White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Can AI Clean Its Own House? There Are Signs It Can

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For me, the big news isn’t the politics of the moment, the deliberations before the Supreme Court or even the news of the battlefront in Ukraine. No, it is a rather modest, careful announcement by Anthropic, the developer of the Claude suite of chatbots.

Anthropic, almost sotto voce, announced it had detected introspection in their models. Introspection.

This means, experts point out, that artificial intelligence is adjusting and examining itself, not thinking. But I don’t believe this should diminish its importance. It is a small step toward what may lead to self-correction in AI, taking away some of the craziness.

There is much that is still speculation — and a great deal more that we don’t know about what the neural networks are capable of as they interact.

We don’t know, for example, why AI hallucinates (goes illogically crazy). We also don’t know why it is obsequious (tries to give answers that please).

I think the cautious Anthropic announcement is a step in justification of a theory about AI that I have held for some time: AI is capable of self-policing and may develop guidelines for itself.

A bit insane? Most experts have told me that AI isn’t capable of thinking. But I think Anthropic’s mention that introspection has been detected means that AI is, if not thinking, beginning to apply standards to itself.

I am not a computer scientist and have no significant scientific training. I am a newspaperman who never wanted to see the end of hot type and who was happier typing on a manual machine than on a word processor.

But I have been enthralled by the possibilities of AI, for better or worse, and have attended many conferences and interviewed dozens — yes, dozens — of experts across the world.

My argument is this: AI is trained on what we know, Western civilization, and it reflects the biases implicit in that. In short, the values and the facts are about white men because they have been the major input into AI so far.

Women get short shrift, and there is little about people of color. Most AI companies work to understand and temper these biases.

While the experiences of white men down through the centuries are what AI knows, there is enough concern about that implicit bias that it creates a challenge in using AI.

But what this body of work that has been fed into AI also reflects is human questioning, doubt and uncertainty.

At another level, it has a lot of standards, strictures, moral codes and opinions on what is right and wrong. These, too, are part of the giant knowledge base that AI calls upon when it is given a prompt.

My argument has been: Why would these not bear down on AI, causing it to struggle with values? The history of all civilizations includes a struggle for values.

We already know it has what is called obsequious bias: For reasons we don’t know, it endeavors to please, to angle its advice to what it believes we want to hear. To me, that suggests that something approximating the early stages of awareness is going on and indicates that AI may be wanting to edit itself.

The argument against this is that AI is inanimate and can’t think any more than an internal combustion engine can.

I take comfort in what my friend Omar Hatamleh, who has written five books on AI, told me: “AI is exponential and humans think in a linear way. We extrapolate.”

My interpretation: We have touched an elephant with one finger and are trying to imagine its size and shape. Good luck with that.

The immediate impact of AI on society is becoming one of curiosity and alarm.

We are curious, naturally, to know how this new tool will shape the future as the Industrial Revolution and then the digital revolution have shaped the present. The alarm is the impact it is beginning to have on jobs, an impact that hasn’t yet been quantified or understood.

I have been to five major AI conferences in the past year and have worked on the phones and made several television programs on AI. The consensus: AI will subtract from the present job inventory but will add new jobs. I hope that is true.

Trump ‘Puts a Bit of Stick About’ and Frightens Our Friends

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President-elect Donald Trump is “putting a bit of stick about.”

That is a British expression which means as it sounds to stir up trouble. In sports, like rugby, it means to play more aggressively. In politics, it can mean to stir up  trouble for trouble’s sake.

Aficionados of UK television will remember when, in the BBC version of “House of Cards,” the prime minister turns to an aide and says with evil relish, “Put a bit of stick about.”

Trump is causing distress, even shock, in the capitals of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, possibly the most effective alliance the world has ever known. NATO has been a force for peace since the end of World War II.

Concomitantly, it can be surmised, Trump’s press conference at Mar-a-Largo thrilled the capitals of China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran. It would appear to them that NATO is coming apart and what used to be called the free world is eating its own.

Trump told Denmark that he might invade Greenland, Panama likewise, and Canada that he would use economic measures to compel it to become the 51st state.

Trump’s final bit of stick, if you will, was to suggest renaming the Gulf of Mexico, presumably to infuriate Mexicans for no better reason than so many of them have migrated illegally to the United States. Pique, just pique, Mr. President-elect.

Allies and defenders of Trump have rushed to his side, largely depending on their lack of a grip on geopolitical reality or because they believe that he must be right because he is their man, their leader, their sage and America’s savior.

Just how are U.S. interests being served by roiling our two large, friendly neighbors with whom we have lived amicably since the end of the hostilities in the War of 1812 for Canada, and the end of the Mexican-American War in 1848 for Mexico?

Trump was enthusiastic about that friendship when he tore up the North American Free Trade Agreement and replaced it proudly with a similar agreement, the United States, Canada, Mexico Agreement, in July 2020, during his first administration.

One can imagine a foolish campaign to seize Greenland, which would tear NATO asunder and give Russia an incentive to invade the Baltic states and, with Europe off balance, to finally win Ukraine.

One could see some future American president eyeing the wreckage and saying, as Richard III wails pathetically in Shakespeare’s play, “A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse,” “Europe for Greenland.”

One can imagine Chinese President Xi Jinping taking any U.S. hostile move against a neighbor in North America as an invitation to take Taiwan.

One could go on, imagining Iran launching a full land war against Israel, and Israel responding with nuclear weapons. Or Central and South America, uniting in hostility to the United States, helping their drug gangs to surge fentanyl into the United States via drones and tunnels.

The Panama Canal is a vital waterway, and Americans did build it after the French failed. Since the full transfer of the canal in 1999, in accordance with the Torrijos-Carter Treaties of 1977, which guaranteed its neutrality, mostly things have worked well. Yes, China has invested in Panama and the canal, but that is no secret. That was going on, as were other Chinese investments worldwide, during the first Trump administration.

The Chinese do operate two terminals on the canal, but they need the revenue from world shipping, just like any other business along the canal.

The canal remains in our backyard, under surveillance. Interfering with its operations would be an act of war by any country.

If Panama is overcharging U.S. shipping, negotiate.

Leave Canada alone. It is our great asset to the north, our kith and kin in democracy and capitalism. Canadians are not a subjugated people, longing to have two senators and about 60 representatives on the Potomac.

Putting a bit of stick about can be some fun. But take it too far and it becomes vandalism.

The Crisis in Journalism — More Reporting Needed

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There is a lot of dither about the future of journalism. Make no mistake, it is the essential commodity.

If you know what is going on in Gaza, Ukraine or Syria, it is because brave journalists told you. Not the government, not some academic institution, not artificial intelligence, and not hearsay from your friends or from a political party.

The crisis in journalism isn’t that it failed analytically in the last election, or that we — an irregular army of individualists — failed, but that journalism has run out of money and its political enemies have found that the courts (and the fear of libel prosecution) can terrorize the companies that own the media.

In 2016, the gossipy site Gawker was sued by the pro wrestler and political figure Hulk Hogan. The lawsuit was financed by the billionaire investor Peter Thiel.

Now come two suits, filed by President-elect Donald Trump: One that he won against ABC News, and one to be filed against the Des Moines Register. It is reported that conservative interests plan a series of these legal interventions against the media.

This will have a frightening effect on news coverage. When there is fear of prosecution, there is less likely to be investigative news coverage.

So far, the most troublesome of the prosecutions has been the one against ABC News. The network caved in early. It agreed to pay $15 million plus legal fees into a fund for what will be the first Trump presidential library.

Could it be that ABC is owned by Disney, and Disney wants good relations with the incoming administration?

However, a much bigger problem faces the media than the fear of prosecution. It is that the old media, led by local and regional newspapers, is dying. Although there are thousands of podcasts, they don’t take up the slack.

You could listen to an awful lot of podcasts and not know what is going on. State houses and local courts aren’t being covered. The sanitizing effect of press surveillance has been withdrawn and, frankly, God help the poor defendants in a local court where there is a disproportionate desire to plead cases, to avoid honest trials even when there is conspicuous doubt.

I never tire of repeating what Dan Raviv, former CBS News correspondent, said to me once, “My job is simple. I try to find out what is going on and tell people.”

Quite so. However, there is a problem: Journalism needs to be concentrated in a newspaper or a broadcast outlet where there is enough revenue to do the job. Otherwise, you get what I think of as the upside-down pyramid of more and more commentary, based on less and less reporting.

We are awash in commentary, some of it very good and some of it trash. It is all based on news gathered by those news organizations that can afford to employ a phalanx of reporters.

Regional newspapers used to have Washington bureaus and foreign bureaus. At one time, the Baltimore Sun had 12 overseas bureaus. Now it has none.

This is the story nationwide. Fewer people actually cover the news, digging, checking and telling us what they have found.

Throughout the history of journalism, technology has been disruptive, sometimes advantageously and sometimes less so. Modern printing presses developed at the end of the 19th century were important boosters, as was the invention of the Linotype machine in 1884.

On the negative side, television killed off evening papers, and podcasts are taking a toll on radio. Now, the internet and tech companies have siphoned off most of the revenue that supported newspapers, radio and television.

As one can’t have a free and fair society without vibrant journalism, we clearly need a new paradigm which is internet-based news organizations that are large enough and rich enough to do the job in the time-honored way with reporters asking questions, whether it is at the courthouse, the White House or on the battlefield.

There is a clear choice: News and informed analysis, or rumor and conspiracy.

Ukrainian Stray Dogs and Cats Threaten Europe with Rabies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Five Things That Underlie the Anxiety That Is Gripping the Nation

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

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

—The presidential election.

—Climate change.

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

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

—The worsening housing shortage.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Ghost of Jimmy Carter Haunts Natural Gas Decisions

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The ghost of Jimmy Carter may be stalking energy policy in the White House and the Department of Energy.

In the Carter years, the struggle was for nuclear power. Today, it is for natural gas and America’s booming liquefied natural gas future.

The decisions that Carter took during his presidency are still felt. Carter believed that nuclear energy was the resource of last resort. Although he didn’t overtly oppose it, he did damn it with faint praise. Carter and the environmental movement of the time advocated for coal.

The first secretary of energy, James Schlesinger, a close friend of mine, struggled to keep nuclear alive. But he had to accept the reprocessing ban and the cancellation of the fast breeder reactor program with a demonstration reactor in Clinch River, Tennessee. Breeder reactors are a way of burning nuclear waste.

More important, Carter, a nuclear engineer, believed the reprocessing of nuclear fuel — then an established expectation — would lead to global proliferation. He thought if we put a stop to reprocessing at home, it would curtail proliferation abroad. Reprocessing saves up to 97 percent of the uranium that hasn’t been burned up the first time, but the downside is that it frees bomb-grade plutonium.

Rather than chastening the world, Carter essentially broke the world monopoly on nuclear energy enjoyed — outside of the Soviet bloc — by the United States. Going forward, we weren’t seen as a reliable supplier.

Now, the Biden administration is weighing a move that will curtail the growth in natural gas exports, costing untold wealth to America and weakening its position as a stable, global supplier of liquified natural gas. It is a commodity in great demand in Europe and Asia and pits the United States against Russia as a supplier.

What it won’t do is curtail so much as 1 cubic foot of gas consumption anywhere outside of the United States.

The argument against gas is that it is a fossil fuel and fossil fuels contribute to global warming. But gas is the most benign of the fossil fuels, and it beats burning coal or oil hands down. Also, technology is on the way to capture the carbon in natural gas at the point of use.

But some environmentalists — duplicating the folly of environmentalism in the Carter administration — are out to frustrate the production, transport and export of LNG in the belief that this will help save the environment.

The issue the White House and the Energy Department are debating is whether the department should permit a large, proposed LNG export terminal in Louisiana at Calcasieu Pass, known as CP2, and 16 other applications for LNG export terminals.

The recent history of U.S. natural gas and LNG has been an industrial and scientific success: a very American story of can-do.

At a press conference in 1977, the then-deputy secretary of energy, Jack O’Leary, declared natural gas to be a depleted resource. He told a reporter not to ask about it anymore because it wasn’t in play.

Deregulation and technology, much of it developed by the U.S. government in conjunction with visionary George Mitchell and his company, Mitchell Energy, upended that. The drilling of horizontal wells using 3D seismic data, a new drill bit, and better fracking with an improved fracking liquid changed everything. Add to that a better turbine, developed from aircraft engines, and a new age of gas abundance arrived.

Now, the United States is the largest exporter of LNG, and it has become an important tool in U.S. diplomacy. It was American LNG that was rushed to Europe to replace Russian gas after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

In conversations with European gas companies, I am told they look to the United States for market stability and reliability.

Globally, gas is a replacement fuel for coal, sometimes oil, and it is essential for warming homes in Europe. There is no alternative.

The idea of curbing LNG exports, advanced by the left wing of the Democratic Party and their environmental allies, won’t keep greenhouse gases from the environment. It will simply hand the market to other producers like Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.

To take up arms against yourself, Carter-like, is a flawed strategy.

Lloyd Kelly: Painting in Solidarity with Ukraine

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“Ukraine Wheat and Sky” by Lloyd Kelly

When war, like the one in Ukraine, breaks out, writers and artists are never impotent. Writers have the power of the pen and artists have the power of the brush.

Through the centuries to this day, they have used their creative talents as war propagandists or protestors. But the Russian invasion of Ukraine has inspired works in protest worldwide.

In Louisville, Kentucky, renowned artist Lloyd Kelly has painted in solidarity with Ukraine. 

“When I saw Ukrainian children being bombed by the Russians, I felt I had to do something that shows support for the Ukrainian people,” Kelly said.

His picture titled “Ukraine Wheat and Sky” is small, but not in its message. 

From a distance, it depicts the flag of Ukraine. But moving closer, you can see what Kelly called “its tension and motion.”

“I underpainted it with complimentary colors — blue on orange and yellow on violet — to create a tension. And the diagonal lines [from the blue sky to the golden yellow wheat of the flag’s colors] show a motion, a fluidity, like the wind blowing the fabric of the flag,” he explained.

Kelly said he didn’t want the flag to be sentimental — a dreamy, wispy image. “I underpainted it because I wanted it to be substantial.” A painting of solidarity.

He has felt so strongly about the suffering in Ukraine that he couldn’t sell it. “Selling it just didn’t feel right. So I gifted it to people who support Ukraine in a very concrete way.” 

Kelly’s painting captures on canvas what Ukrainian President Vol0dymyr Zelensky said so poignantly in a television interview with David Letterman, “This blue color is a color of life; a color of the sky, space, and freedom. The flag doesn’t have any images of planes or missiles in the sky, any traces of gunshots.

“These two colors are the country of where I was born, the country we are fighting for.”

Kelly exhibits at The Christina Gallery in Edgartown, Mass. His studio website address is www.lloydkelly.com.

Political Class Isn’t Leveling With Us About the Hard Times Ahead

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There is a rough road ahead for the world, and our political class isn’t leveling with us.

As Steve Odland, president and CEO of The Conference Board, one of the nation’s premier business research organizations, said in a television interview, inflation will continue at least until 2024, and longer if things continue to deteriorate with the supply chain and the war in Ukraine.

Particularly, Odland, who serves as a director of General Mills, fears a global food crisis with famine in Africa and many other vulnerable places if Ukrainian farmers don’t start seeding spring crops to start this year’s harvest. Already, Ukraine — known as the world’s breadbasket — has cut off exports to make sure there is enough food for their own people, as war rages.

Odland sees U.S. inflation continuing at 7 percent to 8 percent for several years at best. But his primary worry is global food supplies, as countries face a crisis of new and frightening proportions.

His second worry is stagflation. If the rate of productivity falls below 3 percent, “then we will have stagflation,” Odland told me during a recording of “White House Chronicle” on PBS, the weekly news and public affairs program I produce and host.

Odland faults the Federal Reserve for being timid in raising interest rates to counter inflation.

I fault the political class for not leveling with us — both parties. As we are in a state of perpetual election fervor, we are also in a state of perpetual happy talk. “Get the rascals out, and all will be well when my band of happy angels will fix things.” That is what the political class says, and it is a lie.

We are in for a long and difficult period, which began with the pandemic that disrupted supply chains and set off inflation, and now the war in Ukraine has compounded that. Supply chains won’t magically return to where they were before COVID-19 struck, and more likely they will have further constrictions because of the war. New supply chains need to be forged, and that will take time.

For example, nickel, which is used in the batteries that are reshaping the worlds of electricity and transportation and for stainless steel, will have to  come from places other than Russia. At present, Russia supplies 20 percent of the world’s voracious appetite for high-purity nickel. Opening new mines and expanding old ones will take time.

The world’s largest challenge is going to be food: starvation in many poor countries, and high prices at the supermarkets in the rich ones, including the United States. There are technological and alternative supply fixes for everything else, but they will take time. Food shortages will hit early and will continue while the world’s farms adjust. There will be suffering and death from famine.

The curtailing of Russian exports will affect the United States in multiple ways, some of which might eventually turn out to be beneficial as the creative muscle is flexed.

In the utility industry, someone who is thinking big and boldly is Duane Highley, president and CEO of Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association in Denver. Highley told Digital 360, the weekly webinar that emanates from Texas State University in San Marcos, the challenging problem of electricity storage could be solved not with lithium-ion batteries but with iron-air batteries.

In its simplest form, an iron-air battery harnesses the process of rusting to store electricity. The process of rusting is used to produce power when it is exposed to oxygen captured on site. To charge the battery, an electric current reverses the process and returns the rust to iron.

Clearly, as Highley said, this won’t work for electric vehicles because of the weight of iron. But in utility operations, these batteries could offer the possibility of very long drawdown times — not just four hours, as with current lithium-ion batteries. And there is plenty of iron stateside.

Another Highley concept is that instead of dealing with all the complexities of transporting hydrogen, it should be stored as ammonia, which is more easily handled.

This isn’t magical thinking, but the kind of thinking that will lead us back to normal — someday.

Politicians should stop the happy talk and tell us what we are facing.

Europe Faces Winter on the Edge of the Abyss

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BURGENLAND, Austria –There is another world crisis brewing – and one for which President Obama cannot be blamed. The Europeans and have made a mess of things, and now the wolves are at the door.

The first snarling wolf is deflation. Europe’s economies are so weak, so close to recession, that the very real danger of deflation – falling prices – has its economists petrified. It ought also to have its politicians in anguish, but whether it does is less clear.

Europe’s big-driver economy, Germany, as well as France and Italy, are on the edge. The German miracle is ailing, and Berlin may have been writing the wrong prescriptions for the rest of the 18 countries that share the euro as their currency. It has been aided in this effort by the International Monetary Fund.

That prescription, which often seems to harm the patient, as in Greece and Spain, is for austerity – which appears to work better on paper than in the real world. Germany worries about profligate borrowing throughout the European Union. But if the German economy is to escape recession, Chancellor Angela Merkel may have to borrow some money herself and inject it into infrastructure spending to keep Germany competitive and its workers on the job.

The European Central Bank (ECB) has been slow to institute a badly needed program of buying qualified bonds, known as quantitative easing. In the United States, the Federal Reserve, in a program that is now ending, has pumped more than $1 trillion into the economy and helped pull the economy out of recession. But ECB has been timid because it has no clear direction from the European political establishment — pointing up how cumbersome and directionless the European Union structure has become. It has a parliament, which has no power, and is increasingly attracting members who are actually opposed to the European project.

The European Commission has arguably too much power centered in the bureaucracy in Brussels, but no clear direction form its controller, the Council of Ministers. Trouble is the ministers can disagree and veto needed courses of action.

The economic crisis points up the ungovernable nature of Europe and its present institutions. If Washington is gridlocked, Europe is by structures that cannot deal with crisis and what often appear to reflect as many policies as there are members (28) in the EU.

But it is not just the economic wolf that is at Europe’s door. The Russian bear is there, too. Already there is an undeclared war raging in Ukraine.

At the Association of European Journalists' meeting here, a spokesman from the Ukrainian government, who asked not to be identified by name, expressed the sense in Ukraine that it has been betrayed by EU bungling.

“Europe sees Ukraine as its European neighborhood partner. But in Ukraine, the truth is different: Ukraine’s view is that Europe let us down. We are hurt, bleeding. We have been betrayed by a neighbor that, six months ago, we saw as a brotherly nation,” he said.

What was not said was that Europe may freeze this winter if the Putin regime — a growling wolf — wants to punish Ukraine and its neighbors. Europe is hopelessly dependent on Russian gas, which is used mostly for heating. Germany gets 40 percent of its gas from Russia, and Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Slovakia get 90 percent. Russian gas makes its way — largely through Ukraine — down into Italy, and even the United Kingdom has some small exposure.

If the gas goes off, Europe freezes and its economies go south in an avalanche. The most hopeful thing for Europe this winter is that with the world oil price falling, Russia’s own fragile economy may dictate that it keeps the gas flowing — but it will force up the price where it can.

Washington, with a new Congress, might want to brace for Europe’s winter of crisis and disaster. If Europe goes into severe recession, can the U.S. economy escape major harm? The new Congress will be on a sharp learning curve. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

Step on the Gas, Europeans Plead

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To hear Brenda Shaffer, a peripatetic academic specializing in European and Eurasian energy issues, currently on a research fellowship at Georgetown University, natural gas is the predominant fuel of the 21st century, and it will be used copiously as time goes on. It will become the fuel of transportation as well as heating, manufacturing and electric generation.

But, at this point in time, moving natural gas from supplier to user presents special problems. It is not as easily transported as oil, and it is not as fungible.

Ideally, natural gas is transported by pipeline. Less desirably, it is converted into a liquid at -260 F and shipped around the world, where it has to be regassified. The freezing and the regassification processes for liquefied natural gas (LNG) require hugely expensive plants: over $5 billion at the originating end, and half that at the receiving end. This makes the gas expensive and its shipment inflexible.

Oil is put on tankers and unloaded wherever it is needed. LNG is shipped in special cryogenic tankers to dedicated terminals on long-term, take-or-pay contracts.

The United States is in the middle of a natural gas boom of unprecedented proportions; the result of extraordinary reserves in shale and the development of sophisticated hydraulic fracturing (fracking) technology linked to horizontal drilling. The pressure to export is on, balanced by environmental concerns and the fear of manufacturers tat the price will rise.

In the current crisis over Ukraine, a question has arisen as to whether we can help our European allies by shipping them LNG. The answer is “yes and no.”

We do not have any terminals ready to begin exports; the first LNG exports will be loaded from the Sabine Pass terminal in Louisiana late next year and will be shipped to Asia. Nor does Europe have enough receiving terminals.

But the Europeans argue strongly that the mere presence of the United States as a player in the natural gas export business will have a huge impact on the world market, signaling that we are on the way and, hopefully, warning Russia that its captive gas customers in eastern and central Europe are looking at alternatives, and want to lift the yoke of dependence on Russia.

With the invasion of parts of Ukraine by Russian troops or their surrogates, gas has become a weapon of war. Russia's giant, state-owned gas monopoly, Gazprom, has been an arbitrary supplier to Europe for years. Most troublesome is that the bulk of Europe's gas supplies transit Ukraine, and that Gazprom has never behaved like anything but an arm of the Kremlin, dangerous and capricious.

In 2009, Gazprom cut off supplies over alleged contract and payment issues; in the cold of winter, the Russian bear was merciless. Also, it posts a different gas price for each customer, regardless the distance from Russia's border or cost of delivery.

Desperately, Europe is looking for a defense against Russia freezing supply to Ukraine this winter and cutting off some countries, particularly those wholly dependent on Russian gas, like the Baltic states and Slovakia.

That is why the Visegrad Group, consisting of Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, under the chairmanship of Hungary, has been intensively lobbying Congress to pass a bill that would simplify and speed up the licensing of export terminals in the United States. At present, seven terminals have provisional licenses from the Department of Energy, and Sabine Pass is fully licensed.

Visegrad members swarmed Capitol Hill this week, lobbying for the legislation. They were accompanied by officials from Bulgaria, Croatia, Latvia, Romania and Ukraine.

Their message was simple: the legislation would convince the Russians that they had to play by market rules because the entry of the United States as a player in the world of LNG — even if the gas cannot be offloaded in Europe in the near future — will send a strong market-stabilizing message.

Where possible, eastern and central European countries are improving their interconnections and adjusting their systems so they can reverse the flow of gas to help Ukraine in a dire emergency. But no one believes that it will make enough of a difference; besides, as most of that gas will have originated in Russia, some Russian contracts specify the use of the gas.

Almost all of the gas in the region is used for heating rather than electric generation or manufacturing. Central and eastern Europe is dreading winter and imploring the United States to send strong signals, even if it will be a long time before Pennsylvania or Ohio gas warms the people of Ukraine and its neighbors. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate