Llewellyn King: Capitalist solutions to the housing crisis

The Royal Mills complex, in West Warwick, R.I., a former textile factory that was converted to 250 residential apartments.

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

The housing crisis, which is spread across the United States, is most easily measured in the human cost. At the low end that is families, working families, forced to go without a roof, to live in cars, on the streets, and in tent cities or municipal shelters.

But there are other costs, mostly to young people; costs like getting married and having to live with parents or living in a group house long past the age when that is an adventure.

A big cost of the housing crisis is labor mobility.

One of the great strengths of the American workforce has been its preparedness to relocate to the work, unlike parts of Europe where the workers have  demanded that the work come to them.

It was this mobility that fed the growth of California and today is feeding the growth of Texas, although housing stress — particularly in Austin, the dynamic capital — is beginning to be a problem there.

Mobility is a feature that made America America: its restlessness, its sense of seeking the frontier and moving there.

According to Dowell Myers, a professor of policy, planning and demography at the University of Southern California, whom I recently interviewed on the television program White House Chronicle, 21 percent of the population relocated every year, now it is down to 8 percent.

According to Myers and other experts, the housing shortage has been building since the Great Recession of 2008 to 2009. This has been multifaceted and includes a shortage of money available for lending to builders, labor shortages, supply chain disruptions, but particularly local exclusionary laws.

To my mind, and to architects and developers I have spoken to, those laws are the biggest problem: the mostly smug, leafy suburbs don’t want new townhouses or apartments. That introduces underlying issues of class and race. In the suburbs, two of the most dreaded words are “affordable housing.”

The answer is to build “luxury” housing rather than designated low-income housing, according to Myers. It is a view I have espoused for years. Build upscale housing that caters to the middle class and as people move up, more housing will become available at the bottom. It is capitalism at its simplest: supply and demand at work. At present we have too much demand and not enough supply.

An extraordinary thing about the housing crisis that is crippling the nation and changing its social as well as its labor dynamics, is why isn’t this a prominent issue in this presidential election year.

It is an issue that could bolster candidates because there are things at the federal level which can be done. Here is a problem that affects all. Where are the political solutions coming from the top? Where are the political reporters asking the candidates, “What are you going to do about housing, a here-and-now crisis?”

Public housing comes pre-stigmatized. The answer is the market. It isn’t  a free market because it is inhibited by the fortress-suburb mentality, but there is enough room for the market to accelerate, to build more houses with just a little federal incentive.

Some of the most attractive homes in New England are in converted mills and factories. These grand structures have been turned into what realtors call “residences.”

The use of the word residences, instead of apartments, denotes something desirable. So be it: If it works, do it.

Much of the rehabilitation of the industrial properties in New England, and across the country, has gone in tandem with tax incentives. In one case, these were enough for the developers to produce 250 apartments from one historic mill in Rhode Island. (See photo.) Up and down the country there are abandoned industrial properties that require little zoning hassle to be repurposed.

USC’s Myers, who says every kind of housing is needed, points out that building for those who can afford to buy works in another way: It inhibits gentrification and the social upheaval, as the poor are pushed out of their old neighborhoods, something which, by the way, has been very apparent in Washington, D.C.

The use of urban space is changing, shopping centers are failing and office buildings are losing their luster, and that means housing opportunities. Repurposing isn’t the only answer, and a lot of new housing is needed, but there is huge evidence that repurposing works from the factories of New England to the lofts of Manhattan — desirable housing has been created from the debris of the past.

Building anything anywhere isn’t a simple matter, but once the financial incentives are gotten right, things begin to move. It will take decades to fix the housing problem, but that should be accelerated now. 

 Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com, and he’s based in Rhode Island.

whchronicle.com

‘No time for hazy notions’

The Wood River Inn, in Wyoming. R.I. On the National Register of Historic Places, it was built in 1850.

John Phelan

“Miss Rainy Roth of Wyoming Rhode Island, did not believe in luck. Sixty one years old, a self-sufficient woman with a business of her own, she had no time for hazy notions. People who believed in sudden strokes of good fortune, she thought, were simply seeking an excuse for idleness.’’

— From the short story “Rue,’’ by Susan Dodd (born 1946), American writer

Offshore wind-power battles keep coming

“50 m” means mean wind speed at 50 meters above the ground or water.

Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

As usual, whatever the huge environmental and economic benefits of green-energy projects, some people try to block them, especially affluent folks who don’t want to look at them or even if they can’t see them hate the very idea of being anywhere near them. Sometimes the blocking attempts are on their own, and sometimes  they get the help of  the  fossil-fuel industry. (Hey, who wants competition?!) Consider that a far-right (euphemism – ‘’libertarian”) Trump-connected outfit called the Caesar Rodney Institute, with ties to the oil industry, is one of the groups fighting offshore wind projects.

The latest example in these parts is a bunch of people in the Cape Cod town of Barnstable trying to stop electrical cables from the offshore wind farms of Commonwealth Wind and Park City Wind from being laid 50 feet under beaches.

The foes like to cite alleged  health risks from electromagnetic fields and fires. But in fact putting these cables deep underground is the safest way to go. How many of these opponents have complained about the risks from overhead lines, which produce  -- obviously! --far, far more human exposure to electromagnetic fields than can underground cables,   require cutting down wide swaths of woods and otherwise disturbing the environment to make space for them and can (albeit rarely) cause fires, of which California is the most dramatic example.

There have long been underground cables all over America that carry the same voltages that would come from these offshore wind projects. And cables from offshore wind farms in Europe have been put under beaches without incident, but it’s a lot easier to do such projects there than here.

Hypocrisy makes the world go round.

And now some powerful folks in Newport seek to block wind turbines in the water far off that city. One foe is self-described “Trumpette’’ Dee Gordon, whose properties, with her husband, include a place on Ocean Drive.

Of course plenty of people, Trumpette or otherwise, don’t want wind turbines near them.

Hit this link, this one and this one. And this one.

And this one. And, finally, this one.

I hope that Massachusetts officials will favor the broad public interest and not let local opposition block what would be an environmental and economic boon for our region. But lots of people still seem to prefer burning  oil, gas and coal  from outside our region rather than putting up with nonpolluting, locally produced energy.

Pay ‘em to clear out?

Aerial view of Holland-low Barrington, R.I., in 2008

— Photo by Brian McGuirk

How Much to Pay Them?

Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

As the sea level rises, and coastal storms seem to be becoming more severe, more and more states and localities are realizing that in many stretches of low-lying coast, the only long-term solution is to remove houses and other structures, in what has been called “managed retreat.’’ The tricky thing is how to pay for it, especially since shoreline houses tend to be expensive.

Should homeowners who, after all, presumably know (or should know) the risks of owning waterfront property be compensated with tax money for being forced to leave their houses to be demolished or to pay them to move their houses?

Get ready for buyouts, relocating roads and changing zoning ordinances and districts.  This could be particularly exciting in towns, such as Warren and Barrington, R.I., where so much of the land is barely above sea level.

A lot of  shoreline homeowners, who include a disproportionate number of politically powerful rich people,  will be, er, inconvenienced. And towns and cities will worry about the loss of property-tax revenue.

Localities, led by new state policies, should start planning where, or if, buildings and public infrastructure can be relocated, and meanwhile promote marshland expansion, which will help mitigate flooding in stores.

This should be done with all deliberate speed. Global warming is speeding up.

Hit this link.

Relishing ruins

At “The Bells,’’ in Newport

— Photo by GoLocalProv.com

The amphitheater, artificial ruins in Maria Enzersdorf, Austria, built in 1810/11

— Photo byu C.Stadler/Bwag

Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

The state-owned, graffiti-rich carriage house and stables of a once stately Newport mansion, which was built in 1876 and called “The Bells’’ and torn down in the ‘60s, will finally be demolished. That’s after four young people who were playing there were injured when part of the roof collapsed. The structures probably should have been demolished years ago.

Newport has its fair share of residential monuments from the first Gilded Age (semi-officially roughly 1870-1900, though some extend it through The Twenties), but I’d guess that few if any, others are in such a mess as “The Bells.’’ The current Gilded Age, still going strong, began in the 1980s, when, under the Reagan administration, taxes were slashed for the very rich.

Places like “The Bells’’ lure young “explorers,” especially boys, intent on mischief or innocent fun. I well remember as a kid entering (i.e., trespassing) such decayed mansions along the Massachusetts Bay shoreline near our house. Most were, or had been, summer places.  Perhaps some were abandoned, or just started to be neglected, when the owners ran out of money in The Depression. Most were gray-shingle houses that started to be put up after the Civil War. But some of the newer ones had Spanish Mission-style stucco walls, fountains and statuary, which were popular in The Roaring Twenties. Newly (if only briefly) rich people liked what they saw of these houses on Florida’s Gold Coast and in Los Angeles.

Kids would smoke in them (raising the danger of fire) or engage in such idiotic behavior as BB gun fights.

In the 18th Century and early 19th centuries in Europe,  especially in England, there was a mania for building fake ruins; some draw tourists to this day. Maybe some falling-down  Newport mansions can someday serve a similar purpose. Crumbling old houses covered with vines can look romantic, and are spawning grounds for entertaining ghost stories. Just kidding. The building inspectors probably wouldn’t allow it.

Llewellyn King: My brief for America’s embattled police

Los Angeles Police Department officers arresting suspects during a traffic stop. Such stops can be life-threatening for the police.

— Photo by Jim Winstead

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

Police excess has gained huge attention after the death of George Floyd, in Minneapolis in 2020, and the alleged beating death of Tyre Nichols, in Memphis, last month. But police excess isn’t new.

A friend of mine, who had been drinking and could be quite truculent when drunk, was severely beaten in the police cells in Leesburg, VA., a couple of decades ago. I have never seen a man so badly hurt in a beating -- and I have done my share of police reporting.

That he provoked the police, I have no doubt. But no one should be beaten by the police anywhere, ever, for any amount of provocation. I might mention that my friend -- and the officers who might have killed him -- were white.

I used to cover the Thames Police Court, in the East End of London. That was before immigration had changed the makeup of the East End. It was then, as it had been for a long time, solidly white working class.

Every so often, a defendant would appear in the dock showing signs that he had been in a fight. One man had an arm in a sling, another had a black eye, a third had bruises on his face. One thing was common: If they looked beaten-up, they would be charged with “resisting arrest,” along with such other charges as drunkenness and petty larceny.

In the press benches, we shrugged and would just say something like, “They worked that bloke over.” We never thought to raise the issue of police brutality. It was just the way things were.

At least nowadays, when social norms don’t allow for police hitting suspects, there is a slight chance of redress. Although I would wager that nearly all police violence goes unreported, and the “blue wall” closes tightly around it.

People in uniform, men and women, hold dominion over a prisoner. If there is ethnic bias or verbal provocation, bad things can and do happen.

Yet I hold a brief for the police. Policing is dangerous and heartbreaking work, especially in the United States where guns are everywhere, Also it is shift work, itself a stressing factor.

Wearing the blue isn’t easy, and abuse and danger go with the job. Sean Bell, a former British policeman, now a professor at the Open University, described the police workload in the United Kingdom this way, “Those in the policing environment can become a human vacuum for the grief, sorrow, distress and misfortune for the victims of crime, road crashes and the plethora of other incidents dealt with time after time.”

Many of the incidents of American police being shot and police exceeding their authority have as their genesis at a traffic stop, as with Tyre Nichols. These are a cause of fear for both the police and criminals. It is where the rubber meets the road of law enforcement.

We motorists form our opinions of the police largely through traffic stops, which we rail against. But to the police, they are a  life-threatening hazard as they approach a car that may have a crazed or dangerous criminal driver with a gun. They face danger and tragedy in plain sight.

The only thing that police officers are more wary of than traffic stops are domestic-violence calls. They are the worst, officers in Washington have told me.

Yet the traffic stop is an essential police tool, partly for controlling traffic but importantly for arresting criminals, fugitives and drug transporters. It is how the police work within the constitutional prohibition on illegal search and seizure.

People who have control of other people — drill sergeants, wardens and the police — are in a position to abuse, and some do. A uniform and authority can bring out the inner beast. Remember what went on in Abu Ghraib prison, in Iraq?

Following the two terrible incidents of police excess, Floyd and Nichols, all the solutions seem inadequate. But when out on the streets or in our homes, most of us are vitally aware that we feel secure because a call to 911 will bring the law — the men and women in blue who guarantee our safety and well being.

What to do about police violence? Vigilance is the first line of defense, but appreciating the police as well as holding them to account helps. Not many police officers feel appreciated, and that isn’t good for them or for society.

“The policeman’s lot is not a happy one!” So wrote British dramatist W.S. Gilbert in The Pirates of Penzance, an 1879 comic opera, one of his collaborations with composer Arthur Sullivan.

And Gilbert and Sullivan had never dreamt of a traffic stop.

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

whchronicle.com

Boston has the oldest municipal police department in America.

Liability Lane

A noncollapsed part of Newport’s Cliff Walk.

— Photo by Giorgio Galeotti

Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

Will they soon have to patch and fill along and on Newport’s famous Cliff Walk every few months, what with rising seas and more intense storms? The latest drama came in a Dec. 23 tempest in which part of the walk’s embankment collapsed. A section of the walk itself collapsed last March in a storm.

Maybe they should change the name of this tourist attraction to Liability Lane.

But the big thing to watch in The City by the Sea is the redevelopment and, we hope, beautification, of the ugly North End.

Speaking of the tourist mecca of Newport, the country, including New England, will likely go into a recession this year, and unlike in the pandemic recession, the Feds can’t be expected to bail out the states. So the states better pump up their rainy-day funds. Rhode Island, for its part, should intensify its promotion of warm-weather tourism, especially in such nearby areas as Greater New York City, to get more sales tax revenue to help offset the decline in other tax revenue.

‘We are still here’

The cairn in question.

Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

I wrote too whimsically in an Oct. 23 column that I had come across this cairn while walking on the lawn at the Roger Williams National Memorial, in downtown Providence, and asked what it is. Here’s the answer from the National Park Service, via my friend Ken Williamson, who lives in Hawaii.

“This cairn, or stone pile, depicts pieces of Narragansett {Tribal Nation}
history from pre-contact {with Europeans} through today. Built by Narragansett artists associated with the Tomaquag Museum {in Exeter, R.I.} it expresses the fact that WE ARE STILL HERE. The cairn is at the center with 4 raised stones around it representing the Four Directions. It is a meditative circle, representing Narragansett lives, history, and future which brings us full circle. Sit down and reflect on your own past, present and future and its intersection with the Narragansett people.

“The Narragansett Tribal Nation has lived on these lands since time immemorial. Their ancestors respected all living things and gave thanks to the Creator for the gifts bestowed on them, as do Narragansett people of today. Lynsea Montanari & Robin Spears III, both Narragansett, served as summer arts interns at the memorial for this project. They incorporated their own cultural knowledge with teachings by tribal elders regarding first contact with European settlers, genocide, displacement, assimilative practices, enslavement, continuation of language, ceremony, and other cultural practices. The artists chose to create a cairn as it is a part of the history of all indigenous peoples. There are many historic cairns in the Narragansett landscape.’’

 xxx

My strongest memory of Native American cairns comes from driving with my wife in the forests along  the northern side of gorgeous Georgian Bay in Ontario. You can’t go far there without seeing a cairn or other stone sculpture on a slope above the road.

Tomaquag Museum, in the Arcadia section of Exeter, R.I.

—Photo by John Phelan

Same places, different scenes

Harry Adler travels every morning as dark yields to dawn. He’s always on foot, running through Pawtuxet Village (straddling Cranston and Warwick, R.I.), where he lives. Along the way, he photographs that day’s magnificence.

Deep blue cove water melding into powder-blue sky. Snow frosting feathered reeds. Geese with orange feet waddling up a boat ramp. Trees mirror-imaged in the silvery Pawtuxet River. Historic houses in silhouette.

Adler began posting his village photos on Facebook and Instagram three years ago, and more so since the COVID pandemic erupted. Legions of admirers  recognize his talent.

“The eye of the morning is winking at you,” writes one Facebook friend of a sunrise photo. “Your eye sees things that most don’t,” writes another. Many thank Adler for brightening their mornings and sparing them from waking up when he does – at 4:13 a.m. (in time to feed the five cats and run three to five miles).

Adler’s photographs will be displayed at “Traveling in Place,” an exhibit at the Aspray Boat House, 2 East View St., Warwick, R.I., in partnership with The Edgewood Village. Friends, including artist Bert Crenca, suggested  that Adler exhibit his work: Adler agreed so long as part of the proceeds go to The Village Common of Rhode Island.

The exhibit’s title stems from Adler’s observation: “When I started running in the Pawtuxet Village area, I was noticing that every day was dramatically different. And that became the thought behind ‘Traveling in Place.’ I’m still in the same place, but feel like I’m traveling because I’m not seeing the same things all the time. Each day is brand new.’’

Adler, co-owner of Adler’s Design Center & Hardware, on Wickenden Street in Providence, is familiar to many Rhode Islanders. Customers know him as the pleasant font-of-knowledge guy behind the paint counter.

Adler sets out just after 6 a.m. from the 1857 Greek Revival house he owns with his partner, Suzy Box. He runs while searching the skies and scoping out the light. If the light is right, he clicks the shutter on his IPhone 12 Pro.

He shoots his images from the same spots at the Pawtuxet Cove Marina, Stillhouse Cove and the  Rhode Island Yacht Club -- same locales but ever-changing beauty.

Opening reception and “Meet the Artist” on Saturday, Sept. 17, at 5 to 8 p.m. Show continues Sunday, Sept. 18,  at 12-3 p.m.   Refreshments, live music and free parking. For more information, please contact Sorrel Devine at eirehead1@gmail.com

Llewellyn King: The thrill of getting a human on the line; the ‘service economy’ is a giant con

Telephone operator circa 1900.

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

Something wonderful happened to me this week. I spoke on the telephone to a human being at a credit-card company. Well, not immediately. That would be too much to expect.

I had to go through some of the hoops of the company’s automated phone system, beginning with (as it always seems to) “Listen carefully because our menu has changed.”

And, of course, I had to enter the card number, the PIN, the last four digits of my Social Security number and my maternal grandmother’s name, and learn that for quality purposes my rising frustration was being recorded.

I explained repeatedly to the recording what I needed. It wasn’t having any of it. If it was a sample of artificial intelligence, it was acting more like artificial stupidity.

Finally, the AI device decided that stupid people – me -- weren’t worthy of its recorded messages and transferred me to a “representative.” Banks, credit- card companies, and insurance offices don’t have people; they have “representatives.”

This representative was smiley-voiced and delightful. She also was human. After 20 awful minutes of hearing a recorded voice (“How can I help you? I did not get that. Push 7.”), here was someone who really wanted to help. Hallelujah!

Try talking to a live person, you will like it. It is wonderful. She told me about the weather where she was, San Antonio, and we had a whale of a time doing something that I forgot people can do with a telephone: small talk. In a trice, she took care of my need.

I am a regular panelist on a weekly Texas State University webinar. A super-smart man, a polymath, suggested there that my problem for not reveling in the new isolation -- working from home, talking to machines, sending texts, rather than speaking on the telephone and emailing -- may be generational. This I take to be a nice way of saying that if people had sell-by dates, I am past mine.

The implication is that there is a superior place where the digital people do digital things, and pity those of us who do not do digital things, like eat, drink, fall in love. No less a person than the actor Meryl Streep said, “Everything that truly makes us happy is quite simple: love, sex and food.” If she likes talking, too, I will award her my personal Oscar. Another endearing Meryl quote is, “Instant gratification is not fast enough,”

There is one place where computers have not infringed on the old way of doing things: The U.S. Department of State. I believe that they are still looking up things in giant ledgers and writing by hand on parchment.

I say this because if you, dear citizen, wish to get a passport renewed, the expedited route at your local passport office takes five to seven weeks. I am waiting in apprehension for my renewal, having paid $200 for the super-slow “expedited service.”

You can get a replacement Social Security card in moments, a driver’s license immediately, but the State Department will have none of that.

Oddly, passports are issued to all except those with unpaid child support or outstanding criminal warrants. There are more reasons to deny a driver’s license than a passport. But the wheels at the State Department grind extremely slowly, and time isn't an issue.

The service economy has been a giant con, dreamed up by MBAs to keep customers at a distance or to dehumanize them so that they forget that they pay for the abuse they receive, whether it is from the passport office or some financial institution.

I frequent one gas station, in Scituate, R.I., where they still pump your gas. Night and day, there are lines of motorists waiting for fill-ups, and to have a few cheery words with the pump jockeys. Human contact, real service, seems to be worth a few cents more a gallon.

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com, and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

Hope Dam on the Pawtuxet River in Scituate

Llewellyn King: Why I love America but fear its political decay and paralysis

Fourth of July fireworks in America's easternmost town, Lubec, Maine, population 1,300. Canada is across the channel to the right.

— Photo by it'sOnlyMakeBelieve

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

Martin Walker, the gifted former Washington correspondent of The Guardian, used to start his speeches by saying that the Fourth of July wasn’t a time for sorrow for him because it was a time when good British yeomen farmers in the American colonies revolted against a German king and his German mercenaries.

Walker — who now lives in France and writes the hugely successful “Bruno” detective books set in the Perigord region — once told me, “It’s exciting living in a country where the president can order up an aircraft carrier to settle a dispute.”

He, an Englishman, and I, a former British colonial (from Zimbabwe) who moved here in 1963, shared our admiration for the United States. For America’s birthday this year, I have counted some things I most like and admire about this country of endless experimentation. Also, alas, I admit that it is getting harder to feel as proud of it as I once did.

America, for me, has always embodied a special freedom: the freedom to try. The wonderful thing about it is that you can try a business, an idea, a way of living, or even a way of thinking. I read in The Waist-High Culture, the 1958 book by Thomas Griffith, that Europe was a “no” culture and the United States was a “yes” culture. So true.

In my first year here, I wrote to a family member in England, marveling at the size and scope of the American market. I wrote to her, “You could make a fortune here making glass beads, so long as they were good glass beads.” I still believe that.

The other great freedom, which I treasure, is that you can move across the country and start all over again. If you feel you have failed in New York, you can take a fresh sheet and try again in Chicago, Austin or San Francisco. You can have failed in marriage, in business, in a career, and in some very public way, but you can go on anew somewhere else.

You can’t do that in what are, in many ways, city-states — for example, in the way England is dominated by London and France by Paris. There is geographic freedom in the United States that has an exhilaration all its own.

I was intoxicated by America from the first. I didn’t dwell on the sins of the past, from the cruelty of the Puritans, the pioneers and the planters to the folly of Prohibition. When I arrived, I embraced all that was in the present; the civil-rights movement was underway and gathering strength, and it was possible to believe that the United States would continue to be the shining example of how you get it right, how you correct big and small errors, and how you let people prosper. John F. Kennedy was president, and it was a new day.

When I covered Congress, I was enchanted with it: the committee power centers, the indifference to party discipline, and a system where you really did need majority approval to get a law passed.

Overall, members of Congress were among the hardest-working (and some were the hardest-drinking) around. They sought to understand issues from atomic energy to cancer. Congress wasn’t perfect, but it aspired to get things right.

For many years, I participated in the Humbert Summer School — a think tank — in the west of Ireland. I used to enjoy talking up the presidential system as superior to the parliamentary one, where a simple majority can wreak havoc.

Now, alas, Congress is experiencing the evils of parliamentary government and none of the virtues, particularly swift legislating. Party discipline — as in the case of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, of California, shunning Rep. Liz Cheney, of Wyoming — has supplanted the old tolerance for differences within the party. It began with the 1994 Gingrich Revolution, abetted by the proliferation of single-point-of-view talk radio.

Like all unchecked decay, it has gotten worse.

America the Beautiful, I wish you a happy birthday. I thank you for your generosity over these decades, and I say sincerely, “Mind how you go.” The world needs your seeking to be fair and just, and full of possibility, not divided and rancorous, and a threat to yourself.

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. He’s based in Rhode Island and Washington.
 

The wet look

Sunny day flooding in Miami during a “king tide’’.

Coastal flooding in Marblehead, Mass., during Superstorm Sandy on Oct. 2012.

Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

The stuff below is a heavily edited version of some of the remarks I made in a talk a couple of weeks ago and seem to me particularly resonant as we head into summer coastal vacation season:

Most of us are in denial or oblivious when it comes to sea-level rise caused by global warming.  For example, Freddie Mac researchers have found that properties directly exposed to projected sea-level rise have generally gotten no price discount compared to those that aren’t, though that may be changing. And some states don’t require sellers to disclose past coastal floods affecting properties for sale. Politicians often try to block flood-plain designations because they naturally fear that they would depress real-estate values.

So the coast keeps getting more built up, including places that may be underwater in a few decades. It often seems that everyone wants to live along the water.

As the near-certainty of major sea-level rise becomes more integrated into the pricing calculations of the real-estate sector, some people of a certain age can get bargains on   property as long as they realize that the property they want to buy might be uninhabitable in 20 years. Younger people, however, should seek higher ground if they want to live near the ocean for a long time.

A tricky thing is that real estate can’t just be abandoned—it must pass from one owner to another. Some local governments’ coastal permits require owners to pay to remove their structures when the average sea level rises to a certain point. Absent such requirements, many local governments’ budgets may not be enough to pay for demolition or  the moving costs associated with inundation. There are some interesting liability issues here. 

What to do?

Administrative mitigation would include raising federal flood-insurance rates and more frequently updating flood-projection maps.  More localities can take stronger steps to ban or sharply limit new structures in flood-prone areas and/or order them removed from those areas. And, as implied above,  they should implement flood-experience-and-projection disclosure requirements in sales documents.

As for physical answers to thwarting the worst effects of sea-level rise, especially in urban areas, many experts believe that some form of the Dutch polder approach, which integrates hard stone, concrete or even metal infrastructure,  and soft nature-based infrastructure, along with dikes, drainage canals and pumps, may have to be applied in some low places, such as Miami and Boston’s Seaport District.  Barrington and Warren, R.I., look like polder country.

Polders are large land-and-water areas, with thick water-absorbent vegetation, surrounded by dikes, where the ground elevation is below mean sea level and engineers control the water table within the polder.

Just hardening the immediate shoreline, and especially beaches, with such structures as stone embankments to try to keep out the water won’t work well. That just makes the water push the sand elsewhere and can dramatically increase shoreline erosion.

On the other hand, creating so-called horizontal levees – with a marshy or other soft buffering area backed with a hard surface  -- can be a reasonable approach to reduce the impact of storms’ flooding on top of sea-level rise.

Certainly establishing marshes (and mangrove swamps in tropical and semi-tropical coastal communities) can reduce tidal flooding and the damage from storm waves, but that may be a political nonstarter in some fancy coastal summer- or winter-resort places. Then there’s putting more houses and even stores and other nonresidential buildings on stilts, though that often means keeping buildings where safety considerations would suggest that there shouldn’t be any structures,  such as on many barrier beaches.  Still, it would be amusing to see entire large towns on stilts. Good water views.

Oyster and other shellfish beds can be developed as (partly edible!) breakwaters. And laying down permeable road and parking lot pavements can help sop up the water that pours onto the land. I got interested in how shellfish beds can act as a brake on flood damage while editing a book about Maine aquaculture last year. Of course, the hilly coast of Maine provides many more opportunities to enjoy a water view even with sea-level rise while staying dry than does, say, South County’s barrier beaches.

In more and more places where sea-level rise has caused increasing ‘’sunny day flooding’’  -- i.e., without storms  -- streets are being raised.

I’m afraid that, barring, say, a volcanic eruption that rapidly cools the earth, slowing the sea-level rise, the fact is that we’ll have to simply abandon much of our thickly developed immediate coastline and move our structures to higher ground.

Working-waterfront enterprises  -- e.g., fishing and shipping -- must stay as close to the water as possible. But many houses, condos, hotels, resorts and so on can and should be moved in the next few years. If they don’t have to be on a low-lying shoreline, they shouldn’t be there as sea level rises. For that matter, entire large communities may have to be entirely abandoned to the sea even in the lifetime of some people here.

Coastal communities and property owners face hard choices: whether to try to hold back the rising ocean or to move to higher ground. Nothing can prevent this situation from being expensive and disruptive.

Common sense would suggest that we not build where it floods and that we should stop recycling flooded properties.  Again, flood risks should be fully disclosed and we need to protect or restore ecologies, such as marshes, shellfish and coral reefs and dune grass, that reduce flooding and coastal erosion.

Nature wins in the end.

Plastic Providence

This work by Rhode Island artist Jim Bush can be seen at the Providence Art Club March 6-25.

Here’s his description of his background:

“Jim Bush grew up in Cambridge, Mass., and graduated from Kenyon College with a double major in Studio Art and Political Science. He is an award-winning artist, member of the Providence Art Club and a former member of the Sakonnet Artists Cooperative, in Tiverton, R.I. His editorial cartoons appeared in The Providence Journal from 1994-2012. Nationally his cartoons have appeared in the Washington Post National Weekly Edition, The Dallas Morning News and he has drawn for the Tribune Media Services College Press Syndicate.

“In 2007, Jim purchased a building in the historic district of downtown Warren, R.I. and spent a year converting it into an art studio and gallery.  Jim focuses now on his fine art painting, primarily acrylic and watercolor.  He enjoys painting animals, seascapes, landscapes, farm scenes, architecture -- life around him.  His style continues to reflect his cartooning foundation, often displaying his subjects in a light-hearted and off-beat way.’’

Video: 'Satanic mills' in two 'green and pleasant' lands

Arlington Mills, Lawrence, Mass., in 1907

A view of the Berkshires from near North Adams, Mass.

— Photo by jbcurio

Below is a local version of the weird, haunting English poem by William Blake called “Jerusalem,’’ written about 1804. It has long been best known as the hymn of the same name, with music written by Sir Hubert Parry, in 1916. (Remember the movie Chariots of Fire?)

Timmy May, of Newport, R.I., came up with the idea of inserting "New" before “England’’ in the three places where “England” appears in the original Blake poem.

The Industrial Revolution brought many, many “dark satanic mills,’’ first to England and then to its offspring.

Mr. May is on the left in the video below. The other musicians are Jamie Lawton, on violin, and Gregory Jonic, on uilleann pipes.

Hit this video link.

Caitlin Faulds: Trying to save a drowning coastal marsh

Wenley Ferguson, of Save the Bay, and many others have spent more than five years trying to save the drowning Sapowet Marsh, in Tiverton. R.I. marsh.

— Photo by Caitlin Faulds/ecoRI News)

Common reed (Phragmites australis) is an invasive species in degraded marshes in the Northeast.

Salt marsh during low tide, mean low tide, high tide and very high tide (spring tide).

From ecoRI News (ecori.org)

TIVERTON, R.I.

The grasses are dying. Clusters of broken, denuded stems stand in shallow pools of brackish water, making a patchwork of the low-lying marshlands.

The slow balding is invisible from the blacktop of Seapowet Avenue, hidden behind a thick curtain of phragmites. But standing boot-deep in the peat, surrounded by the sulfuric scent of decomposition, the bare ground is clear evidence of the steady saltwater creep happening in marshes across Rhode Island.

Spartina alterniflora, or smooth cordgrass, is notoriously salt-tolerant and a common feature in saltwater marsh environments.

“They can grow along the edge of the cove and get flooded twice a day, but they can’t grow in standing water,” said Wenley Ferguson, shovel in hand. All around, the sunlight glints off pools of standing water, unable to drain and slowly growing with each high tide.

The average sea level in Rhode Island has increased by about a foot since 1929. Storm surges and king tides have pushed further and further inland. Normally, the marsh would respond to the rising high-water line by matching the migration inland.

But with the sea on one side and a dense web of roads, development, cultivated fields, and invasive species on the other — and accelerated sea-level rise on its way — Sapowet Marsh has nowhere to move.

But Ferguson, the director of habitat restoration at Save The Bay, is working to save the marsh from that saltwater grave.

Ferguson has been working with the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management (DEM) at the Sapowet Marsh Wildlife Management Area, a 260-acre state property, for more than five years now.

The coastal edge of Sapowet has seen more than 90 feet of shoreline erosion in the past 75 years. Under Ferguson’s watch, Sapowet has become home to the largest marsh migration facilitation project in the state — a small counter to the forces at play.

“When I say facilitate marsh migration,” she said, “it’s kind of like prepping the land for the marsh to migrate.”

Back in 2017 and 2018, Save The Bay and DEM, along with the Tiverton Conservation Commission, restored 9 acres of coastal grassland and reestablished beachside dunes on the northern side of the marsh to slow erosion.

Now the work has moved to the west and southeast sides of the marsh — and the strategy has changed to match.

Along the western front
The cordgrass roots are taut, but they cut easy. Just one stomp and the shovel sinks through the muck, water pooling up and over the toes of Ferguson’s black rubber boots.

It was a warm and clear November day — too warm, according to Ferguson. She packed for a cool fall day and wore a blue-flowered fleece, but 60 degrees means she’ll be sweating by midday.

Earlier in the week, Ferguson — along with a handful of DEM employees and volunteers — used shovels and a small excavator to dig a weaving network of runnels through the marsh. These shallow creeks will give the pooling water a route out to Narragansett Bay, allowing the area to slowly drain.

If the root zone of the marsh plants is able to dry even slightly, they will grow “healthy and happy,” Ferguson said. Healthy plants build up a stronger root base, and a stronger root base makes a coastline more resilient to erosion and sea-level rise.

But “we don’t want to drain it too fast,” she said. It has been three days since they dug the first runnels and the water level has dropped only slightly, exposing a few inches of bare mud — exactly as planned.

The standing water is thick with unconsolidated sediments and topped by a bacterial mat. If the water rushes out all at once, this sediment will pour into the bay. It’s better to dig in phases and let it settle out in the marsh, maintaining as much high ground as possible.

They are back on this day to adjust the runnels, excavating the areas where the muck has naturally dammed up. Lucianna Faraone Coccia, a Save The Bay volunteer and an environmental science master’s student at the University of Rhode Island, shovels out a cluster of grass roots.

“If that’s in there, it could plug up this whole runnel,” said Faraone Coccia, glancing down to point out a fiddler crab fumbling its way along the channel with its unbalanced claws.

With each shovel-full, the flow of water grows incrementally stronger and piles of dislodged peat beside the runnels grow larger.

“That’s technically considered fill,” said Ferguson, tossing another glob of peat toward the pile beside her. “We actually leave the peat on the marsh and we create these small little islands.”

These islands are about a chunk of peat thick —some 6-12 inches, not too high, Ferguson said — but that small elevation rise “is like a mountain in a marsh.”

Ferguson fought to keep the peat in the marsh, acquiring additional permits from the Coastal Resources Management Council, DEM’s Office of Water Resources, and the Army Corps of Engineers. This microtopography is essential for a healthy marsh surface, she said.

“These areas will just be a little higher, and they might recolonize,” Ferguson said. “And when I say might — they do recolonize.”

Within one season, the islands will host new sprouts of cordgrass, or they’ll prove high and dry enough to support clusters of high marsh grasses. The clusters of high grass will make ideal nesting habitat for the saltmarsh sparrow.

As healthy salt marsh has waned, so has the population of the saltmarsh sparrow — a bird that makes its nest out of a cup of dense high marsh grasses. The nests are built to withstand the highest moon tides, created with a dome so “the eggs float, but they don’t float out of the nest,” Ferguson said. But the area here is flooding too frequently, contributing to nest failure.

“That’s why these little islands that we’re creating are really valuable habitat,” Ferguson said.

Wenley Ferguson is constantly looking for clues to what shaped the marsh seen today.

Old ways and leftover lines
The state of marshes today are the result of centuries of human development and marshland intervention. According to Ferguson, nearly every marsh in the country holds some sort of historical impact. They are in no way pristine.

“So many of them were manipulated in this area for agricultural activity. And then in more recent years, we put roads along them,” Ferguson said. “We culverted them. We created duck habitat and impounded them. We filled them.”

From the 1700s to the 1900s, about 50 percent of marshes in the region were filled, according to Ferguson. Agricultural embankments have manipulated the marsh surface too, dating back to about the 1600s, when people started haying in these areas.

“The fresher the marsh grasses, the fresher the water table, the greater the value of the hay,” she said.

When she digs these runnels, Ferguson is always scouting for clues to what shaped the marsh seen today. A shovel full of root matter means a stagnant pool was once a field. Water pooling along straight lines could be a sign of an old embankment. Long straight trenches are likely remnants of old mosquito ditches — once made to reduce mosquito breeding grounds but now speeding marshland erosion.

The marsh’s tired past — coupled with its location in an old river valley whose steep sides make marsh migration difficult — spell out a challenging future.

“That’s why what we’re doing today is trying to restore some health of the marsh … under current conditions,” Ferguson said, “but always looking at where the marsh wants to go.”

An excavator heads into a thicket of phragmites growing on the eastern edge of Sapowet Marsh.

The eastern blockade
“Be careful of your eyes walking through this,” said John Veale, habitat biologist with DEM’s Division of Fish and Wildlife, as he pushed away the sharp corners of dozens of broken phragmites. “It can be a little bit dangerous.”

In the past century, invasive phragmites species — few native phragmites remain — have taken advantage of weakened saltwater marsh ecosystems to rampage through North American. The eastern edge of Sapowet Marsh, tucked below Old Main Road and several DEM-owned cornfields, is no different.

In many ways, phragmites are the perfect storm. Their feathery seed heads catch the light beautifully, but they also catch the wind and spread like wildfire. Once the seeds take hold, the reeds grow so densely they all but eliminate animal habitat and outcompete native grasses.

On Sapowet Marsh, it serves as an impenetrable blockade to marsh migration. Only a few grapevines are brave enough to reach their tendrils into the thicket. For the marsh to move away from the encroaching seawater, the phragmites need to loosen their hold. But that’s a notoriously difficult task.

“There’s no way we could do it with a shovel,” Ferguson said. “I mean, it’s just so hard. It’s one thing a little patch of phragmites. It’s another thing when it’s head-high.”

Mowing and burning do little to control phragmites, and pulling them out by the roots quickly proves costly. But like the smooth cordgrass, it is vulnerable to salt water. If Ferguson can drain the pooling fresh water and facilitate tidal flow up into the phragmites, they might dissipate — and the native grasses might have a chance at survival.

“We’re not going to get rid of the phragmites, but we can reduce the height and vigor of the phrag by facilitating that freshwater drainage,” she said.

Ferguson is in the early stages of battle on this front, just figuring out the plan. The phragmites grow 10-12 feet high in places, obscuring the lay of the land.

“There’s enough water,” Ferguson said. “It’s coming from someplace. I just can’t figure out the drainage cause it’s too thick.”

She has called in the help of an excavator. Within a few hours, the machine has established a clearing in the reeds and deepened part of a natural creek. Once some of the standing fresh water drains it will be easier to gauge the direction of the water flow.

Ferguson and her team intend to elongate the creek and the old agricultural ditches — putting past mistakes to better use — but for now the plan is still in development. Better to move slowly than be patching more mistakes up in a hundred years.

“The deterioration along the marsh edge is pretty remarkable, in a terrifying sort of way in my mind,” said Ferguson, pausing to point out a flock of buffleheads skimming into the water. “So that’s why we want to be really cautious on not making new openings for that erosion to expand upon.”

Caitlin Faulds is an ecoRI News journalist.

Warren Getler: This most uncertain winter

Luce Hall (1884) at the U.S. Naval War College, in Newport, R.I. The institution is a center of the U.S. military’s war-gaming work.

—U.S. Navy photo by Jaima Fogg

Ukrainian troops in the threatened country’s Donbas region. Russia has been massively increasing its troop strength nearby in what some observers fear is a precursor to an all-out invasion.

America faces its most challenging year-end since its formal entry into the Second World War, in December 1941.

While we have been internally grappling with COVID for nearly two years, dark clouds have gathered on the geopolitical map.

Russia is mobilizing some 175,000 troops on its border with Ukraine; China is flying repeated bomber test-runs near Taiwan; Iran is using its proxies to hit its Arab neighbors as well as Israel and U.S. bases in Iraq and Syria with drones and missiles. Russia and China are exhibiting their closest military collaboration – in joint-training exercises and bilateral arms sales – in decades. And both have signed military and economic pacts with Iran in recent years.

Will there be war, indeed, continental war, on several fronts?

The risk may be  greater than at any time since World War II.

Authoritarian rulers-for-life in Moscow and in Beijing are testing the waters. Specifically, they are testing the mettle of U.S. President Joe Biden and his first-year administration. They’re gauging a Biden preoccupied with internal debates around vaccination policies, inflation, crime, supply-chain bottlenecks and other largely domestic, massively time-consuming matters.

And they perceive vulnerability in the Oval Office – with Biden, who just turned 79, coming off a grueling multi-year presidential campaign against incumbent Donald Trump and then seeing his approval ratings drop for months. What’s more, they sense a country deeply divided -- an American superpower at growing risk of civil unrest.

Are these  Russian and Chinese military maneuvers   mere provocations, mere signals of what could happen if  the West challenges their geopolitical  ambitions?

Or are these up-tempo deployments by Russia’s Putin and China’s Xi meant merely for domestic Russian and Chinese consumption? Possibly not.

This time, the activity around such large-scale mobilizations appears alarmingly furtive, and therefore open to wide interpretation, particularly regarding Moscow’s intentions toward Ukraine. These maneuvers (including rumors of a planned assault on eastern Ukraine in late January or early February) may invite retaliation and potential “miscalculations” by both sides. Putin and Xi may not appreciate the seriousness of  possible "kinetic" responses by NATO allies and our friends in Asia. Israel, meanwhile, uncertain of backing from Washington, is leaning toward taking things into its own hands to stop -- with direct military action from the air -- a nuclear-armed Iran from emerging.

America, as the world’s leading democracy, is slow to anger, which is a good thing. Yet we are also at times too slow in  confronting harsh realities beyond our borders. As a nation, we must focus on the  large-scale  threat scenarios developing in Europe, East Asia and the Middle East…with level-headed coolness and  a serious, sustained focus.

John F. Kennedy, in his Harvard thesis-turned book, Why England Slept, pointed out the danger of Britain ignoring for too long Nazi Germany’s growing war machine and the bellicosity of its totalitarian dictator, Adolf Hitler.

“We can't escape the fact that democracy in America, like democracy in England, has been asleep at the switch. If we had not been surrounded by oceans three and five thousand miles wide, we ourselves might be caving in at some Munich of the Western World,” writes Kennedy, the then 22-year-old future president of the United States.

“To say that democracy has been awakened by the events of the last few weeks is not enough. Any person will awaken when the house is burning down. What we need is an armed guard that will wake up when the fire first starts, or, better yet, one that will not permit a fire to start at all. We should profit by the lesson of England and make our democracy work. We must make it work right now. Any system of government will work when everything is going well. It's the system that functions in the pinches that survives.” 

To prevent  tipping into something recalling the 1939-45 cataclysm, we must show resolve – an unquestioned firmness that lets our real and potential adversaries know that we stand united --  at home and  with our key allies abroad. Such resolve deters dangerous opportunism among our foes,   setting up a bulwark against a lurch into regional war, indeed, into seemingly unthinkable inter-continental war below the nuclear threshold.

We must recognize that both China and Russia have been developing advanced missile systems – notably conventional-use hypersonic weapons – that could put us at risk in the same manner (or more at risk) as the surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. Back then, at least, we could surge into a mass production of armaments as never-before seen; today, given supply-chain restrictions and other factors, such an achievement would  perhaps be less certain after any potentially devastating attack on our military bases, ports and other critical infrastructure.

Lest we forget, while Britain slept in those years before the outbreak of WWII, Germany was able to secretly develop its , first-of-their-kind V-2 rockets  that would eventually rain down on London and cause widespread damage and terror. Today, Pentagon chiefs are repeatedly sounding the alarm about the yawning gap in U.S. vs. Chinese/Russian advanced hypersonic-missile capabilities, not to mention recently demonstrated Russian capabilities of destroying satellites in orbit with missiles fired from its territory.

To its credit, the Biden administration is slowly but surely turning its strategic military assessments and its inner-circle Pentagon planning toward our  China challenge, thus pivoting away from the “forever wars” of Afghanistan, Iraq and, going further back, Vietnam. And, just last week, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken had this to say about the massive Russian troop buildup, including more than 1,000 tanks, on the border of Ukraine. “We don’t know whether President Putin has made the decision to invade. We do know that he’s putting in place the capacity to do so in short order should he so decide.” 

As we approach the 80th anniversary of Pearl Harbor this week -- not to mention the 250th anniversary as a nation in less than five years -- America cannot afford to be ill-prepared for tectonic convulsions on the geopolitical landscape. We can not, as a society, spend too much time navel-gazing or being preoccupied with the likes of the latest crazes on Instagram, Tik-Tok or the Metaverse.

These times demand extraordinary leadership, no matter the internal challenges and pre-occupations of the world’s greatest democracy. As Americans, we will be roundly tested during this most uncertain winter -- and not merely by inflationary pressures or a new surge of the Delta and Omicron COVID-19 variants, which are eroding the fabric of civil society both here and abroad. 

Warren Getler, based in Washington, D.C., writes on international affairs. He’s a former journalist with Foreign Affairs Magazine,  International Herald Tribune, The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News. His two sons serve in the U.S. military.

Llewellyn King: Today’s lessons from the 1970’s energy crises

During the 1973-74 part of the 1970’s oil crisis.

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

I’ve been here before. I’ve heard this din at another time. I’m writing about the cacophony of opinions about global warming and climate change.

In the winter of 1973, the Arab oil embargo unleashed a global energy crisis. Times were grim. The predictions were grimmer: We’d never again lead the lives we had led -- energy shortage would be the permanent lot of the world.

The Economist said the Saudi Arabian oil minister, Sheik Ahmad Zaki Yamani, was the most important man in the world. It was right: Saudi Arabia sat on the world’s largest proven oil reserves.

Then as now, everyone had an answer. The 1974 World Energy Congress in Detroit, organized by the U.S. Energy Association, and addressed by President Gerald Ford, was the equivalent in its day to COP26, the UN Climate Change Conference which has just concluded in Glasgow, Scotland.

Everyone had an answer, instant expertise flowered. The Aspen Institute, at one of its meetings, held in Maryland instead of Colorado to save energy, contemplated how the United States would survive with a negative growth rate of 23 percent. Civilization, as we had known it, was going to fail. Sound familiar?

The finger-pointing was on an industrial scale: Motor City was to blame and the oil companies were to blame; they had misled us. The government was to blame in every way.

Conspiracy theories abounded. Ralph Nader told me that there was plenty of energy, and the oil companies knew where it was. Many believed that there were phantom tankers offshore, waiting for the price to rise.

Across America, there were lines at gasoline stations. London was on a three-day work week with candles and lanterns in shops.

In February 1973, I had started what became The Energy Daily and was in the thick of it: the madness, the panic -- and the solutions.

What we were faced with back then was what appeared to be a limited resource base that the world was burning up at a frightening rate. Oil would run out and natural gas, we were told, was already a depleted resource. Finished.

The energy crisis was real, but so was the nonsense -- limitless, in fact.

It took two decades, but economic incentive in the form of new oil drilling, especially in the southern hemisphere, good policy, like deregulating natural gas, and technology, much of it coming from the national laboratories, unleashed an era of plenty. The big breakthrough was horizontal drilling which led to fracking and abundance.

I suspect if we can get it right, a similar combination of good economics, sound policy, and technology will deliver us and the world from the impending climate disaster.

The beginning isn’t auspicious, but neither was it back in the energy crisis. The Department of Energy is going through what I think of as scattering fairy dust on every supplicant who says he or she can help. On Nov. 1, DOE issued a press release which pretty well explains fairy dusting: a little money to a lot of entities, from great industrial companies to universities. Never enough money to really do anything, but enough to keep the beavers beavering. 

That isn’t the way out.

The way out, based on what we have on the drawing board today, is for the government to get behind a few options. These are storage, which would make wind and solar more useful; capture and storage of carbon released during combustion; and a robust turn to nuclear power.

All this would come together efficiently and quickly with a no-exceptions carbon tax. Republicans will diss this tax, but it is the equitable thing to do.

Nuclear power deserves a caveat. It is unique in its relation to the government, which should acknowledge this and act accordingly.

The government is responsible for nuclear safety, nonproliferation, and waste disposal. It might as well have the vendors build a series of reactors at government sites, sell the power to the electric utilities, and eventually transfer plant ownership to them.

The government has some things that it alone is able to do. Reviving nuclear power is one.

The energy crisis was solved because it had to be solved. The climate- change crisis, too, must be solved.

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com and he’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

Llewellyn King: Nuclear power, a victim of an ignorant left-wing assault, urgently needs to be expanded to fight global warming

The Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant, in Seabrook, N.H.

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

If the Biden administration genuinely wanted to get serious about weaning the electric-power sector from fossil fuels, it would get serious about nuclear — not just patting it on the head, as it is doing with the government equivalent of “There, there, baby.”

Nuclear was an early victim of the culture wars that started in the late 1960s, and it remains so to this day.

It is incredible that a source of power, a cutting-edge technology, should have been sidelined for more than 50 years because of fear, suspicion, ignorance and politics.

In the late 1960s, nuclear power became the target of an environmental and political left lash-up. It became part of the environmentalist catechism that nuclear was an evil source of power and must be expunged from the national list of options. The political left didn’t so much as embrace environmentalism as environmentalism embraced the left.

Some environmentalists have had an epiphany, such as the Union of Concerned Scientists, which was founded by Henry Kendall, an activist whom I knew well. We were friends who didn’t agree about nuclear. Now the Union of Concerned Scientists is pro-nuclear, but it was at the barricades against nuclear for decades.

It isn’t that the environmental movement doesn’t want to do the right thing. It does. But it has thought that it alone should decide what was right and good for the environment, and often it has been totally wrong.

The environmental movement turned the nation from nuclear to coal. In the 1970s and 1980s, environmental groups advocated for fluidized bed combustion coal plants. I remember them saying that coal eliminated the need for “dangerous nuclear.” I sat through innumerable meetings and had sparing friendships with such anti-nuclear activists as Ralph Nader and Amory Lovins.

All presidents have said they favor nuclear power, even Jimmy Carter, who was the most reluctant and did huge damage to the United States’ position as the world leader in nuclear energy and technology. Carter wouldn’t say he was opposed to nuclear, but he did talk about it as a last resort and stopped the plans to build a fast-breeder reactor. He also ended nuclear reprocessing, necessitating the disposal of whole nuclear cores, instead of capturing the mass of unburned fuel — thus creating a much larger waste disposal challenge, as well as the need to mine more uranium.

If you believe — and I do — what was said at the COP26 summit in Glasgow, Scotland, now is the time to fix the electric-power industry. It can be fixed by building up nuclear capacity so that electricity can be the go-to, clean fuel of the future. It could replace fossil fuels in everything from cement making to steel production to heating buildings. That potential, that future, is awesome and possible.

Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm should ask her national laboratories to make recommendations on a nuclear-power future, not to the detriment of wind and solar power, but embracing them.

Wind power is valuable. But depending on it is a little like having a trick knee: You never know when it is going to go out on you.

Europe has just learned that lesson the hard way. It is in the grip of a major energy crisis with electricity prices quadrupling and natural gas prices headed into the stratosphere as winter approaches. One of the causes of this crisis is that wind speeds through the summer fell to their lowest recorded levels in 60 years, with a total wind drought in the normally gale-wracked North Sea.

We won’t get to a carbon-free future unless we have a robust, committed plan to deploy state-of-the-art nuclear plants across the country. We built them in the 1960s and into the 1970s – 100 of them.

Granholm needs to declare a purpose and to pick the proven winner. It is nuclear, and it has been gravely wounded in the culture wars. She needs to rescue it – with word and deed.

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. He’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

On Twitter: @llewellynking2

Llewellyn King: Using school buses, etc., to store energy in the new electricity revolution

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

Carbon-free electricity isn’t a final destination – it is merely a stop along the road to a time when electricity becomes the clean fuel of choice and reduces pollution in buildings, cement and steel production, transportation and other places and industries.

That is the glorious future that Arshad Mansoor, president and CEO of the Electric Power Research Institute, sees. He revealed his vision on White House Chronicle, the weekly news and public-affairs program on PBS, which I host, on his way to the COP26 summit in Glasgow, Scotland.

Mansoor, who talks about the future with an infectious fervor, was joined on the broadcast by Clinton Vince, chairman of the U.S. Energy Practice at Dentons, the globe-circling law firm, and Robert Schwartz, president of Anterix, a Woodland Park, N.J.-based firm that is helping utilities move into the digital future with private broadband networks.

Mansoor outlined a trajectory in which electric utilities must invest substantially in the near future to deal with severe weather and decarbonization. For example, he said, some power lines must be put underground and many must be tested for much higher wind speeds than were envisaged when they were installed. Some coastal power lines must be raised, he said.

While driving toward a carbon-free future, Mansoor cautioned against utilities going so fast into renewables the nation ignores the ongoing carbon-reduction programs of other industries. Further, if utilities can’t meet the electricity demands of transportation or manufacturing, these industries will turn away from the electric solution.

“Overall, we looked at the numbers and they showed a huge national role in decarbonization for the electric utility industry,” Mansoor said. However, the transition is fraught. It must be managed, sometimes using more gas until the system can be totally weaned from fossil fuels, he said. An orderly transition is vital.

Clinton Vince said the electric utility world has experienced a lot of volatility from severe weather, due to climate change, to the Covid-19 pandemic, and cyber-intrusions. “If I were to boil down to one word what is vital for utilities, it would be ‘resilience.’ ”

Resilience is an ongoing utility goal: It is the ability of a single utility or a group of utilities to bounce back from adversity, often by restoring power quickly. Anterix’s Robert Schwartz said that with his company’s private broadband networks and the deployment of enough sensors, a utility could identify a power line break in 1.4 seconds, before it hits the ground.

One of the most exciting and revolutionary aspects of Mansoor’s thinking is that the consumer will become a partner in the electric utility future. They will join the ecosystem by providing load-management assistance through smart meters, now installed in 60 percent of homes.

Mansoor thinks that the nation’s 480,000 school buses, if electrified, along with private electric vehicles, can be used to store energy. This answers the concern many utility executives have about storage and the concern that a tsunami of electric vehicles will overpower electric supply in the coming decade.

I think the utilities should plan right now for the integration of electric vehicles into their systems. They should offer electric vehicle owners financial incentives for plugging in and sending their stored power to the grid.

Likewise, the utilities should provide rate incentives for off-peak electric vehicle charging. They could do worse than look at the algorithms that have made Uber and Lyft possible, unlocking value in the personal car.

The utilities could devise a flexible system whereby they pay for power when needed and give a price break for charging during off-peak hours, or when there is a surfeit of renewable energy. That is the kind of data flow that will mark the utilities going forward and stimulate demand for private broadband networks.

We, the consumers, will be partners in the electric future, managing our own uses and supporting the grid with our electric cars and trucks. That is Mansoor’s achievable vision.

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. He’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

On Twitter: @llewellynking2

White House Chronicle

A very comfortable faith

The superyacht Azzam, which from 2013 to 2019 was the largest private yacht in the world.

For N.T.
The path to joy is faith in God,
The young man told his friend.
His joy was plain upon his face;
He hoped not to offend.
All night they talked, and on the morn,
When day dawned bright and hot,
He shook her hand and wished her well
And set out on his yacht.

By Felicia Nimue Ackerman, a poet and a Brown University philosophy professor. This poem is slightly revised from one that ran in Free Inquiry.

Harbour Court, the Newport, R.I. headquarters of the hyper-exclusive New York Yacht Club