tribe; someone in line to be its king if the wider struggle had not been paramount.
 
From Mahatma Gandhi, who had led a civil rights campaign for Indians in South Africa in the first decade of the 20th century, from the missionaries and from his birth, Mandela knew who he was. He also had a selflessness. He could have been released from prison a decade earlier, if he had been prepared to renounce violence. He was not.
 
Unlike Gandhi, Mandela thought violence was a necessary tool in the struggle. Many otherwise good white South Africans thought he should have been put to death – much in the same way we feel about terrorists today.
 
Yet when apartheid fell, not least thanks to Mandela's great partner in the making of the new South Africa, former President F.W. de Klerk, Mandela insisted on peace and reconciliation, saving a troubled, beautiful land from more bloodshed.
 
Mandela shook the hands of his enemies; those who had imprisoned him for 27 long years. He shook their hands just as McCain had gone back to Vietnam and shook hands there.
 
In that atmosphere of celebrating the life a man who had the genius to shake the hands of those who wanted him dead, and then to have reconciled with them, it would have been a travesty of Mandela's legacy for Obama not to have shaken the bloodstained hand of Castro. That is what Mandela would have wanted and would have done himself.
 
It is probably what McCain would have done, too, had he won the presidency. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

David and Goliath, or, the Sick and the Bureaucracy

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Malcolm Gladwell, the New Yorker writer, has grown rich with a series of books exploring the sociological dimensions of success and failure. In his latest, “David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants,” Gladwell celebrates the many Davids who triumphed over the odds because they were nimble and resourceful.
 
If he wants to observe a classic David-versus-Goliath rumble, Gladwell might want to go to Washington on Tuesday (Dec. 10). He will see a frail woman go up against the federal government with a humble petition and a small following of mostly very sick people.
 
Her name is Susan Kreutzer and she suffers from the debilitating and mysterious disease Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS), also known as Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, which is the name patients favor.
 
Kreutzer and others will begin their demonstration at 9a.m. outside the headquarters of the Department of Health and Human Services on Independence Avenue, where she will hand over a petition. Then she will move up the street to Capitol Hill to demonstrate and hand-deliver petitions to members of Congress. She will end her day of petitioning her government outside the White House.
 
Kreutzer has no idea how many, if any, demonstrators will join her, but she assures me she has the required permits to demonstrate. Another time, only six demonstrators turned out,, but they unfurled a huge banner and stood on he street telling the oft-ignored story of their suffering to anyone who would listen.
 
Telling your story in Washington without a big-bucks lobbying firm or celebrity friends is not an easy assignment. Not only is there the high chance of being ignored but there is also the chance of being discounted as one of the apocalyptic “end of days” proselytizers, or those who believe the CIA has it in for them and who habitually assemble at the White House and elsewhere. In other words, it is easy to be dismissed as a “crazy.”
 
But Kreutzer, who will have a warm-up demonstration on Dec. 9 in San Francisco at the HHS offices there, believes in the strength of small voices, of a murmur in the cacophony of Washington petitioning. “I feel I have to do this,” she said.
 
This year, the victims of CFS are particularly upset with HHS and its dependent agency the National Institutes of Health. They are fuming at the decision of NIH to seek a new clinical definition of their disease, supplanting the Canadian Consensus Criteria, which has been the diagnostic gold standard for researchers who are deeply committed to finding a cure for a disease that affects as many as 1 million Americans and another 17 million people worldwide.
 
It is a disease that simply confiscates normal life and substitutes an existence in purgatory, where victims can be confined for decades until death. Sometimes they will be so sick they must lie in darkened rooms for months or years; sometimes they can function for a few hours a day, usually followed by collapse. Dysphasia — word confusion — increases. Lovers leave, spouses despair and the well of family compassion runs dry.
 
The first and major complaint of all those in researching the disease and those suffering from it is that NIH spends a trifling $6 million on this circle of hell that could have been invented by Dante.
 
The second and immediate source of anger laced with despair is that NIH has, apparently arbitrarily, decided to have the clinical definition of the disease reclassified by the Institute of Medicine and has diverted a precious $1 million to this purpose. Thirty-six leading researchers and physicians from the United States, risking retribution in funding, protested the move but were ignored. They were joined by colleagues from abroad, bringing the blue-ribbon protesters to 50.
 
Still nobody knows why the move to reclassify the disease. One school of thought is that NIH would like to abandon the current and well-accepted diagnostic criteria, known as the Canadian Consensus Criteria, in order to treat the disease as more of a mental one rather than a physical one.
 
I approached HHS for a comment and for a word with Dr. Howard Koh, the assistant secretary in charge, but have received no response.
 
Will this David, Susan Kreutzer, fell this Goliath, HHS? — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
 

Europe and Its Slippery Energy Slope

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BRATISLAVA, Slovakia — Europe, at present the world's largest market and largest economic bloc, is decline and living standards are in danger. That was the sober message at an energy conference here, delivered by a battery of speakers from across eastern Europe.
 
The narrative is that energy is what is dragging Europe down – not low birthrates and pervasive social-safety networks, but increasing dependence on expensive energy imports and hopelessly tangled markets.
 
Although delegates gathered to discuss the particular problems of eastern Europe, many had comments about the energy dependence across Europe; its labyrinthine regulations in nearly all 28 countries, its inability to form capital for large projects like nuclear, and governments intruding into the market.
 
The result is a patchwork of contradictions, counterproductive regulations, political fiats and multiple objectives that leave Europeans paying more for energy than they need to and failing to develop indigenous sources, such as their own shale gas deposits in Ukraine and Poland. It also leaves countries dependent on capricious and expensive gas from Russia, unsure of whether they can build needed electric generating plant in the future and poorly interconnected, sometimes by both gas pipelines and electric lines.
 
Good intentions have also had their impact. The European Commission has pushed renewable energy and subsidized these at the cost of others. The result is imperfect markets and, more important, imperfectly engineered systems.
 
Germany and other countries are dealing with what is called “loop flow” – when the renewables aren't performing, either because the wind has dropped or the sun has set, fossil fuels plant has to be activated. This means that renewable systems are often shadowed by old-fashioned gas and coal generation that has to be built, but which isn't counted toward the cost of the renewable generation.
 
With increasing use of wind, which is the most advanced renewable, the problem of loop flow is increased, pushing up the price of electricity. Germany is badly affected and the problem is getting worse because it heavily committed to wind after abandoning nuclear, following the Fukusima-Daiichi accident in Japan.
 
Frank Umbach, associate director of the European Center for Energy and Resource Security at King's College, London, said energy costs in Germany are now driving manufacturing out of the country and to the United States.
 
Umbach said that as Britain de-industrialized 15 years ago, Germany was beginning to go the same way. He said Britain had been able to sustain itself through financial services and other service sector jobs, but that was not a prospect for Germany, the industrial mainstay of the European Union. Now Britain, with its new nuclear policy, is trying to re-industrialize, he said.
 
Umbach urged that Europe get serious about shale gas and even burning coal. His argument was that there are environment safeguards available and that more are being developed, such as the new less environmentally assaulting techniques in hydraulic fracturing (fracking) used to extract tightly bound natural gas from shale formations.
 
Several speakers said the region has to face the reality that it is no longer able to generate the capital it needs for liquefied natural gas terminals, nuclear power plants and unconventional gas recovery in Ukraine, Poland and in the Black Sea offshore Romania and Bulgaria.
 
Many countries, particularly in eastern Europe, still balk at foreign ownership of their energy infrastructure and have actively driven away investment. Poland, for example, has frightened off shale gas developers from the United States by insisting that as the resource is developed, 50 percent of the developing company must be ceded to the state. The companies left.
 
In other places, the Czech Republic, for example, landowners have no claim to the resource under their land; that remains the property of the government and, therefore, they are hostile to any development on their property, whether it is for oil, gas or minerals.
The United Kingdom, by contrast, declared a spokesman for its energy ministry, Hergen Haye, is open for business. That means if the Americans, the Chinese of the Middle Easterners want to “buy into” Britain's new nuclear undertaking, “they are welcome.”
 
Europe's sad energy situation was summed up by Iana Dreyer of the EU Institute for Security Studies. She said Europe is still the largest trading bloc in the world, the largest economic machine and the largest market, but that it is slipping. By 2030, she calculated, Europe will have slipped to No. 3, behind the China and the United States, unless it can untangle its energy Gordian knot.
 
Europeans here cite the United States as the way to go in energy. It makes a body feel good. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

A Civics Lesson on Government-Private Collaboration

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The world is awash in natural gas and, to a somewhat lesser extent, in oil. This is due to the controversial but hugely effective technology of hydraulic fracturing, known as “fracking.”
 
The principal of fracking is so simple that it has been discussed and tried since the latter part of the 19th century; in other words, it is as old as the oil industry. If you find something you want in the crevasses in the ground, why not dislodge it with something else?
 
It was frustrating to know that you were leaving more oil behind than was coming to the surface. Ditto when natural gas also became an important fuel.
 
In the 1960s, the federal government had not one but two programs to see whether nuclear detonations could release natural gas in tight formations. These foundered not on their feasibility, but on fears that the gas would be radioactive. That scheme sounds crazy now.
 
Crazy was what some people said of a Texas oil man, George Phydias Mitchell, who believed that fracking could be developed on a grand scale to unleash natural gas and oil in shale. By any standards, Mitchell, who died at the age of 94 in July, was a visionary who knew, from wildcatting, that on the frontier of technology, you will fail before you succeed.
 
He also knew that he needed the U.S. government.The U.S. government may not have known that it needed George Mitchell and his company, Mitchell Energy and Development, but together they forged a partnership so effective that it has changed the world and brightened America’s prospects as world competitor because of cheap energy at home.
 
There are those who want to believe that Mitchell did it all by himself; that the U.S. government was wasting our money on other things. But that is not so.
 
Starting in 1975, the U.S. government began putting money into advanced oil and gas recovery, fracking. The United States brought science to bear at a time when about half of Mitchell’s own employees thought he was on a wild goose chase.
 
Key to the success of the drilling revolution was the naval technology three-dimensional mapping. First developed for tracking submarines, it was possible to look under the ground and establish the contours of the resource.
 
Horizontal drilling was the essential breakthrough: the well — or borehole as it is called in oil-speak — could follow the shale seam laterally, but sometimes rising or falling with it. A well that is a few hundred feet might have horizontal branches, stretching out as much as 10,000 feet. The oil or gas is driven out under the pressure of water, sand and a cocktail of chemicals. The role of these is to prop open fissures created by the pressure, and so release the precious hydrocarbons – pry them from their eternal rest.
 
There are well-known environmental problems, especially the enormous quantities of water used and what becomes of it afterward. But fracking works and has changed the geopolitics of the world. More than 40 countries may have shale resources that change their prospects. For example, in time, Australia may be a bigger supplier of gas than Qatar. Already, Russia is treating its European contracts with a new respect. There is looming competition.
 
To me the lesson is that wondrous things happen in U.S. government-funded science, especially in its laboratories, and when it is combined with enlightened managers on both sides.

 

So it is a tragedy the federal research budgets are being cut by budget sequestration. We know what can be done when the U.S. government research machine, together with private collaborators, is unleashed: America leaps forward.
 
Medicine is the permanent frontier challenging us, but only 8 percent of research grant requests are funded by the National Institutes of Health. The sick suffer, competitiveness suffers, and American loses its edge as the fertilizer and incubator of science.
 
The idea that all research is or will be undertaken efficiently in private industry is fallacious. At present, there is a desperate need for research on the diseases of the immune system like Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, where a miniscule $6 million is budgeted. New antibiotics are needed to counter the declining effectiveness of those in use. Tragically, it is not happening in the private sector. A medical calamity is possible if research dollars are not committed to this high risk endeavor.
 
Science is our best national investment. George Mitchell knew that. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 
 
 
 
 

Chris Christie and a Fat Man’s Lament

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I write on behalf of fat men everywhere. We’ve had enough and we aren’t going to take it anymore.
 
If you are thin, you can stop reading now. This is not for you; you of the pathetically normal.
 
The latest on the fat front comes from the people at Time magazine, who published a cover with a silhouette of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie in all his amplitude.
 
This was fodder for the raspy-voiced, foam- flecked, breast-beating, breathless, polarized commentators on television who lost it with mock horror, cooked up indignation and synthetic fervor. Horror, shock disgust, ran their narrative.
 
What caused their bile to rise?
 
It was the caption, “The Elephant in the Room.” This double entendre was too much for the pundits.
 
The professionally outraged – those people who think political commentary is about umbrage taken and apologies sought – should get a life.
 
Christie’s avoirdupois is part of his success. Without it the New Jersey governor, and possible GOP presidential hopeful, would've been just another rough-talking Jersey pol, telling us that he's going to fix everything with straight talk and “sitting down” with his opponents.
 
The thing about Christie is if he tells you he’s going to kick your butt, he looks equipped to do it.
 
Christie has made a virtue of heft, and offered those of us who bulge a seat at his metaphorical table. His message is you don’t have to be trim and smooth to get into public life.
 
He has had the courage to take his poundage to the platform, where he joined William Howard Taft, Mr. Republican, as a conservative behemoth — a real political heavyweight who weighed in at 350 pounds. No wonder Teddy Roosevelt, who was on the corpulent side, loved him before they fell out over who should be president; something worth falling out about, you might say.
 
Slimming down may please a candidate’s doctor, but what of his public? Look at Mike Huckabee, another governor who tarried too long, too often at the buffet, but faded politically as he dwindled in girth.
 
Let’s face it, being overweight isn’t easy. It builds character. You’re at a disadvantage in the singles bar, you break furniture, you have to slink into the fat man’s shop and people are quite rude to you. At a party a young woman said to me, “You’re much fatter in person than you are on television.” After that I ate a tray of consoling canapés.
 
Your friends damn you with faint praise. “You carry your weight well,” I've been told my lying friends.
 
At meals, people watch you so they can avoid doing what you do. If you slather butter on rolls, they eat them dry. If you tuck into dessert, they nibble a quarter of it.
 
The fat have to shop at special shops, where there are sizes that fit. It’s altogether humiliating.
 
The terrible truth we live with is not that in every fat man is a thin one trying to get out, but we know that inside every fat person is a fatter one trying to get out.
 
So Christie has had a stomach band applied. Already, there’s less of him. Already he's abandoned us: the tubby brigade. He wants to be just like other politicians – like Cassius looking “lean and hungry.”
 
There will be no role model left for the — hateful word — obese. We must look back into history for, er, fat heroes. They're there, but the times have changed and fat is a political and social issue. Jackie Gleason, Orson Welles, Diego Garcia, G.K. Chesterton and even Winston Churchill packed on the pounds in their day and were accepted.
 
Now we, the fat men, must go back to the lettuce, the protein shakes and the baggy gym pants. Hopes of a friend, a larger-than-life friend in high places are fading. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

Can King Coal Be Helped back onto His Throne?

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Forty years on from the Arab oil embargo of 1973, which triggered decades of turbulence in the energy markets, there is a sense of plenty at last. There also is a sense, says Barry Worthington, executive director of the United States Energy Association, that “technology came through.”
 
And it has. Windmills are producing more and more electricity around the globe; the cost of solar energy, particularly rooftop collectors is falling; and there is, above all, enough natural gas and oil to keep a voracious world supplied.
 
In oil and gas there is real technology triumph; the culmination of decades of effort between the government and private enterprise to develop better ways of mapping reserves with 3-D seismic surveys, horizontal drilling, and finally the development and deployment of geological fracturing, known as “fracking.”
 
With this technology, a well is drilled vertically and then two horizontal wells shoot off from the mother well; one for breaking up the rock with sand, water and chemicals, and another for transporting the oil or gas, which has been loosened from shale formations. This technology has revolutionized oil production made the United States — which has abundant oil and gas-bearing shale — a potential gas exporter, and possibly self-sufficient in oil.
 
Forty years ago the energy picture was pretty bleak, and it remained bleak through the decades. The United States was resigned to the reality that it could not be self-sufficient in energy. Natural gas, according to the then Deputy Secretary of Energy Jack O'Leary was a “depleted resource” not worth worrying about. Oil production was declining and consumption was climbing.
 
Coal was the great hope because there was a lot of it and it could burned, made into a gas, and turned into a liquid for transportation. With coal and nuclear — then still a cutting-edge technology — electricity would be the only safe bet.
 
In 1973 climate change was phrase yet to enter the language, and only in obscure academic settings was the possibility of global warming hinted. The rage of what was a relatively new environmental movement was directed toward coal and nuclear. But, for social and political reasons, it settled on a course of hostility — bordering on the psychopathic– to nuclear, which stumbled first in public esteem and then in the marketplace, mostly from costs driven up by delay occasioned by environmental litigation.
 
The world oil picture was changed by technology as well. Not only was extraction better and cheaper and, therefore, could take place in increasingly hostile environments and in very deep water off shore, but oil was discovered in the Southern Hemisphere, where old-line geology had declared it would not exist.
 
The challenge now, as seen by Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, is to make the burning of fossil fuels more environmentally benign; to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide. Moniz was at a ministerial conference in Washington on Nov. 7 to push for the capture of carbon from coal plants, the most intense emitters. This embryonic technology, known as “carbon capture and storage,” removes the carbon dioxide from the effluent streams chemically. Then it is compressed to a liquid and pumped into geological formation for storage. In time, scientists believe it will eventually harden and become part of the earth that hosts it.
 
Twenty-three nations were in Washington for the meeting and to hear Moniz spur them on to greater effort; to catch the wave of technological euphoria and to see if King Coal, now under attack by environmentalists and by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, can be helped back onto his throne.
 
Since 2009, according to Moniz, the United States has committed $6 billion to carbon capture and eight large demonstration projects are underway. China, often dismissed as an environmental renegade, is working on carbon capture.
 
“It is wrong to think that China doesn't care about the environment,” said Sarah Forbes of the World Resources Institute, which has an office in China and is working with the Chinese.
 
There are more questions than answers about whether carbon can be captured from utility chimneys cheaply, and whether enough of it can be kept out of the atmosphere to make the effort worthwhile. But the effort is underway.
 
Remember, it took 40 years to beat back the energy crisis. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
 
 
 
 

How Computers Are Trashing the Old Ways of Work

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I saw the future outside my apartment building this week — and it was a brown van. To be exact, it was a United Parcel Service van and the operator was struggling with a huge load of parcels on a hand truck.
 
You can’t tell too much from a parcel, but the shape gives the contents away to some extent: a small, rolled carpet; a large, flat-screen television; about a dozen boxes that could contain a variety of goods — goodies for fun and essentials to keep things going. Talk about Frankie Laines’1949 hit “Mule Train.”
 
Every day the UPS delivery man is at our building, sometimes with more, sometimes with less. Sometimes he brings clothes for my wife, and recently he brought a book for me. What the trusty fellow in the brown van doesn’t unload, his compatriots from FedEx and the United States Postal Service do.
 
A sea of goods flow into this building each day; goods that have never seen a retail store, never been offered for sale in a mall or high street shop, but goods that people want anyway. Welcome to online shopping and the future disruption it'll bring.
 
What's missing with this shopping is the shop, whether it's a big box store in the mall or a ma-and-pa operation on the high street.
 
It's part of one of the great historical revolution brought about by the Internet. All the data show that online shopping grows every day.
 
Eventually, in the way that the malls undermined the neighborhood shop and the chains killed off those wonderful downtown department stores, a different one for each city (Garfinkel's in Washington, D.C., Jordan Marsh in Boston and I. Magnin in San Francisco), the Internet may bury the malls.
 
Make no mistake, the Internet is a hellishly efficient and cruel exterminator of jobs, as well as a ruthless agent of social change.
 
As so often, the political class is still convinced that job growth can be achieved by economic and regulatory policy shifts. It's easier to blame presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush, depending on your ideological persuasion, even though the evidence of massive change is everywhere, than to face a new reality.
 
It's nigh impossible to speak to anyone on the phone at a bank, an insurance company or a utility without going through 20 minutes of computer-assisted torture in the form of voice prompts — “Press star 2 to get your balance.”
 
Academia has been surprisingly slow to study and quantify the job-threatening nature of the new order. MIT, Oxford and Harvard have spoken up, and now you can expect more pessimism from on high as academics get the wind up about their own employment.
 
In the ivory towers, those citadels of refined arrogance, there is deep disquiet. The cause: MOOCS, or massive open online courses. These are attracting students by the hundreds of thousands; some for credit, some just for the joy of watching the most articulate professors in action. They are creating a star system that favors the telegenic over everything else and could, in time, change the nature of higher education so profoundly that many lesser university will close up shop. One study, by researchers at Oxford, has estimated 47 percent of our jobs may disappear.
 
History tells us that new ways of doing things lead to new areas of endeavor; agrarian people became urban manufacturers, manual labor gave way to service-sector work. The computerization of work is an equal-opportunity un-employer. Is new work possible?
Factories in China and Germany are as subject to computer predation as those in the United States. We may yet see a global economic collapse driven by too much productivity; computer productivity.
 
This column was written on a computer and distributed by computer. The contents were generated by a human being, but that may change. Stay online. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
 
 
 
 

 

Conquering Radiation Fear, the Big Challenge

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Can we learn to love radiation? Maybe not, but if we understood it better, we might not be so damned scared of it – a fear that has cost us in many ways, from where reactors are sited to how hospitals handle life-saving nuclear material to the benefits of eradicating deadly bacteria in food.
 
There's a lot of data on the long-term effects of ionizing radiation, ranging from that which was generated by studying the health of survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings to the environment on the Bikini Atoll, where weapons were tested in the 1950s, to conditions at the Chernobyl meltdown site in Ukraine. The big news is that the data doesn't support the idea that cancer and mutations will follow as night and day after exposure to high doses of radiation.
 
Now the battle has been joined by a Harvard researcher and lecturer in public health, David R. Ropeik. He doesn't suggest that we rush out and encourage dentists to be even more promiscuous in their use of X-rays than they are already, but he does draw attention to the epidemiological data over the past 68 years and what it says: The linkage between very high radiation exposures and cancer and mutations isn’t there.
 
For years, it's been postulated that radiation leads to cancer axiomatically. The data says otherwise.
This glimmer of light, this pinprick, this faint glow could be the beginning of a new day in nuclear, or at least encourage a new look at radiation and its effects. It comes at a time when the American Nuclear Society (ANS), the professional society for nuclear scientists and engineers, is planning a more active public role.
 
The ANS president this year, Donald P. Hoffman, is a hard-driving nuclear advocate, who, in 1985, created the nuclear services company which he still heads, Excel. He'd like to see the 12,000 members of ANS step forward and provide honest witness in disputes about nuclear, believing that the professionals would be more believed than corporate people.
 
He'd also like to boost public knowledge of the uses of nuclear outside of generating electricity, especially in medicine, where it is growing. Already, about one third of hospital patients benefit from nuclear through CAT scans and X-rays to the direct application of radiation to cancer cells. This evolving therapy is less debilitating than chemotherapy or large-area radiation.
 
Hoffman says, “We are seeing nuclear science deployed in new ways,” including non-destructive testing, food irradiation, medicine, space exploration and many more. He believes the uses for nuclear technology are only in their infancy.
 
Outside of the hospital and the laboratory though, the big impediment to nuclear is the fear of radiation or, as popular phenomenon author Malcolm Gladwell would argue, the “fear of fear.”
 
In a recent New York Times piece, Ropeik salutes the Environmental Protection Agency for beginning to take a different look at how we should respond to a nuclear accident or even a terrorist “dirty bomb.” For example, because most radiation can be stopped easily, it may be better to go indoors than to begin a frenzied and hazardous evacuation.
 
As many as 30 years ago, Dr. Mortimer Mendelssohn of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, whose life’s work has been studying the populations around Hiroshima and Nagasaki, told me that the cancers and mutations he expected simply had not occurred. “They’re just not there,” he said.
 
At Bikini Atoll, the Pacific test site, marine life goes on. The vegetation has concentrated some long-lived radionuclides, but the marine life is healthy. At Chernobyl, the worst nuclear accident site, wildlife is teeming among the radioactive ruins.
 
Towns within the radiation belt around Fukushima, which are now safe for their populations to return, remain deserted. The Japanese population is in the grip of a national psychosis of fear — not of earthquakes and tsunamis, but of radiation. The earthquake and tsunami that damaged the reactors at Fukushima killed some 18,000 people but radiation killed no one.
 
The fear of fear is a social construct, as Gladwell and before him, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, pointed out — a mighty challenge for Hoffman and his ANS. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate