White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Needed: A New Approach to Nuclear Proliferation

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The trouble with the diplomatic argument against nuclear proliferation is that it is patronizing. Simplified, it is the nuclear weapons state saying to any nuclear aspirant, “Trust us, because we do not trust you.” This unpleasant message is often amplified by race and religion. After all, the primary force in containing proliferation is the United States, backed up by its western European allies. Sure there are blandishments that can tip the scale, as happened with Libya. But by and large, proliferation is a national goal for many countries.

The surprising thing about proliferation is how slowly it has spread. For awhile, it even looked as though it was in retreat, when Argentina, Brazil and South Africa quit the race.

To understand the pressure to proliferate, we need to look at each potential proliferator and its aspirations separately.

Small countries, with a high respect for their history and a deep commitment to the well-being of their people, tend to eschew proliferation. Britain got into the club very early, but it is not likely that any British government in recent time would have elected for Britain to seek the nuclear deterrent. At times, it was hard enough to keep it. Bertrand Russell´s Committee for Nuclear Disarmament was a powerful force in British politics throughout the 1950s and 1960s.

Proliferators generally need a large land mass for concealment and testing, a defined sense of threat from outsiders, and a desire for regional dominance. Classically, Iran meets these criteria. North Korea´s motivation is more bizarre, but so is its leadership. It already has conventional weapons superiority over South Korea, but it cannot hope to be a dominant player in Asia.

Security alarmists constantly pose the proposition that a non-governmental organization, like al-Qaeda, could build a weapon in secret and introduce it into the Middle East, Europe or the United States. This is the worst of all scenarios, but it is also the least likely. Building a nuclear weapon is a huge industrial undertaking, requiring secrecy, specialized materials, skilled scientists and engineers, and an open money spigot.

True, it has gotten a little easier since it has become clear that plutonium from civilian nuclear reactors can be diverted to weapons. It is also clear that centrifuge now offers the potential for a highly enriched uranium bomb–something that was not really available with the World War II enrichment technology.

The bad news on nuclear proliferation and the intractable problems of proliferation by Iran and North Korea have come at a time when the world clearly needs an enormous increase in the amounts of civilian nuclear power deployed. Countries that have been reluctant to build new nuclear power plants are going ahead. In Europe, this has been stimulated by the growing fear of dependence on fossil fuels from Russia. In many countries, this is heading towards 50 percent of their electric generation; and when the new Baltic pipeline starts deliveries into Germany, it could be as much as 70 percent dependent on Russian gas. Super-green Finland is building a fifth reactor. And the green-leaning Labor government in Britain has sanctioned more nuclear.

In Europe, new reactors raise few hackles on the proliferation front. But what to say about King Abdullah of Jordan’s desire to build a nuclear plant? He is a firm friend of the West and a stabilizing influence in the Middle East. The question is how long will his monarchy survive? It was the United States that urged a nuclear future in Iran, and reactor construction was happily under way when the Shah was deposed by the Islamic Revolution.

Diplomacy works in 10-year cycles or less. Nuclear reactors are designed to last 30 to 50 years. Neither friends nor foes can be identified over that time horizon. Ergo, a new proliferation strategy may be needed.

The United States had the makings of a strategy before Jimmy Carter was elected president. Simply, it was that the United States would dominate all facets of the nuclear fuel cycle and encourage nuclear club members to do the same thing. When Carter suspended the reprocessing of nuclear fuel in the United States, the possibility of controlling the fuel cycle for “clients” ended.

Subsequently the policy has been diplomatic persuasion, followed by sanctions, followed by a plea for multinational talks. It may or may not be working with North Korea; and so far it has produced no results with Iran.

In the Cold War, the United States assisted the Soviets with making their weapons safer by sharing aspects of fail-safe technology and giving them the technology for insensitive high explosives. The fear was accidental detonation, and the collaboration on preventing it was impressive.

Primitive nuclear weapons are dangerous; so much so that Little Boy and Fat Man, dropped on Japan, were partially assembled on the aircraft that was delivering them. Their designers were terrified that they would blow up unintentionally.

In a world in which there are more dangerous weapons in the hands of more dangerous people, there is not much hope that ambitious states can be deterred. But by working with them on safety, the old-time nuclear states, led by the United States, might establish new diplomatic channels and get a better idea of what they have got. Candidate One for safety collaboration might be Pakistan.

 


 

 

In Praise of Robert Novak

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The op-ed page of The Washington Post is full of type, but not enough to fill the gaping hole where Robert “Bob” Novak’s column used to appear. Novak’s column nominally originated from The Chicago Sun-Times, but he was the first to say that much of his success was the result of appearing in The Washington Post. If you write about politics it helps to do it where the politicians will read you. In Washington the best place for that is The Post, with its dominant circulation among the three newspapers published in the nation’s capital.

Now that Novak, 77, has had to retire to fight a brain tumor, it is clear that he has no successor. Some of his colleagues on The Post are more articulate than Novak. His fellow conservatives Charles Krauthammer, George Will and Michael Gerson all are great stylists. The liberals Ruth Marcus and Harold Meyerson turn a beautiful phrase, and Richard Cohen has remained fresh and funny for three decades.

But none of them sets out to do what Novak did for 45 years–break news. He believed the old adage that “there is nothing as good as news in the newspaper.” First with his late partner Rowland Evans, and in recent years by himself, Novak broke news. He understood that opinion alone grows tired, especially when everyone knows the sympathies of the columnist, but news is always self-refreshing.

For Novak, the column was a newspaper inside a newspaper; and he was going to fill it with news whether it was hurtful or harmless to his Republican friends. Because Novak was an ardent conservative for most of his professional life, conservatives always felt hurt when Novak’s reporting revealed chinks in their armor. As a commentator, particularly on television, Novak was a fierce partisan. But as a reporter he went where the story led, as they say, without fear or favor.

Novak got the news, which distinguished his column, the old-fashioned way: He worked for it. In this he was like the liberal Jack Germond, who worked hard for his stories.

Timothy Carney, who worked for Novak on the Evans-Novak Political Report, and now edits that newsletter, said in his Washington Examiner column last week, “The hardest working man I have ever known has retired.”

Carney went on: “What we’ve lost primarily is a reporter who cast a cynical eye on the best-laid plans of bureaucrats, who took the same level of skepticism to his coverage of both political parties, and who was motivated, above all, by the desire to unearth information that powerful people would prefer remain buried.

“To the detriment of the republic, there is now one fewer skeptic calling around Capitol Hill until he gets the real dirt–there is one fewer sleuth–freed by his spot on the opinion pages from what Novak calls ‘the deaf-dumb-blind’ sort of impartiality that often makes news reporting worthless–exposing the true machinations in the government. This can be a cause for relief for many powerful people.”

I first met Novak at a conference. We were both speakers, but he was the star. I do not remember the conference or where it took place–Texas, I think. But I do remember Novak and how kind he was to me, and generous with his praise of my talk.

Over the years I ran into Novak at the White House, at receptions, and one glorious evening at the National Press Club in 2001, when we lampooned Novak. Actually that was not the plan, but it was the result. The plan was to give him the prestigious Fourth Estate Award and to say pompous, platitudinous things about journalism. Instead his fellow columnists filled the stage, and there was much merriment and roasting “The Prince of Darkness.” This moniker came from a fellow journalist, John Lindsay, and was a commentary on Novak’s Slavic looks and pessimism about the human condition. Novak loved it.

To my mind Novak’s politics were tortured, but his journalism shone through. He believed that the purpose of his column was to find out what is going on and to tell us. He was true to the old journalistic concept that you have failed if the reader does not know something he or she did not know before they picked up your piece.

Obama on Oil’s Slippery Slope

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Way back in the 1970s, the old Mobil Oil Company paid $212 million for an oil shale lease in Colorado. The company did not produce a single barrel of oil from that lease. After leasing the land, Mobil shied away from developing the resource because of substantial environmental problems, involving water and degradation of the high desert.

Traditionally, oil companies have taken leases that they have had to abandon either because the resource was not as substantial as they had hoped, or because the economics had changed or as in Colorado, other impediments appear.

Also, there are physical limitations on where the oil companies can look for oil. And sometimes the judgment of their geologists is just wrong. Even in this age of seismic sophistication, there are dry holes.

A modern deep-sea oil rig is nearly as complex and sophisticated as a refinery. Every off shore rig (there are a little over 400 of them around the world) is working flat out; sometimes in the service of international oil companies, and sometimes in the service of state-owned oil companies, which control a majority of the world’s resources.

When it comes to offshore drilling, the oil industry feels that there would be a better chance of finding reserves in new leases rather than old leases, which they acquired defensively at a different time.

To the Democrats, this is evidence of oil company ineptitude and greed. To the oil companies, it is a situation reminiscent of the David Mamet play “Glengarry, Glen Ross,” where the real estate salesmen are denied the best prospects in order to shift lousy inventory.

The best oil-drilling prospects are in the eastern Gulf of Mexico and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). Not only do these areas have the best expectation of good reserves, but there is already a sophisticated infrastructure in place in the Gulf and Alaska. No such infrastructure exists on the Atlantic Coast or the West Coast north of Santa Barbara. Infrastructure is important because it reduces cost, and especially because it speeds the time it would take to bring new oil to market.

The drilling controversy has been a gift to the Republican Party because it enables John McCain to go after Barack Obama on an issue that people understand: the price of gasoline. Seventy percent of Americans, according to the polls, favor drilling offshore now. Yet Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the House, refuses to allow an up or down vote on this simple issue. She wants a vote to be part of a larger energy and environment bill.

Pelosi is handing the best issue yet to John McCain. The public cannot understand many of the complex problems confronting the country, but it can understand the price of gasoline, even if new drilling will not lower that. It does not matter to the public that it was a Republican president, George H.W. Bush, who originally blocked drilling in the Outer Continental Shelf, or that John McCain was a supporter of not drilling there and still opposes drilling in ANWR.

The Democrats have boxed in their presumptive presidential nominee. Unless Pelosi softens her position, the issue is going to dog Obama through to the election. Even if he comes out in favor of drilling, he is vulnerable to McCain’s attacks if he is at odds with the speaker of the House.

Democratic antipathy to Big Oil goes back many decades. To many Democrats, the dislike of Big Oil is visceral. They have convinced themselves that somehow the oil companies represent a malign international conspiracy to block alternative energy sources and to run up prices. The left wing of the party has never been able to separate the oil industry from John D. Rockefeller and his kerosene cartel.

For their part, supporters of more drilling onshore and offshore are overselling what can be expected in the way of new supplies. The United States has about 2.5 percent of the world’s oil reserves and consumes about 25 percent of the world’s oil. Nothing can be done about the former, so something will have to be done about the latter. Right in the front of doing something about the latter are–surprise, surprise–the oil companies. British Petroleum has enormous investments in alternative energy, including hydrogen. And Chevron, as it likes to remind us, is the largest geothermal producer in the United States.

The oil companies are not perfect, but they are quite good at what they do: getting oil out of the ground and to your local gas station.

In Memoriam: The Pleasure of His Company

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John McCaughey, journalist, bon vivant, friend and a past editor of The Energy Daily, died on Saturday of heart failure. He was 61.

McCaughey was born to a Catholic family near Belfast, Northern Ireland, when it was not a city in which you wanted to be a Catholic. More remarkable, his father was a member of the strongly Protestant Royal Ulster Constabulary.

Like many young Irish, McCaughey went to London to make his way in journalism. After a brief stint on a local Irish paper, McCaughey was scooped up by the foreign desk of The Financial Times, where he was a sub editor. He was also the toast of the paper’s staff and a growing circle of admirers across London. In the tradition of George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde, another literary wit from Ireland had arrived to disperse the London fog.

It used to be said of Wilde that he put his talent into his writing and his genius into his conversation. It could be said of McCaughey that he put his talent into journalism and his genius into his dinner parties. London had seldom seen the like of them. And when he moved to Washington, well, they were in the style only the Kennedys were known to approach: Waterford crystal (the Lismore pattern), the best Bordeaux vintages (preferably Chateau La Mission Haut Brion) and fine port (ideally bottled in Holland not in its native Portugal). All this he accomplished while despising garlic, cheese and nuts, except for the nutty flavor of the port.

If you entertained McCaughey, he would always, but always, send you a wonderful piece of writing as a thank you letter. If they had been gathered and published, they would take their place as works of the high art of protocol.

Such a man also had to be a man of friends, and so he was–friends in Washington, England, Ireland , Germany and France. He was a man of Edwardian tastes and formality softened with wit and charm. He loved satire and revered the Irish satirist Jonathan Swift. He liked his church services served in Latin.

He was also a great journalist with a reverence for a well-turned phrase and an intuitive understanding that you could write commercial and industrial news with flair, passion and humor. I hired him as a temporary matter while he got a feel for the United States. He stayed more than a decade and rose to be the editor of The Energy Daily. He was good at his work and brilliant at his play.

Hail a Cab, Hail a Culture

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CARTAGENA, Colombia–I think it was the English writer Alan Bennett who said that for him taxis were not the black boxes he found in London, but the “yellow projectiles” that hurtle through intersections in New York.

Taxis tell you a lot about a country, and more about the social status of the taxi-driving class. In France taxis are clean, small and entrepreneurial. Taxi drivers in France do not think they are at the bottom rung of the social ladder.

Alas, American taxis tell us that the drivers would rather be doing something else. The cars are dirty, seats are broken, and the drivers are often mannerless immigrants with no sense of service.

It was not always like this.

When New York taxis were driven by the Jewish working class, men who read Dorothy Schiff’s The New York Post and lived in the Bronx, you got a serving of philosophy, or at least humor, with each ride. Similarly in Washington, D.C., taxis were spotless and driven by older African-American men who appeared to love their work, knew the geography of the city and took pride in it.

At last, Washington taxis have meters. But because the hack bureau of the city government has no teeth, the taxis are as dirty as ever, the drivers talk incessantly on cell phones in the languages of Africa and the Middle East and treat their passengers as inconvenient necessities.

Things are not much better in other American cities.

In Atlanta, I was taken all the way around the beltway to reach an address near the airport. The driver did not know the way, would not listen to me and refused to call his dispatcher for guidance.

In Houston, I had an experience nearly as bad when the driver, newly arrived from Nigeria, took me about 25 miles out of my way because he could not understand what I was saying to him.

Taxis in Los Angeles are more fun. Here the driver is more likely to turn to you and say, “I am not actually a taxi driver. I am in the movie business.” In the City of Angels, I have been offered two scripts and a demonstration tape by drivers who thought I could advance their careers. When I asked friends in L.A. why I had been singled out for this treatment, they replied, “You wore a suit. Only film financiers wear them here. And you were probably staying at The Beverly Hills Hotel.” I was.

In Chicago, a driver waved a bunch of bills at me and said, “We have the best police money can buy.”

In the Third World, taxi drivers offer services beyond transportation. In Singapore, I arrived to give a speech just before a monsoon broke. I was greeted at the airport by a lovely, young ethnic Chinese woman who asked if I was Mr. King. I said I was. She said, “I have a car waiting for you” and escorted me to a Rolls Royce. I thought things were looking up.

As we headed out of the airport, she began to tell me about the program for the following day. She said there would be a tour of the port, an inspection of crane technology, and meetings with maritime officials. When I pointed out that I was in Singapore to give a speech on energy, not port operation and technology, she started screaming at the driver, “Wrong Mr. King. Wrong Mr. King.” Just as the monsoon broke, and rain came down in a way that you do not see outside Asia, she tossed me and my bag out of the Rolls. Taxis evaporated.

Then there appeared at my side a man I called Mr. Fixit. Journalists learn the value of shady entrepreneurs in tight situations. “I have taxi,” he declared, grabbing my bag. I asked if it had a meter and light on the top, knowing the answer. “No, my taxi discreet,” he said.

There was not much choice, so we negotiated a fee and off we went in quite a nice car that he had parked illegally at the curb.

“I am looking after you in Singapore,” announced Mr. Fixit. “We go see snake charmer, crocodile wrestling and transvestite show. And at night, I bring you different girls, every kind of ethnic.”

Then, quite suddenly, he took his hands off the wheel and put them around his throat. Turning to me, he said, “But no drugs. When government start hanging people, I stop drugs.”

In Rio de Janiero, in the 1960s and 1970s, the standard taxi cab was a VW Bug, with the front passenger seat removed. It worked surprisingly well, but only for two passengers.

The Soviets did not understand economic value, and neither did the puppet governments in their satellites. The Poles are justifiably proud of their strong horses. And in the last days of the Soviet Union, they used horses to plow fields. But in one village, I was astounded to see a large agricultural tractor towing a small cart marked “taxi.”

Of course, taxis in London are part of the pride of the place. Fact and mythology get a bit mixed up about the cabs, and Londoners like it that way. In law, it is said, a London cab must carry a bale of hay for the horse and it is legal for a man to urinate on the right rear wheel.

London cabs are always evolving. Every few years, the city holds a new cab design competition. It is said that the only two essential design criteria are that the cab’s roof must be high enough for a man to wear a top hat and the cab must be able to turn almost entirely on its own length. The cabs are not always built by automobile companies, and there is fierce competition for new innovations.

Which brings me to yellow projectiles and the cabs of Cartagena. They are not so much yellow projectiles as yellow darts, buzzing around in a way that reminds me of yellow jackets. These cabs are clean and made by various manufacturers, including Chevrolet, Hyundai, Kia and Renault. No car so small would have the temerity to offer itself as a taxi in America. But the price of gas here is a factor. The price at the pump in Cartagena hovers at $4 per gallon.

As the price of oil increases in America, look for the downsizing of all vehicles, and cabs in particular. But I fear that we will get the downsizing without the cleanliness and courtesy of the cabs in Cartagena.

A Farewell to Tony Snow

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Now we must turn down an empty glass for Tony Snow. The expression comes from “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam,” as translated from the Persian by the English eccentric Edward FitzGerald. The FitzGerald translation also gave us “The moving finger writes and having writ, moves on . . .” and many other quotable lines.

 

Anyway at one time, journalists, particularly those who worked for newspapers, liked to treat “The Rubaiyat” as a kind of drinking song without music. It was very popular in saloons frequented by journalists, who insisted on being called newspapermen or women. It wasn’t until the rise of television that “journalist,” an old-fashioned term, reemerged probably because newspapermen and women were appearing more and more on TV.

 

When we lost one of our own, we’d turn down an empty glass. We’d also upend a few bottles as we mourned our loss; another good soul destined for that great newsroom in the sky.

 

Journalism is a soberer business nowadays, and the old practices have largely died out. Unfortunately in dismantling our vices, mostly drinking and a pervasive inability to handle money, we’ve also lost our ability to grieve collectively, to hug and to cry.

 

Even so, much of the Washington journalistic population, and the White House press corps in particular, are walking around shocked. Tony Snow is dead. We all feared it was coming, and also believed it wouldn’t happen. Not our Tony. Even the atheists among us hoped for some divine intervention; some triumph of the human spirit, so plentiful in Snow, over the evil of metastasizing cancer.

 

After all, we are a sentimental lot; conservative about our trade and profligate with our adoration, if we can find someone we feel worthy of it. There’s the rub. We live in a world of ambitious and disingenuous politicians who buy their opinions wholesale and will pirouette on a dime if there’s a vote or campaign contribution to be had. We are not cynical; we are lovelorn, short of people to admire–editors and proprietors, as well as politicians.

 

 

Tony was one of us and one of them, but fundamentally we thought he was one of us. Sure he’d written speeches for Reagan, subbed for the polemicist Rush Limbaugh, and wore the colors of George W. Bush. We didn’t care.

Snow knew that we go to the White House briefings and press conferences to get the facts, not to debate policy. He knew that everyone of us had an appointment with a word processor or a camera moments after he left the podium, He respected our struggle, and we respected his.

Sadly, the last time I saw Snow was at a funeral for CBS broadcaster Ivan Scott. Snow sat with my wife, Linda Gasparello, and me. Toward the end of the Mass, Snow went over to Scott’s widow, Sarah, and hugged her for the longest time, in a gesture made the more poignant because we all knew that he was fighting the same disease that carried off Ivan. Also, he appeared to be the only present or recent White House official who showed up. He was like that.

 

Bad Energy Vibes from Obama, Odd Ones from McCain

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Memo To Sen. Barack Obama: Beware of your friends and their opinions.

For example, Rep. Edward Markey was on a Sunday talk show allegedly defending your position on offshore drilling. But, in fact, the Massachusetts Democrat was defending his own long-held and irrelevant views. You just had an epiphany on campaign finance. Now, you need to have one on energy. At this point, the world needs oil and will need it for many decades. True, the United States will not get any new oil from the outer continental shelf for 10 years, and it will only account for about 4 percent of our needs as long as it lasts. But even that is essential.

Memo To The Friends Of Sen. John McCain: Just when you thought your candidate had settled down to be George W. Bush Lite, he up and proved that old mavericks cannot change their ways. McCain split the difference on oil by reversing himself on outer continental shelf drilling and remaining adamant on not drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). This put Tom Ridge, the former homeland security chief, on the spot on a Sunday talk show. Ridge simply could not explain the inconsistency of McCain, whose presidential bid he supports.

No matter what you believe should be done, the irrefutable fact is that the world is in a terrible energy bind–and all the indications are that the world energy situation may get worse.

Politicians of the left want to believe that there are technologies ready to come on line, and they are being squeezed out by old-line energy companies. They place their faith in what are referred loosely as “alternatives,” which include solar, wind and geothermal power. These they see as being the equivalent of low-impact aerobics. Painless and environmentally neutral. These politicians oppose the burning of coal and have no coherent policy on oil and gas. They choose to believe that the current high price of oil is a combination of oil company greed, Wall Street speculation, and the Bush administration’s appeasement of the Saudi royal family.

Conservative politicians have as much problem facing reality as their liberal colleagues. They have an inordinate faith that current off-limits drilling areas, both in the ocean and on land, will produce untold quantities of energy for the United States. They have considerable faith in new technologies that will clean up coal, find oil at ever-greater depths, and exploit gas hydrates on the ocean floor. They also believe that oil shale in the West, abandoned in the 1970s because of the environmental consequences of mining and the shortage of water, will replace Saudi Arabia.

One thing the left and the right do agree on is that plug-in hybrid vehicles are going to help a lot. The theory is that they will make a big dent in the 20 million barrels of oil that the United States gulps down every day; that is 10,000 gallons of gasoline every second, according to John Hofmeister, president of Shell Oil Company.

There is an energy establishment, and it is of one mind on energy challenges. This is the thrust of its thinking:

l Energy conservation is essential

l The outer continental shelf should be explored aggressively, along with federal lands

l ANWR should be drilled immediately, and a natural gas pipeline from Alaska should have priority

l Nuclear power is the best substitute for the coal now being burned and to replace geriatric plant

l Coal gasification is the best way to burn coal

l Wind power works and should be encouraged; in particular, storing wind energy as compressed air needs research

l Liquefied natural gas imports need to be boosted

l The search for new technologies needs to be relentless

l Energy producers, from oil companies to wind farms to electric utilities, need consistency in public policy

The unsaid addendum to the establishment thinking is that Obama needs to get some energy advisers who have a solid purchase on the Earth, and that McCain needs to listen to his advisers. In 1974, governments fell like ninepins as the global economy was battered by high energy prices. The battering next time may be much worse.

 

The Shocking Truth about Future Electric Supply

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TORONTO — “Nobody knows de trouble I see,” goes the Negro spiritual. It could have been playing as background music in Toronto, where the Edison Electric Institute (EEI) held its annual convention this week. Things are not terrible for the U.S. electric utility industry at the moment. But the industry’s future is more uncertain than it has ever been.

The challenge facing the industry is that we are using more electricity than ever before, with our bigger homes that have more appliances and gadgets. To meet future demand, according to Jeffry Sterba, chief executive officer of Albuquerque-based PNM Resources, the industry will need to spend $800 billion. Not only is it unclear whether it can raise this amount of money, in a time of constrained credit, but it is also unclear what expenditures public policy will sanction. Consider:

l The future of coal, which accounts for more than half of U.S. electricity production, is uncertain. It is the largest contributor to greenhouse gases, and the future promise of “clean coal” is yet to be realized on a large scale at an affordable price.

The second hope for coal, carbon capture and sequestration is a hot topic in electric utility circles. But David Ratcliffe, chief executive officer of Southern Company, confesses that it has been oversold, and it will be many years—if ever—before the technical and legal issues of diverting carbon dioxide and storing it by the millions of tons underground. The uncertainty has already caused 60 new coal-fired power plants to be canceled, according to speakers at the EEI convention.

l Nuclear power, a longtime favorite of utility executives, still faces public antipathy, and the cost of building the plants has gone up as the American engineering base has declined. The large steel forgings that are required for the construction of nuclear power plants can no longer be made in the United States. They must be imported from Japan at great expense.

Also the U.S. nuclear industry, thriving in the 1960s, has been sold off. Where once there were four U.S. companies that offered nuclear power plants, now General Electric is the only one, and it is in partnership with Japan’s Hitachi. The once mighty Westinghouse Electric is owned by Japan’s Toshiba. And the other vendor is France’s Areva. Only Ratcliffe’s Southern Company is sure that it is going to build two nuclear units. Other companies, including Baltimore-based Constellation Energy, have expressed interest in about 14 new plants—only about half of these are likely to be built.

The Nuclear Energy Institute reckons the nation needs a whopping 65 new nuclear plants to meet new demand and to allow for the retirement some of the more than 100 operating reactors.

l Wind is a bright spot. Wind power has proved more effective for most utilities than they thought, and they are now scrambling to find ways to store wind power as compressed air. But while the West and the North have good wind conditions, the Southeast suffers stagnant air at the time it most needs electricity: the summer. It is an energy option that is not open to every utility and because of its dispersed nature, it is not as manageable as a large coal-fired or nuclear plant.

l Then there is natural gas, which is the most desirable fossil fuel. In the past 25 years, the use of natural gas to turn utility turbines has grown exponentially, from 0 to 30 percent of generation. The trouble is that there is not that much indigenous natural gas around, and there are demands on it for home heating, cooking and fertilizer manufacturing, which are seen as higher uses than making electricity.

This has led to a boom in the import of liquefied natural gas from Asia and the Middle East. But James Rodgers, chief executive officer of Duke Energy, which is a large gas seller as well as a major electric utility, says that this is a dangerous route. By the time the gas gets here, after it has been liquefied and transported in an oil-burning tanker, Rodgers says it is only 20 percent less polluting than coal. Worse, he says this will harness U.S. electric rates to the global cost of oil and gas. That way he sees ruin.

Like their compatriots in the oil industry, utility executives talk a lot about technology coming to the rescue. But so far, there has been nothing that suggests a revolution akin to the one that transformed telephony is in sight. The only really happy thing here in Toronto is the realization that the plug-in hybrid car is coming, and that it will boost utilities’ revenues by recharging overnight when there is a surplus of electricity.

Appalachian Man: He Is Hurting

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See George.

George is our handyman. As the owners of a 1780 stone house in Virginia, my husband and I have seen George a lot in the past five years. This year, we have seen his already sorry lot in life change for the worse.

It hit a new low last week when Kevin, his new partner, decided to start his own painting and home repair company. He had replaced George’s brother-in-law, Billy, who had quit in November and taken the license plates of the reconditioned ice cream truck that they used to haul their ladders, painting equipment and tools. Petty and pity.

Billy quit at the same time as George’s wife, Amber, decided that she wanted to go it alone, taking their young son Carter. Amber, who is not a well woman, is just about holding onto her low-pay, no-benefits job. And Gayle, George’s unmarried daughter, has just had a baby boy and lost her job, which had some benefits. Last week, Gayle asked her father to pay her rent. Her partner, Jed, who works at a hardware chain store and a chain restaurant, can only pay for food, car fuel, and some of their baby’s bills. So George is now paying child support to his estranged wife, and helping out his grown child.

For now, George is living with a nephew, Mark, who he hopes will work with him. George can’t work alone, because his health is collapsing from a combination of heavy physical work in his present and past job in an auto body repair shop, and from Type 2 diabetes and lung disease. Over the last five years, George has gone from a burly man to barely a man, almost child-sized. Needless to say, he has no health insurance.

I know exactly what Sen. Jim Webb was talking about when he said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” that “Black America and Scots-Irish America are like tortured siblings. They both have a long history, and they both missed the boat when it came to all of the larger benefits that a lot of other people were able to receive,” the Virginia Democrat added: “There’s a saying in the Appalachian Mountains that they say to one another and it’s ‘if you’re poor and white, you’re out of sight.’ ”

George typifies these poor, working people–white and black–who fall out with each other but who need each other to survive. A nephew has a room, or couch, you can use for a while; a sister can pick you up and drive you to a job, or pick up a paintbrush, when your van, or partner, is out of sorts; and a high-school buddy can take your wife to the hospital, when she becomes ill at work, pick up your son from school, and watch him until you can get home.

So when the presidential candidates toss off references to the struggle of working-class people, they should see George in their minds’ eye. And when elected, the president should not toss these people into a desk drawer in the Oval Office.

Scotty, We Hardly Knew Ye

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In my opinion, Scott McClellan was one of the worst White House press secretaries. He was often short with reporters and refused to say anything about anything that was not in his talking points. He did not seem to know what role the White House press corps played in the functioning of the government.

 

When McClellan did not want to answer a question, he would “refer” you to other agencies or to the vice president’s office. In fact, McClellan had three standard evasive practices. The first was to refer the questioner to an executive agency, department or another branch , which he learned from his predecessor, Ari Fleischer. The second was to invoke the war on terror to shut down a line of questioning. The third, which he also learned from Fleischer, was to accuse the questioner of asking a “hypothetical” question. The third practice gave McClellan undue leverage because most questions embody a hypothesis.

 

I would sit in the press briefing room in the White House and wonder if McClellan really understood why we were there. He was argumentative, obtuse and sometimes scornful.

 

So it is with great surprise that we learn that McClellan was on our side, all the time yearning for us to ask him tougher questions. Give us a break.

 

During his tenure as press secretary, McClellan knew that the press corps, singly and collectively, had great doubts about the merits of the war and the disingenuousness of Vice President Cheney in trying to link al-Qaeda with Saddam Hussein. If McClellan was yearning for greater press coverage of the failures of the administration, he was awfully good at hiding his desire.

 

My colleagues are quite astounded that McClellan has written a kiss-and-tell book. But we wonder whether he wrote it more because he was eased out of his White House job than any deep feelings he might have had about high administration officials lying about Valerie Plame.

 

As news, McClellan’s book is hot stuff. But as literature, apparently it is wanting. One reviewer has described it as “limp.” Another has said it is inferior to former counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke’s memoir. Perhaps even inferior to former Treasury secretary Paul O’Neill’s lifting of the veil on the White House.

 

The importance of McClellan’s revelations, and why they dwarf the others’, is because he was the public face of the administration. As a press secretary seeks to control what the world thinks of a president and his actions, whatever he says now, McClellan day after day defended the president, the war, the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, and the interrogation of prisoners by harsh means.

 

It is likely that media-savvy people like Karl Rove, with their friends in the press, picked up the disillusionment of reporters with McClellan. They realized that they needed someone who got along better with the press, knew what motivated them, and was less combative.

 

The White House got what it wanted in Tony Snow. Snow was a conservative and a journalist. He not only knew what the man in the Oval Office wanted but also what the irregulars in the briefing room needed. He understood that the press office has to operate efficiently—phone calls have to be returned and documents have to be provided. McClellan’s press office was perceived to be erratic.

 

Snow’s successor, Dana Perino, who was promoted with his blessing, is also well regarded by the press. She is well-informed and, on the whole, treats reporters civilly, although sometimes she will attack one. Unlike McClellan, she does not act as though the sole purpose of the press corps is to antagonize the briefer.

 

The smart money in the press corps is on Perino getting a job with a network as soon as she leaves her White House job. That is now a well-trodden path, blazed by George Stephanopoulos.