White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

The Battle for America Is the Battle for Science

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The man who popularized Greek-style yogurt, Hamdi Ulukaya, is probably one of the only, if not the only, billionaire of recent years who does not owe his fortune to the government. Jeff Bezos does, Bill Gates does, Mark Zuckerberg does, along with dozens of others who have amassed fortunes in the digital age.

They are smart men all who have exploited opportunities, which would not have existed but for the government’s presence in science. I applaud individuals who build on government discoveries to make their fortunes.

But government-backed science, which has brought us everything from GPS to the internet, is in for a radical reversal, as laid out in the Trump administration’s budget proposal.

It was greeted with derision when it was released, with many hoping Congress will reverse it. However in the science community, in the halls of the National Science Foundation, in the facilities of the National Institutes of Health, and in the sprawling world of the Department of Energy’s national laboratories, there is fear and alarm.

There should be. There should be from the world of learning a great bellow of rage, too.

The Trump administration has declared essentially that the United States cannot afford to be wise, cannot afford to invent, cannot afford to cure or to minister, and cannot afford to continue the rate of scientific evolution, which has made science of the post-World War II period so thrilling, benefiting countless people.

The administration has identified 62 programs for elimination or severe cutbacks. It has done this in a mixture of ignorance, indifference and delusion. The ignorance is that it does not seem to know how we got where we are; the indifference is part of a broad, anti-intellectual tilt on the political right; and the delusion is the hapless belief that science and engineering’s forward leap of 75 years will be carried on in the private sector.

The broad antipathy to science, to learning in all but the most general sense, is the mark of the Trump budget proposal.

But science, whether it is coming from ARPA-E, (Advanced Projects Research Research Agency-Energy) or the National Science Foundation’s watering of the tender shoots of invention, the Department of Energy’s world-leading contribution to the Human Genome Project, or the National Institutes of Health’s endless war against disease (especially the small and awful diseases like Myalgic Encephalomyelitis and the rarest cancers) is the future. Without it, the nation is gobbling its seed corn.

In the Trump administration, there is money to build a giant wall but no money to surge forward into the future.

To the administration, as indicated in its budget proposal, the sciences and the engineering that flows from them is a luxury. It is not. It is the raw materials of peace and strength in this century and beyond.

To take just one of the follies implicit in the philistine budget, cutting funding for medical research will come just when there is need for more — research that if not funded by the government will not be done. New epidemics like bird flu, Zika and Ebola cry out for research.

Increasingly, the old paradigm that new drugs would come from the drug companies is broken. It now costs a drug company close to $2 billion to bring a new compound to market. That cost is reflected in new drug prices, as the companies struggle to recoup their investments before their drugs go off patent. Shareholder value does not encourage the taking of chances, but rather the buying up of the competition. And that is happening in the industry.

The world desperately needs a new generation of antibiotics. The drug companies are not developing them, and the bugs are mutating happily, developing resistance to the drugs that have held bacterial disease at bay since penicillin led the way 89 years ago.

Fighting the political folly that threatens science is the battle for America. In 50 years, without amply government-funded research and development, will we still be the incubator for invention, the shock troops against disease, the progenitors of a time of global abundance?

Our place in the world is not determined by our ideology, but by our invention. Sadly, the pace of invention is at stake, attacked by a particularly virulent and aberrant strain of governmental thinking.­­

The Rare Earths Problem: A U.S. Solution

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Rare earth elements – there are 17 of them – have the world’s manufacturing by the throat. They are, as John Kutsch, director of the Thorium Energy Alliance, says, “the great multipliers.” They make metals stronger, generators more efficient, cell phones smaller, television sets sharper, and laptops lighter. They are, in their way, as important to modern manufacturing as energy.

At one time, the United States was a major supplier of rare earths — with supplemental supplies coming from countries around the world, including Australia and Brazil. Today, 90 percent of the rare earths the world uses come from China.

The use of rare earths is as important in lasers and jet engines as it is in aiming cruise missiles, which means the United States, and the rest of the world, has a huge vulnerability: China controls the supply of new war-fighting material. All U.S. defense manufacturers – including giants Boeing, General Electric and Lockheed Martin — are dependent on China. Now China is demanding that U.S. companies do more of their manufacturing there: China wants to control the whole chain.

Yet, as the rare earth elements industry is quick to assert, rare earths are not rare; they are scattered generously throughout the world. So why China’s dominance?

China has three main advantages. The first is that in 1984, leader Deng Xiaoping adopted a major initiative, the so called 863 Program, to move China from being a simple supplier of raw materials and products, enhanced by cheap labor, to being an industrial powerhouse and scientific giant. Rare earths were one of the areas singled out in the program.

The second advantage is that the Chinese ignored – and, to a large extent, still do — the environmental costs of rare earths’ extraction. The environmental damage is described by those who have been to one of two major Chinese sites, which have a combined population of 17 million, as catastrophic, with mountains bathed in acid to remove the sought-after rare earths, resulting in lakes of acid.

China’s third advantage is a natural one: It has a lot of ionic clay, which contains rare earths without the associated uranium and thorium.

About the time China was ramping up its plans to dominate the world rare earths market, the United States, in conjunction with the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, began to regulate so called source materials. These are materials which, at least in theory, could be fashioned into weapons. In reality, those associated with rare earths are not in sufficient quantity to interest potential proliferators.

But the regulations are there. Many in the rare earths elements industry believe that it was these regulations — particularly as affecting thorium — that crippled production around the world and essentially closed down the U.S. industry, just as demand was escalating.

There is a commercial market for uranium. While hardly any thorium is used nowadays, it was once used in some scientific instruments and mantles for lighting. Thorium is akin to uranium in atomic weight, and it is a fertile nuclear material. That means that it can be used in a nuclear reactor, but it has to be ignited by a fissile material, such as enriched uranium or plutonium.

Thorium is radioactive, but mildly so. It is an alpha emitter, which means it can be shielded with tissue paper and will not penetrate the skin. However, it has a half-life of 1.5 billion years.

The answer, according to James Kennedy, a science consultant and rare earths expert, is to develop a reactor using thorium instead of uranium. This reactor, called a molten salt reactor, is inherently safe, say its passionate advocates, and would be a better all-around nuclear future. The technology was pioneered by one of the giants of the early nuclear age, Alvin Weinberg, at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, but abandoned under pressure from enthusiasts for light water reactors, the kind we have today.

The Thorium Energy Alliance believes that the United States and other countries should develop a cooperative to source rare earths from the existing mining of phosphates and metals and store the thorium until it becomes a useful fuel. A bill to do this is making its way through Congress, but its chances are slim. Short of putting a value on thorium and isolating it, the chances of a rare earth elements industry reawakening in the United States, or elsewhere, is rare. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

Nuclear Teetering on the Economic Precipice

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This will be a bleak Christmas for the small Vermont community of Vernon. It is losing its economic mainstay. The owner of its proud, midsize nuclear plant, which has sustained the community for 42 years, Entergy, is closing the plant. Next year the only people working at the plant will be those shuttering it, taking out its fuel, securing it and beginning the process of turning it into a kind of tomb, a burial place for the hopes of a small town.

What may be a tragedy for Vernon may also be a harbinger of a larger, multilayered tragedy for the United States.

Nuclear – Big Green – is one of the most potent tools we have in our battle to clean the air and arrest or ameliorate climate change over time. I've named it Big Green because that is what it is: Nuclear power plants produce huge quantities of absolutely carbon-free electricity.

But many nuclear plants are in danger of being closed. Next year, for the first time in decades, there will be fewer than 100 making electricity. The principal culprit: cheap natural gas.

In today’s market, nuclear is not always the lowest-cost producer. Electricity was deregulated in much of the country in the 1990s, and today electricity is sold at the lowest cost, unless it is designated as “renewable” — effectively wind and solar, whose use is often mandated by a “renewable portfolio standard,” which varies from state to state.

Nuclear falls into the crevasse, which bedevils so much planning in markets, that favors the short term over the long term.

Today’s nuclear power plants operate with extraordinary efficiency, day in day out for decades, for 60 or more years with license extensions and with outages only for refueling. They were built for a market where long-lived, fixed-cost supplies were rolled in with those of variable cost. Social utility was a factor.

For 20 years nuclear might be the cheapest electricity. Then for another 20 years, coal or some other fuel might win the price war. But that old paradigm is shattered and nuclear, in some markets, is no longer the cheapest fuel — and it may be quite few years before it is again.

Markets are great equalizers, but they're also cruel exterminators. Nuclear power plants need to run full-out all the time. They can’t be revved up for peak load in the afternoon and idled in the night. Nuclear plants make power 24/7.

Nowadays, solar makes power at given times of day and wind, by its very nature, varies in its ability to make power. Natural gas is cheap and for now abundant, and its turbines can follow electric demand. It will probably have a price edge for 20 years until supply tightens. The American Petroleum Institute won't give a calculation of future supply, saying that the supply depends on future technology and government regulation.

Natural gas burns cleaner than coal, and is favored over coal for that reason. But it still pumps greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, though just about half of the assault on the atmosphere of coal.

The fate of nuclear depends on whether the supporters of Big Green can convince politicians that it has enough social value to mitigate its temporary price disadvantage against gas.

China and India are very mindful of the environmental superiority of nuclear. China has 22 power plants operating, 26 under construction, and more about to start construction. If there is validity to the recent agreement between Chinese President Xi Jinping and President Barack Obama, it is because China is worried about its own choking pollution and a fear of climate change on its long coastline, as well as its ever-increasing need for electricity.

Five nuclear power plants, if you count Vermont Yankee, will have closed this year, and five more are under construction in Tennessee, South Carolina and Georgia. After that the new plant pipeline is empty, but the number of plants in danger is growing. Even the mighty Exelon, the largest nuclear operator, is talking about closing three plants, and pessimists say as many as 15 plants could go in the next few years.

I'd note that the decisions now being made on nuclear closures are being made on economic grounds, not any of the controversies that have attended nuclear over the years. 

Current and temporary market conditions are dictating environmental and energy policy. Money is more important than climate, for now. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

Sex, Booze and Rock ‘n’ Roll in Making a British Jihadist

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It is a simple question, but there are only fragments of an answer. The question is: Why do so many Muslims, born in Britain, turn to jihadism?

The best numbers available show that more than 500 young, British-born Muslims have traveled to Syria to fight for the Islamic State. By comparison, an estimated 100 Americans have taken up arms for the Islamic State. As the population of the United States is 313 million, compared to 63 million for the whole of Britain, the disparity is huge.

The “the enemy within,” as the British media calls these young people, has deeply disturbed the British public, as it looks to its political leaders to take action. One writer, in The Daily Telegraph, says that the government has been soft when it should have been tough, and tough when it should have been soft.

The truth is that successive British administrations have been silent on the consequences of immigration since the second Churchill government in the 1950s. Everyone is to blame and no one is to blame.

Britain never saw a large influx of immigrants after the Norman Conquest in 1066. In fact, it had become quite proud of its tolerance for émigrés; Karl Marx was the exemplar. The Jews were tolerated after the 1650s, but excluded from many occupations and social circles.

Past and present Britain is made up of enclaves remarkably disinterested in each other. Hence, a small island nation can support 53 distinct, regional accents and dialects.

Idealists believed that post-World War II immigration would change Britain for the better, sweep away its imperial trappings. Actually if anything eroded the class structure, it was the great wave of pop music and fashion in the 1960s.

Surveys show that of the immigrants from the subcontinent, the Indians assimilated best and took to business — and the class system — with alacrity, many becoming millionaires. The Muslims, primarily from Pakistan, have fared the worst. They assimilated least and imported practices that are a savage affront to British values: forced and under-age marriages, honor killings, and halal butchers, opposed by many British animal rights groups.

These same values have made life rough for young men of Pakistani descent. For working-class British youth, sex, booze, music and soccer are their safety valves. Sexual frustration is endemic all over the Muslim world; it is at work among devout, young Muslim men in Britain, where sex is celebrated in the culture.

British business had a role in the mix of immigrants in the 1960s. Businesses wanted workers for the textile mills and factories in northern England, who would do the dirty, poorly paid work nobody else wanted. The proprietor of large tire retreading company boasted to me in 1961 how he had solved the labor problem by recruiting rural Pakistanis, who worked hard and cheaply and kept to themselves. His words have echoed with me down through the years.

This alone does not explain why, for example, a preponderance of the jihadists are from London, or why some of them seem to be university types from the London School of Economics, King’s College London, the School for Oriental and African Studies, and others. If you are young, male and Muslim, and even somewhat religious, it is easy to be persuaded that you live among the infidels with their alcohol and preoccupation with coitus.

But, again, it is not explanation enough; not an explanation of why a generation of British-born young men are attracted to the life and values of their distant ancestors, or why they have shown such savagery.

Britain has comforted itself by dealing with self-identified “community leaders” in the Muslim community. Unfortunately the real leaders have been fiery, foreign-born imams who proselytize hatred in the mosques that serve Britain’s 2 million Muslims. The Muslim communities have been hidden in plain sight from the British mainstream.  — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate


Love Blooms Across the Atlantic

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The casual observer may wonder why the United States and the European Union are working on a scheme to bring about a trans-Atlantic free trade zone by 2015. The project is big. It is ambitious. It is daunting. And it is underway.
 
There is no shortage of European goods in America whether it is machinery from Finland, wine from France, cars from Germany, beer from Holland, subway cars from Italy, trains from Sweden, and cheese from all over Europe. And there is a raft of American goods, ideas and investment flowing into the European Union's 28 member states. In fact, 45 percent of the world’s trade is between the European Union and the United States.
 
Yet in the embassies and among the foreign-policy wonks in Washington, the project, known as the Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), is the hot topic — after the government shutdown, of course. There are those who believe that the bonds between the United States and Europe have been loosening since the Cold War era, as has the importance on both sides of the Atlantic of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
 
The TTIP (pronounced TEE-tip) has political purposes as well as trade ones. In trade it will endeavor to remove all remaining tariffs – the average tariff is around 4 percent — and to end the practice of revenge tariffs, whereby a commodity that is not involved in a trade dispute becomes a tariff target. For example, sticking a huge tariff on olive oil because there is a dispute over how carcasses are washed down in slaughterhouses. Many of these disputes now end up before the World Trade Organization and drag on for years.
 
Another touchy and expensive issue is certifications. Although the European Union and the United States have high standards of safety and consumer protection, products have to be certified on both sides of the Atlantic. Sweden's Volvo automobiles are designed to be super-safe, but they have to be certified as street-legal in the United States.
 
A new study by the Bertelsmann Foundation, Europe’s largest think tank, the British Embassy in and the Atlantic Council concludes that the TTIP will create between 740,000 and 1 million jobs in the United States. All 50 states would see new jobs created and an average 33 percent rise in exports to the European Union by 2027, according to the study.
 
The political case is both sentimental and practical. European Commission President Jose Manuel Barosso has made strengthening Atlantic ties a high priority. German Chancellor Angela Merkel sees tightening the Atlantic bonds as important to her legacy.
 
But nobody on either side of the Atlantic needs the TTIP more than David Cameron, the beleaguered British prime minister. It may be the olive branch that will soothe the anti-Europe forces in his own Conservative Party and across Britain.
 
Cameron has promised a referendum on whether Britain stays in the European Union or pulls out. A new American alliance with jobs attached may just be enough to bring the right wing of his own party to heel.
 
To understand how divided the Britain’s conservatives are, look no further than the U.S. House of Representatives. Political fury is not a U.S.-only phenomenon.
 
Supporters of the TTIP see it as against fortification against Asia; an opportunity to maybe gain back some footing in non-luxury goods, and a reassertion of Western values.
 
Yet the road ahead is rough.
 
The North American Free Trade Area was negotiated and signed by President George H.W. Bush and ratified by President Bill Clinton with Republican support, as the unions and their Democratic allies wanted nothing to do with it, although it is now regarded as a template not only for the TTIP but also for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which would brings together the United States, Canada, Mexico and many Asian countries but excludes China.
 
Tyson Barker, director of European relations at the Bertelsmann Foundation, says that when both free-trade deals are concluded, the United States will be a fulcrum between the two. Sadly, at present, negotiate is a dirty word in Washington. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate