White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

How to Move the Nuclear Project Forward

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Nuclear power ought to have everything going for it. It has worked extremely well for more than 60 years — a fact that will be celebrated at the Nuclear Energy Institute’s annual meeting in Washington this week.

Yet there is a somber sense about civil nuclear power in the United States that its race is run; that, as in other things, the United States has lost control of a technology it invented.

Consider: There are more than 70 reactors under construction worldwide, but only five of those are in the United States. They are in Georgia, South Carolina and Tennessee. Even so, costs are rising and rest of the electric utility industry is resolutely committed to natural gas, which is cheap these days.

Once nuclear power plants are up and running, they tend do so seamlessly for decades, often operating above their original design output. It is clean power, unaffected by fuel prices, doing no damage to the air and very little to the earth, except in the mining of uranium or in immediate contact with the used radioactive fuel, when it is finally disposed of — an issue made thorny by two presidents, Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama.

Carter banned nuclear reprocessing just as it was about to be commercialized, and Obama nixed the Yucca Mountain waste repository in Nevada. The trigger for his devastating decision was the opposition of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), thought to be acting on behalf of the gaming interests of Las Vegas. Talk about wheels of fortune — a great technology endangered by legions of slot machines.

Overlooked when the nuclear titans gather in Washington will be two of nuclear’s greatest achievements: the nuclear Navy and the transformation of medicine. The Navy is largest maritime war machine in history with its aircraft carriers that can stay on station for more than a year and submarines that can go under the icecaps and stay submerged for months.

The utility industry seeks stability in all things, ergo it is not scientifically entrepreneurial. It embraces risk reluctantly. It accepts new technology when it is delivered with limited or shared risk.

It was that way with nuclear power, where the risk was shared with the government and sometimes the vendors. Likewise, with the development of today’s aero-derivative gas turbines, the military did the work and took the risk.

In this atmosphere it is easy to forget that nuclear is not a mature technology, but that it belongs at the frontiers of science. Today’s nuclear power plant is analogous to the black rotary phone — there is room for improvement.

But as there is no competition between electricity supplying entities, the impetus must come from elsewhere: government and incentivized private companies. Some like the General Atomics Corp. in San Diego, Calif., have reaped huge benefits by exploring the scientific frontier. While they are known mostly for the Predator drone, General Atomics' work on nuclear fusion has provided the building blocks for magnetic resonance imaging and tissue welding among dozens of medical advances and has enabled the company to use fusion science to develop the electromagnetic catapults for launching aircraft from carriers. If you get to ride a levitating train, it may be because it is suspended by electromagnetic forces pioneered in nuclear research by General Atomics.

Nuclear waste – the industry hates that term because of potential energy left in spent fuel — is the sad story of nuclear: too much yesterday (ideas codified and frozen 60 years ago), not enough tomorrow.

When aviation science has been stuck in the past, it has leaped forward by offering prizes to unleash invention: the first flight across the English Channel, the first Atlantic crossing, and now the first commercial foray into space, were inspired by prizes.

The good burghers of the nuclear industry might with their government allies think of cobbling together a really big prize that will change the thinking about how we deal with used nuclear fuel. At present, there are only two options: reducing the volume by cutting it up, leaching the useful stuff out and making glass out of the rest, and burying that or everything in a place like Yucca Mountain.

Generally in life and science, when there are only two options, there is a deficit of thinking. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 

 

Amtrak at 42: Making the Grade

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Two cheers for Amtrak, which celebrated its 42nd anniversary on May 1. The nation's only intercity passenger rail service, derided by its critics and begrudged funding by Congress, is providing improved service and reliability.

But this service is lopsided, favoring the Northeast Corridor — the electrified route from Washington to Boston. Here, you have a choice of two levels of service. The premier level is the Acela Express, a Swedish import. Reaching speeds of 150 mph, the Acela trains compensate for tight curves with sophisticated tilting technology. The second level is the Northeast Regional with traditional trains running up to 125 mph, but mostly traveling much slower and with frequent stops. In both levels of service, the trains seem to be clean and well-maintained.

The two principal Northeast stations, Penn Station in New York and Union Station in Washington, are a different story. They are both horrific in their own way, and both are maintained by Amtrak.

Penn Station has a lot of low-grade retailing that seems to attract people who have no plan to ride the train and add to the sense of urban threat.

Union Station is less threatening, but it seems to have given itself over to chain retailing. The grandeur of this architectural masterpiece has been undermined by a proliferation of chain stores. Passenger accommodation is an afterthought: The restrooms are inadequate and too few, seating is scarce and often shabby, and passengers stand in long lines waiting to board their trains. This gives the feeling that the trains are as bad as the stations; they are not.

Outside of the prized Northeast Corridor, Amtrak shows decades of underinvestment. It tries to deliver rail service across 46 states. Correspondents tell me that this is often inadequate and is a last resort. I've been told horror stories about delays in Florida and the Midwest and breakdowns in California. One has to think seriously about whether one wants to take a long-haul train, even a sleeper, outside of the Northeast Corridor.

Amtrak came into being 42 years ago because passenger rail service from commercial railroads had collapsed and Congress felt that the United States couldn't be without passenger rail service. In those days, it was thought that Amtrak would serve those who couldn't afford to fly and those who simply didn't like flying. Amtrak wasn't set up as a government department but rather as a business, although it was understood that government funding would be necessary.

So began a long struggle; ostensibly over money, but more so over ideology. Conservatives in Congress have never liked Amtrak, and have believed that it should either perish or survive without government funding. Amtrak initiated relentless mallification of its station properties and predatory pricing in the Northeast Corridor, euphemistically called revenue management. Here Amtrak, like the airlines, charges what the traffic will bear. The Acela between Washington and New York and between New York and Boston is fast, elegant transportation for those who can afford it. The Northeast Regional uses the same revenue-management pricing, but charges somewhat less for slower rail service.

By means of its commercial struggling, Amtrak says it is able to cover 88 percent of its costs from revenue. The government subsidy amounts to $1.3 billion — $443 million for operations and $705 million for capital improvement. The total Amtrak budget is around $4 billion. By comparison, the much-admired European rail systems, with their sleek trains that run at 220 mph, have huge subsidies amounting to about 50 percent of the ticket price. In that sense, Amtrak may be a model performer.

As a passenger, someone who is infused with a sublime sense of well-being when a train pulls out of a station, I'm glad to report that despite its limitations, its chaotic terminals, its gotcha pricing, Amtrak has rolled into middle age, proving that rail transportation is still the most civilized way to travel and should have a bright future. Will Congress get smart and take the train? — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

The Making of McPaper

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Before the Internet laid siege to the well-being of newspapers, there was television, which made substantial inroads. It killed off evening

newspapers across the country, including famous ones like The Washington
Evening Star and The Chicago Daily News.

Morning newspapers with a more elite, less blue-collar readership,
thrived, although often their front pages were curiously long-winded
and out-of-date. They told people what they already had learned the
night before, but in greater detail — sometimes mind-numbingly so.

Al Neuharth, who died last week, had the courage to take on television
head-to-head with the first newspaper totally designed for the fight
against television: USA Today. It mimicked television with fact
boxes, short breezy stories and scads of weather coverage. It employed
color with a confidence that few newspapers had done. Other newspapers
followed its lead.

Critics dubbed the newspaper “McPaper,” which might actually have
pleased Neuharth, who had an eye for the bottom line. Looking at the
success of McDonalds, Neuharth might have thought to himself that if
his newspaper sold like hamburgers, well, that wouldn’t be so bad.

Noel Coward, the British playwright and entertainer, when asked what
he thought about his last musical “Sail Away” drawing vast crowds and
scornful critiques told a reporter: “Once again, I shall have to
comfort myself with the bitter palliative of commercial success.”
Those words might well have belonged to Neuharth as, after a 10-
year struggle, the newspaper broke through to real profitability, even
while the critics, inside and outside Gannett, scoffed.

For Neuharth, USA Today was the jewel in his crown. It was the one
achievement that redeemed his status as a newspaperman rather than a
corporate titan.

At Gannett he grew the company, taking over whole newspaper chains,
but not its journalistic renown. Papers like The Louisville Courier-
Journal were seen to deteriorate under a regime of relentless cost
control which homogenized and standardized the newspapers as
products, like hamburgers. All 75 papers in the chain were driven to make money not stars. It was the rank and file of the Gannett papers that might have been given the sobriquet “McPapers.”


With USA Today, Neuharth relied heavily on a new technology that
enabled the papers to be printed across the country. He accepted that
readers of the paper might already know the bare bones of the news, and
so he gave them that in short form and reserved longer pieces for the
lead in each section and the “cover story” on Page One. These were not
the news of the day, but news behind some aspect of American life. He abandoned the habit of “jumping” stories off Page One to an inside page. Only the cover story got this treatment.

Neuharth realized that to succeed, he would have to do something that Gannett papers did not do: spend money. He did so on talent, news bureaus and offices.

Jan Neuharth, one of two children from Neuharth’s first marriage,
operated an equestrian center in Middleburg, about 50
miles from Washington in Virginia's famed Hunt Country. It was there that she married Joseph Keusch, in a wedding that demonstrated her father’s organizational genius.

Neuharth was a great businessman, a great newspaperman, but most importantly he was a great organizer – whether he organized the growth of Gannett or the production and distribution of USA Today. Remember how you could not check into a hotel without a copy of USA Today appearing in front of the door in the morning? That was Neuharth the Organizer at work.

At his daughter’s wedding Neuharth did it all: tents for the members
of the wedding to get their hair and makeup done, a leafy chapel that was
transformed into a dance floor after the ceremony. But above all
Neuharth made sure that everyone, from the great and famous of the
Hunt Country, like NBC's Willard Scott and a scattering of senators and
billionaires, to the lowliest stable hand was there. He had grown up poor in South Dakota and hadn’t forgotten.


Maybe that’s how he knew what people wanted in his newspaper and why,
late in his life, he and his third wife adopted six children, across
the spectrum of ethnicity.

And to the end, he hadn't forgotten his old newspapering skills: he wrote his column on a manual typewriter. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate


Harassment in Egypt, Then and Now

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A recent front-page story in The New York Times about harassment and sexual assaults on women in Egypt, which have increased over the past two years, reminds me of my own experience there more than three decades ago.

I was a graduate student at the American University in Cairo in the late 1970s. From my arrival in Egypt to my departure, I can't remember a harassment-free day. Indeed, the harassment began on the day I landed at Cairo International Airport.

Arriving at the airport, bleary from a difficult overnight flight from London, I grabbed the only taxi at the outside stand. I spoke some Egyptian Colloquial Arabic and I asked the driver, Mohammed, to take me to the American University.

The sun had barely risen when I got into Mohammed's cab, but when he dropped me off at the university at closing time, I'd seen much of Cairo as well as the Great Sphinx and the pyramids of Giza. Throughout the abduction Mohammed would try to steer the car with his left hand, while trying to grope one of my legs with his right hand – a driving feat, considering I had pinned myself against the right backseat door.

Mohammed wasn't just running up the meter, he wanted to marry me. In fact, we stopped briefly at his uncle's souvenir shop and perfume palace near the pyramids and Mohammed told him that we were getting engaged.

“May God grant a successful conclusion [to the engagement],” his uncle said, handing me a small green glass vial of eye kohl through the cab window.

God, in his mercy, concluded this unwanted tour around 5 p.m. But Mohammed stalked me for another week, showing up at the university and at the apartment on the Nile River island of Zamalek, which I shared with two roommates. They had a head start on harassment management, and I seem to remember that they told Mohammed to hit the road.

The city bus we rode to the university was a daily opportunity for groping by Egyptian men. One morning, I remember getting on the bus which was overloaded with workers — especially men in drab pants and v-necked sweaters, mostly bureaucrats who worked in government administrative offices around Tahrir Square. I was clutching my textbooks and pocketbook, and trying to keep my balance.

As the bus sped along 26th of July Avenue, I heard a woman behind me say sharply to a man in his twenties who was standing close behind me, “You are very wicked.” I looked over my shoulder and saw that he had parted my wraparound skirt and had unzipped his pants. Caught almost in the act, he smiled that smile I came to abhor; the smile that said, “Don't blame me. You're a woman out in public and a khawaga [a foreigner, a loose woman].”

My roommates and I became inured to bad behavior by the boys (shabbab), who crawled under the seats in darkened movie theaters and grabbed our ankles, flashed us in street alleys in Alexandria, encircled us like sharks when we went swimming in the Mediterranean, and muttered ishta (cream) when we walked by them. We chalked it up to their sexual frustration due to the lack of socialization between the sexes, especially among the lower classes, starting at puberty.

“A dog's tail never stands straight,” says an Egyptian proverb about incorrigible habits, including the harassment and abuse of women by men.

In President Anwar Sadat's Egypt, which was opening to the West and modernizing, I was often harassed physically and verbally by men, but I never once feared for my life. Fear of Sadat's police and mukhabarat – the intelligence agents, who my roommates and I called the “green meanies” after the color of their uniforms — prevented men from public attacks on women, which are now so frequent and violent in the Arab Spring Egypt of President Mohammed Morsi.

Sexual assault of the kind that CBS News correspondent Lara Logan and many Egyptian women have suffered since the Jan. 25, 2010 revolution, which ousted President Hosni Mubarak, are the result of the general security breakdown. But they are also the result of a breakdown of human respect and decency, which is a growing worldwide phenomenon.

Innovation and modernization, including the empowerment of women and girls, is suspect and shattering for many men in Egypt, so they beat a dusty retreat into traditional mores. A substantial presence of women in public life in Egypt, and elsewhere in the world, might get the dog's tail to stand straight.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Gale-Force Wind Called Thatcher

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If there had been no Margaret Thatcher, the Brits might have had to invent her. 

When she blew into the premiership like a gale-force wind off the North Sea, her island nation appeared to be sinking. The economy was a mess and trade union activism was strangling Britain.
 
In those days, the morning radio broadcasts listed the areas of “industrial action” — the prevailing euphemism for strikes, mostly illegal — as routinely as the weather. For example, “Traffic at Dagenham in Essex will be adversely affected by industrial action at the Ford plant.” Or, “Expect delays on the London Underground today because of industrial action on the Circle Line.”
 
Newspapers often weren't printed, trains slowed down, export orders delayed and power stations ran short of fuel. Flying to London was gamble on whether the air traffic controllers were peaceful that day. At one point, because of continuing strikes in the coal industry, the government put Britain on a three-day work week and shops were lit with candles. Shakespeare’s “sceptred isle” was a dark place.
 
The public blamed the government as much as it faulted the unions. Yet Britain remained committed to trade unionism and the rights of the unions were protected fiercely, in the way that the Second Amendment is now protected in the United States.
 
Edward Heath, who Thatcher deposed as the leader of the Conservative Party, had been powerless against the miners and their feared leader Arthur Scargill. When the Conservatives decisively won the election of 1979, Thatcher was unleashed. She said of Scargill, “Poor Arthur, he’s out on a limb and all I have to help him with is a chainsaw.”
 
But Thatcher did not break the unions; she simply brought them into the rule of law with the British equivalent of the U.S. Taft-Hartley Act. In a country that treasured unionism, that was a revolution.
 
Thatcher took no public prisoners. Matthew Parris a Conservative member of parliament in the Thatcher years, said she was curt with her own backbenchers and often feared by her ministers. Her sharp remarks cut: No one wanted it known how she had characterized them.
 
Her style in the House of Commons was brutal. It was as though she had brought a club to a fist fight. James Callaghan, leader of the opposition, said to Thatcher, “Congratulations. You’re the only man in your team.” Thatcher replied: “Well that’s one more than your team has.”
 
Thatcher said of her critics that if she walked on the water across the Thames River, they'd say that she did it because she couldn’t swim.
 
For all the harshness, there was a softer Thatcher.
 
I, along with other American journalists, was in the press gallery of the House of Commons for one of the bitterest debates of the Thatcher years. It involved the future of Westland Helicopters, a British company seeking foreign investment. Thatcher not only had to deal with an opposition that smelled blood, but also with a revolt in her own party lead by the defense secretary, Michael Heseltine, who thought he could unseat her. She beat back the opposition and savaged the Heseltine renegades.
 
Our U.S. press group had been invited to tea at the prime minister’s official residence, Number 10 Downing Street. The contrast between the bravura performance in parliament and the soft hostess who greeted us at her home was dramatic. She was indulgent of her press secretary, Bernard Ingham, who fell asleep, seated to her right and an older member of our team, Sterling Slappey, who also dozed off, seated on her left. Without stopping what she was saying, she gently shook these men awake to save them embarrassment. The gale had fallen to a zephyr.
 
Later, I was with her at a conference in Arizona where she exhibited both Thatchers. From the podium she was relentless, booming, a steel-on-steel kind of exhortation meant to rally conservative backsliders and pillory neo-socialists. Afterward, she acknowledged old friends and old campaigners in the audience with extraordinary memory and touching sentimentality. How great the change from major to minor.
 
She also attended every session at that conference, asking questions, taking notes and doing the work of a regular delegate. Even in retirement, Thatcher liked to work. “Men do the crowing, women lay the eggs,” she said once. Some of hers were golden. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

When History and Its Myths Interfere with Today’s Issues

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Justice Anthony Kennedy nailed it when he said the Supreme Court was in uncharted waters when considering same-sex marriage. He might also have said that this means that society is unburdened with myth and legacy on this issue and can consider it almost on it merits; whereas homosexuality is as old and permanent as time, marriage between homosexuals is a new concept in the organization of human affairs.

Actually, the justices are facing something antithetical to their purposes: a clean slate. For the rest of society, a clean slate is almost unachievable. But when it does happen — when law, conduct and invention are unhampered by the legacy of the past and myths that are codified into principles — wonderful things happen. For example:

1. The U.S. Constitution, where the old building blocks of political organization were rearranged into something totally new and marvelous.

2. The computer age, where ideas and inventions — largely because they weren't limited by previous ones — have changed the entire human system of work and communication.

3. Modern art, where millennia of tradition had established rigidities that defined what was art and its production, added to the sum of the medium and allowed a new voice of expression.

4. Rock and Roll, where a new form eclipsed the popular music of the time and was able to borrow from the blues, jazz and other sources without accepting their rigidities. It vastly enlarged the musical firmament.

 
The shadows of history and its attendant myths reach down into the present; sometimes informing and guiding, but also inhibiting.
 
The old way of doing things, the old of thinking, the old slavery to myth is comforting and provides society with order and stability. But at the frontiers of human experience it's distorting. That's why innovators have to leave their old-line companies and branch out of their own, why new art is at war with critics and the artistic establishment, and why medical research is often inhibited by the traditions of medicine.
 
The European Union, for all of its faults, was a bold attempt to free Europe from the bonds of its history and the internecine war which they created. The Middle East is in chaos, as ancient and modern history play out – from Biblical times through World War I and World War II. History won’t let go of it, denying it a new beginning. Ireland’s inability to shake history has cost it dearly, as has bitter relationship between Greece and Turkey. Ditto Kashmir and many other trouble spots.
 
Happily, the implosion of the Soviet Union left little myth to perpetuate its failures; there's not a lot of yearning for a failed idea. The myth of the system's superiority perished with it.
 
Alas, Congress is always convulsed by the past; not the past of ancient history, but the past of the last election. One of Washington’s wiser political figures, former Sen. Howard Baker, who later served as Ronald Reagan’s chief of staff, told me that to understand Congress, you have to understand that it's a retrospective body, always reacting to the last election. Indeed.
 
My reading of this is that if President Obama can't refocus Congress, take it to a new place with new ideas, even if they are new ideas about old issues, then Congress will perpetuate the rancor of the last election with its outrages, false facts and perpetuated myths. That’s what the president must be indicted for – not for being a Democrat or the tragedy in Benghazi, or for trying to revamp our health payment system.
 
Inappropriately, Congress doesn't have a clean slate; uncomfortably, the Supreme Court has one. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Learning about Churchill through His Appetite

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For a reader, getting one’s arms around Winston S. Churchill is like trying to hug a mountain. He was a colossus, a phenomenon.
 
Churchill strode across the world from the time he was commissioned in his regiment, the Queen’s Own Royal Hussars, in 1895 to his death in 1965. He was a force in history, in journalism, in politics and in fun, which he brought to everyday life.
 
This has made reading comprehensive books on Churchill daunting. The great work is his official multi-volume biography by Martin Gilbert and the fact-crammed one by Roy Jenkins, a British politician and biographer. The former is too big and the latter so detailed about the operations of the House of Commons that readers are turned off. William Manchester's biography of Churchill was more novel-like and, as a colleague of mine once said, “lighter on British minutiae.”
 
It is the smaller books that are a joy for readers, who treasure taking their Churchillian history in delectable bites. Martin Gilbert realized this when he wrote “In Search of Churchill,” which is a book about how he wrote the official biography, and one of the most revealing books on Churchill.
 
To enjoy Churchill, to cherish the foibles and the towering achievements of the incontestably great man, read around Churchill. There are many wonderful books in this cannon, for example “Churchill and Ireland” by Mary Bromage.
 
So in this way of approaching a big subject obliquely, it is a joy to read Cita Stelzer’s “Dinner with Churchill” a superbly researched and told story of Churchill’s passion for dinner parties and his belief that in the convivial atmosphere of the well-lubricated social event, minds could be changed and information gained.
 
Stelzer has added a shining star to the firmament of Churchill biography: the idea alone is brilliant. What a marvelous concept to write not about Churchill’s great struggles, but rather about the dinners that he used as a tool of statecraft in the time leading up to and through World War II. Churchill not only believed in dinner parties as a tool to advance his causes, such as trying in Tehran and at Yalta to save Poland from Stalin, but also as riotously enjoyable occasions.
 
Churchill loved to talk, to stimulate ideas and disclosures through his own verbal bravado and so to gain intelligence. He also just liked to eat and to drink, and to celebrate the dinner party as a high art form. He ate a lot and had strong opinions about what should be served. He also drank a lot; maybe not as much as he liked people to believe he drank, but he always had a drink going. Usually he drank champagne or Scotch, starting at breakfast, and this was supplemented with fine wines, port and brandy at dinner.
 
For me, the interesting thing about Churchill’s drinking was how he put it to use rather than being used by it. If he had been indifferent to its effects, one would assume that he would have drunk tea all day. By making jokes about his own consumption, Churchill was able to put his guests at ease and loosen their tongues.
 
Stelzer, who has pursued previously unpublished diaries and spoken to those who were at some of his dinners, believes that Churchill’s drinking is overstated and that he remained very much in control. Martin Gilbert reports on how after long, well-lubricated dinners Churchill would retire and write for two hours. Although there have been many drunken writers, very few could write under the influence. Very few can pour out the golden words after the golden liquid.
 
Be that as it may, Stelzer has captured all the elements of Churchill: his energy, his resilience, his attention to detail, his endless enthusiasm, his humanity, his joy, his baroque speech, his love of the British people, his sometimes petulance and occasional childishness.
 
The reader is awed by how much fun Churchill could have had while prosecuting the greatest war yet raised.
 
This is a wonderful book because if you know nothing about Churchill, you will love it; if you know a lot about Churchill, you will love it more. Through the dinners, Stelzer has served up a man in full. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

King Coal Just Won’t Leave His Throne

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King Coal is back – not that he ever went very far away. But, according to Hal Quinn, president of the National Mining Association, coal in 2016 will again be the world’s favorite carbon fuel, pushing out petroleum as the world's largest source of energy.
 
This may seem especially surprising at a time when the use of coal in the United States is in decline, edged out by cheap natural gas and increasingly strict regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency. Yet a rising tonnage of coal is being used for electric generation worldwide.
 
The Third World is hungry for coal, as it increases electricity production. In the developed world, nuclear setbacks — most notably the aftereffects of the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power plant accident, when a tsunami wave knocked out six reactors — have helped boost the commitment to coal. The accident has forced the Japanese to burn more coal and the Germans to begin phasing out their nuclear power plants. Other European countries are dithering, and the cost of building nuclear plants is rising.
 
If you do not have an abundance of natural gas, as here in the United States, then coal is your default choice. It is shipped around the world in larger and larger quantities. The more the world has resisted the burning of coal, the more it has had to fall back on it. Alternative energy, attractive in theory, is yet to make its mark.
 
Because coal has always had an environmental price, it has always been under attack, and at the same time it has proven stubbornly hard to replace. King Edward I of England, who reigned from 1239 to 1307, was the first known major opponent of coal. He banned it in 1306.
 
Tales of why he did this vary. One story goes that his mother, Queen Eleanor of Provence, when staying at Nottingham Castle, was so affected by the coal fumes from the town that she had to move out.
 
Wood was hard to come by in towns, and it does not heat like coal. Anyway England was a cold place and wood was in short supply, so the ban was not very effective, despite the fact that the death penalty was standard for disobeying royal orders.
 
Two and a half centuries later, Queen Elizabeth I tried to ban coal with not much effect. The prospect of a coal ban was even more draconian then as her father, Henry VIII, had largely denuded the English forests to build his navy and she was even more committed to sea power.
 
With the invention of the steam engine in the early 1700s (ironically, it was originally intended to pump water out of coal mines), the supremacy of coal for was guaranteed. It led directly to the Industrial Revolution and coal’s preeminence as the fuel of the Industrial Age. There was a price in mine disasters, mine fires that burn for decades, and air pollution. But there were also huge benefits.
 
Britain led the way both in the use of coal and its environmental costs. An industrial area in the Midlands was known as the “Black Country.”
 
London fog was assumed to be just that, fog, but it was smog. The smog was so bad that I can recall, in the winter of 1962, walking in the streets holding hands with strangers because you could not see where you were going. So-called smokeless fuel – usually a kind of coke or other high- carbon fuel — ended that, and fog in London is now no worse than it is elsewhere.
 
“Clean coal” has been the rallying call of the industry for 30 or more years — and coal is getting a lot cleaner in its preparation, combustion and mining. The trick in combustion is higher temperatures and pressures, described as supercritical and ultra-supercritical, a technology China has embraced that increases the efficiency of coal, from a historical 28 percent to around 50 percent with concomitant reductions in the greenhouse gas per kilowatt.
 
Mining, too, has gotten safer in the developed world with stricter regulation and better equipment. Quinn of the National Mining Association says that reclamation after strip mining is better than it ever has been. Yet the scars remain from an earlier time across all the coal- producing states.
 
If, like Edward I, Elizabeth I and the EPA, we cannot stop coal use, we better get behind the technologies and regulations that reduce its impact, because King Coal looks set for a long, long reign. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
 
 

St. Patrick’s Day and the Computer-Aided Drinker

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I’m going to get right to it: If you want to do it up right on St. Patrick’s Day, March 17, you really should go on a pub crawl. That's the time-honored way to enjoy a good deal of what the clergy in Ireland have been known to refer to as “the devil’s buttermilk.”
 
The important thing about a pub crawl is the crawl – visiting a number of establishments and not tarrying too long in any one. A real pub crawl in Dublin would begin as early as 2 p.m. and last until six or more establishments have been visited. Ideally, this should be accomplished on foot and in the company of friends, who can look out for each other in the the event that sudden loss of vertical stability should occur.
 
The crawl establishes a kind of discipline on the proceedings. You are advised to drink the native brew of Ireland, stout, usually Guinness, but there are other brands like Murphy’s; or beer, the most popular in Ireland is Smithwick's ale from Guinness, but other low- carbonation beers are quite acceptable. But for safety, stay with Guinness, it's slow to draw (properly done, it can take five minutes or longer to get the head just right) and you can’t drink it too fast.
 
As I've done on many a night in Ireland, along the way you might have a whiskey, Bushmills or Tullamore Dew. But these are, as Thomas Jefferson warned, “ardent spirits” and can cause an abrupt deterioration in vertical stability.
 
A good pub crawl can be undertaken anywhere in the world where liquor is sold. Remember it's not about getting drunk, but rather about good company and holding off inebriation; you parry with the demon drink, not succumb to him.
 
You may wonder how such indulgence, such frivolity, such selfishness, such pampering of the dark side of self, such willing abandonment of Christian rectitude, such sinning can take place during Lent? Rest easy, both the Anglican Communion (the Church of Ireland) and the Catholic Church give dispensation for drinking on St. Patrick’s Day. Probably, they calculate the sinner will be punished more on March 18 than he can offend the rules of God and man on March 17.
 
There are few parts of the world in which St. Patrick’s Day is not celebrated. Would you believe the wearing of the green and the flooding of the pubs is prevalent in Argentina?
 
For nearly 70 years, the pubs of Ireland were closed officially on the great day after over-celebration in the country in the early part of the 20th century. But the Irish started to feel left out of their own festival and overwhelmed by the greatest of all St. Patrick’s celebrations: the convulsion that shakes New York every year in memory of the man who brought Christianity to Ireland in the 4th century, and possibly drove the snakes out of Ireland.
 
I'm excited to report on the eve of this St. Paddy’s Day, science has wrested pub crawling from the poets and musicians and handed it over to mathematicians and engineers. At a conference in Dublin of largely PhD engineers that I was oh-so-lucky to attend last year, the engineers, having apologized that the timing was truncated and that the boozy perambulation couldn't start after lunch, but had to be delayed until evening, we were issued a pub crawl itinerary with engineering-type specs — and an awesome thing it was!
 
There were details of when the celebrants and “spiritual advisers” should arrive at each of the 13 pubs, how many drinks they should order at each pub, the precise time they should head to the next pub, and how to watch for danger and slowdown. It even suggested at which pub a sandwich should be eaten, and at which point of danger a taxi should be summoned and the whole project delayed a year.
 
The engineers laid out a vigorous tour of Dublin — one refueling station after another noted, no substitutions allowed. The engineered-pub crawl has a lot to be said for it; call it “structured imbibing” or “computer-aided drinking.” It even has a default position – home to bed. Cheers! — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
 

Obama and His Oil Sands Brer Rabbit

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If there were an Oscar for political ineptitude, President Barack Obama would be a front-runner for the prize. The president’s possible approval of the 2,000-mile-long pipeline from the oil sands (previously known as the tar sands, and most correctly bitumen sands) of Alberta, Canada to the refineries and shipping terminals of the U.S. Gulf Coast is a tale of political calculation that has gone sadly wrong.
 
Back in January 2012, when he was expected to give his approval and that of the State Department, to what is an international agreement, the president punted. Concerned about stout opposition in his own administration, and particularly from his Environmental Protection Administration chief Lisa Jackson, Obama demurred and requested more studies.
 
This did two things: It antagonized the Canadian people, always sensitive to slights from the United States, and humiliated the government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Joe Oliver, Canada's minister for natural resources, told me on the record just before Obama’s statement that he had had strong indications from the administration that the Keystone XL pipeline would be approved. In the event, he and the Canadian government were outraged and embarrassed.
 
As though offending our trading partner and favorite neighbor was not enough, Obama gave the environmentalists time to mobilize — a mobilization so complete that it resulted in a demonstration on the Mall in Washington immediately after the president’s second inauguration.
 
Not only did a broad front of environmentalists march against the pipeline but in the year since Obama kicked the can down the road, they extended and codified their objections not just to the pipeline, but also to the exploitation of the oil sands. Obama’s delay has allowed the environmental groups to declare a kind of non-governmental trade war against Canada.
 
Originally, the environmental movement and its supporters in the administration were concerned with the effects of the pipeline in Nebraska and the threat it would pose to rivers and aquifers in the state. While the company that wants to build the pipeline, TransCanada, has agreed to re-routing and Nebraska Gov. Dave Heineman has signed off on the project, the environmentalists have downplayed the Nebraska issues and concentrated on the whole matter of the exploitation of the oil sands. The Natural Resources Defense Council has called oil-sands oil “the filthiest oil in the world.”
 
This is a mighty assault on the economy of Alberta and Canada, as 44 percent of Canada’s oil exports come from the oil sands and they are scheduled to keep rising. If it were of less economic consequence, the protests might find more sympathy north of the border than they do. Mining the sands is a monumental undertaking, disturbing enormous tracts of earth and employing trucks and mechanical shovels, which are the largest on the globe. The disturbance to the earth is considerable and worth noting.
 
Also worth noting are the vast quantities of natural gas and water used in the extraction and retorting of the sands. More greenhouse gases are released in the production of the oil than in regular oil fields; the oil sands extraction is calculated to be the largest contributor to greenhouse gases in Canada.
 
However, Canadians are sensitive to these issues and are offended by the idea that Canada is a backward country with no regard to the environment. Canada maintains that evolving technology is reducing the impact on the environment year after year. The oil sands are going to be developed no matter what.
 
There is a pattern of escalation in environmental concerns about big projects. Nuclear power gives a fine historical perspective on this escalation. Back in the 1960s, the first concerns about nuclear power were on the thermal effluent into rivers and streams. This escalated into concern about radiation, then safety, then waste and finally a blanket indictment of the technology.
 
Bogdan Kipling, who has been writing about Canadian-U.S. relations from Washington for four decades, takes an apocalyptic view of the future U.S.-Canada relations if Obama wavers and does not approve the pipeline. In a recent column, he said that such an action would “decouple” the United States from Canada across a broad range of issues, social a as well as economic. “Such a decision would be sweet music to the ears of Canadian nationalists,” Kipling said.
 
Now Obama finds himself between the swamp of his own political left and the rock of international relations. It did not have to be like this. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate