Llewellyn King: Microgrids offer community solution to electricity challenge

A typical scheme of a microgrid with renewable-energy resources in grid-connected mode.

—Graphic by Le Anh Dao

See this about microgrids in Massachusetts.And this. And in Rhode Island.

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

You may have heard of microgrids in passing, maybe at a town meeting or when the future of your electricity supply is under discussion. Mostly, they aren’t headliners like data centers.

But microgrids are becoming an important part of the future electric infrastructure. They provide a valve to release some of the pressure building for more electricity supply for data centers and transportation.

Burns & McDonnell, an architecture, engineering and construction firm, figures that by 2030, 50 percent of in-city deliveries will be made with electric vehicles of all types, and these will have to be charged daily.

There are about 700 microgrids operating in the United States, and over 7,000 are planned or under construction. While they got off to something of a slow start, they are now going full-speed ahead.

Originally, microgrids were seen as appropriate for military bases, college campuses, and other uses where there was a defense or social purpose, or in remote locations far from the grid.

Utilities were cool or actively hostile to them — although it can be argued that the first microgrid was established by Thomas Edison in Manhattan.

One utility executive said to me four years ago, “What is it about ‘micro’ that the promoters don’t understand?” Now utilities are beginning to embrace microgrids as part of the solution, not a raid on their customer base.

A microgrid, as explained by the futurist-entrepreneur Chase Weir, CEO of Distributed Sun and its spinoff truCurrent, is a way of bringing “kilowatt-hour liquidity” to the electric sector, smoothing out the periods when demand meets maximum capacity, often beginning as the sun sets.

It is a self-contained electric generation and localized distribution entity, using storage, renewables and, at times, traditional generation to create a grid that can operate either independently of the national grid or be connected to it. It is usually separated from but linked to a utility.

Oisin O’Brien, senior director of commercial solutions at truCurrrent, walked me through the dynamics of a microgrid that the company is building for a large food distribution company in Northern California.

Its assignment was to develop a charging station for 30 Daimler electric-tractor trailers used for food distribution. The challenge: To provide 2 megawatts of power for charging the Class 8 trucks during largely off-peak hours. Each truck has a 200-mile range on a single charge, and must be charged daily.

On this project, O’Brien explained, truCurrent is working closely with the local utility, PG&E. “We were able to harness the utility’s flexible service program,” he said.

The full power plant — which is awaiting permission to operate from PG&E — will team 800 kilowatts of solar power with battery storage to create a contained system. 

Currently, solar collectors are being installed on the facility’s roof, but two dozen of the company’s trucks are already using the charging points in the parking lot. The 180 kilovolt (which equals 1,ooo volts) fast-chargers can fully recharge a truck in three to four hours. 

This first-of-a-kind pilot is remarkable in that it has brought “speed to power,” going from contracting to charging in 13 months. It meets the food distribution company’s need for charging when they need to do so, brings resilient backup and load flexibility, and provides a price hedge at a time of record-high diesel prices.

“Our solutions are only becoming more valuable as cost, reliability and power availability worsens,” said Weir.

According to O’Brien, truCurrent has plans to deploy microgrids across the nation, utilizing a system of turnkey installations where the infrastructure is owned and operated by the local company or the community, but the planning, procurement and installation is provided by truCurrent.

“This project was driven by regulatory pressures in California, the company’s sustainability targets, and the increasing economic benefits with updated analysis, showing lower operating costs for electric fleets compared to diesel [pre-Iran war calculations],” O’Brien said.

The truCurrent project is for transportation usage, but there is a growing demand for microgrid deployment in suburbs, and even in apartment complexes. 

It is an example of Weir’s vision for the electrical grid of the future which, in addition to liquidity and speed, must be designed for abundance and affordability.

The project “turned every challenge into an advantage for the developer, the customer, the utility and capital markets,” Weir said. 

Shared prosperity with a microgrid: What’s not to like

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

Llewellyn King: In the collision between billionaires and news coverage, the public loses

“Big Fish Eat Little Fish,” by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1556)

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

Trillions, as in trillions of dollars, are being bandied about in the way millions were, then billions. But take a look at 1 trillion expressed numerically: 1,ooo,ooo,ooo,ooo. Awesome, isn’t it? Twelve zeros.

The national debt stands at $39 trillion and the interest on that will top $1 trillion this year.

Very soon the first trillionaire will thunder past the post, presumably Elon Musk. 

I have nothing against Musk. And I have nothing against successful people being rewarded for their talent.

Musk has done enormous things. An immigrant from South Africa, he made his first fortune with PayPal. Since then, he has been important in solar-energy revolution, electric cars, and in leading development of a heavy-lift rocket that has made space exploration cheaper than when NASA alone was at the controls. His Boring Company still holds promise.

It is assumed, as so often, that because a person is good at one thing, that same person must be good at everything else. Whoa! Musk’s limits as a manager and a visionary were exposed when he barged about “streamlining” the government for President Trump.

It was a case of a bridge-too-far for Musk — a disaster for America that eroded privacy, critically wounded many departments and saved no money.

Whereas much of what Musk has achieved has been beneficial, his purchase of Twitter, rebranded to X, was evidence of the harm that is a part of gigantic wealth. He wanted to control not just the medium, but also the news.

Musk — although it isn’t good that he has taken steps to control the message with X — isn't the problem facing the media and the public’s right to know. When there is so much money floating around, news-media freedom is in trouble.

The immediate threat comes not from Musk, but from two other men of gargantuan wealth: Larry Ellison, co-founder of the tech firm Oracle Corp., whose personal net worth is estimated at $245 billion, and his son, David. 

Together they are set to control the media to an extent not imagined and never seen. The media titans of yesteryear — Pulitzer, Hearst, Luce, Thompson, Sulzberger, Graham and Murdoch — are knee-high to the fearsome power that the Ellisons have, and which will more than double if (and it is more when than if) the merger of their Paramount Skydance Corp. with Warner Bros. Discovery is approved by regulators.

At present, the Ellisons control the CBS Television Network, CBS Sports, MTV, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, Paramount Network, and BET. They control CBS News, and Paramount+ which has 79 million streaming subscribers.

But if the merger goes through, they will control CNN, HBO Max, and Warner Bros. Studios — a treasure trove of entertainment.

In short, they will control a huge swath of American broadcast news, information dissemination, and movie and television culture. 

Their declared purpose is to incorporate more technology and more AI across their astounding current and probably future empire. That is bad for journalism and worse for movies. The invasion of the bots.

I know how media control works. I have seen it firsthand: It isn’t what is said, but what is implied or what employees feel those who own the outlet want. A casual remark can become policy; a hint of preference can become a hard rule.

If an Ellison family member were — of course, this is hypothetical — to say they hated rhubarb, you could bet the Food Network wouldn’t do a show episode on rhubarb pie making. If it were known that one of the owners of Paramount were boosters of nuclear power, movies such as The China Syndrome and Silkwood would never have been made.

In journalism, the story that isn’t covered is as important as the one that is covered. If a disease caused by a common product — asbestos is a good example — isn’t covered because the staff has heard that the media owners love that product or is invested in it, then you can bet it won’t be covered.

Consolidated corporate ownership is antithetical to free speech, creativity, and open government. No news is bad news. 

News isn’t suited to the corporate world; it isn’t a fit with those whose interest is adding zeros to bottom lines. It is the pursuit by an irregular army of often eccentric individuals, who turn over stones to find out what is beneath.

Likewise, individual ownership furthers the news objective, which for me was summed up by something Dan Raviv said when he was a correspondent for CBS Radio (recently shuttered by the Ellisons), “My job is simple. I try to find out what is going on and tell people.” Write that in the corporate prospectus.

News organizations need to be owned by news people, such as Ted Turner, Bill Paley and, yes, even Rupert Murdoch.

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.

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Llewellyn King: Three big challenges for new college grads in these crazy times

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

Dear Graduates of 2026,

Welcome to the world you will be taking jobs in and where you will begin building careers, and at times shaping history.

It isn’t the world of your parents, and it isn’t the world your college has taught you about, because it is changing too fast. It begins anew daily. As Maya Angelou said, “This is a wonderful day. I haven’t seen this one before.”

There are three big forces looming on the horizon that will shape your world and that you will play a role in shaping. They are technology, specifically AI; politics, the harsher politics of today; and the environment, which is eventually everything.

AI will have an effect that defies comprehension — it is so enormous. It is also evolving so fast that it keeps slipping out of your grasp.

“It is exponential, and human thinking is linear.” So said one of the foremost thinkers about AI, Omar Hatamleh, former head of AI at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. He has written five books on AI.

All that is absolutely, definitely and incontrovertibly known is that AI will affect everything. It will change how we work, play and learn. It will change how we mate, think and expect.

Graduates, you will come to realize that political action and speech have changed from what they were. Both are out of the guide rails that have served them well over time.

Authoritarianism has taken root in America, and it will be hard to pull out. The bureaucracy has been politicized. There has been an expansion of presidential power over areas constitutionally assigned to Congress, under the watch of an accommodating Supreme Court.

There are troops on American streets, political searches and seizures, arrests and indictments, and deportations without due process. All this was unleashed with the Republicans. When Democrats take power, will they put the evil genie of unconstitutional government back in its bottle?

Domestic politics has also changed our relations to the world — a world where America, Canada and Europe stood together, sharing a common heritage and a common view of law, and savoring a shared peace in Europe until Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, and set in motion four years of bloody fighting.

Could we have done more? Yes, more weapons, more money, and less acceptance of Putin. Maybe troops, too.

We didn’t, and that has changed the world. Free countries now know that America won’t axiomatically have their backs. That time is past and will have major geopolitical consequences.

Internationally, the big, open American hand has been closing as it has curtailed or ended participation in international institutions from NATO to the World Health Organization to the Paris climate agreement. The arbitrary closing of USAID was a declaration of withdrawal from the world and from the exercise of soft power as a diplomatic tool.

Another challenge for future Americans as they grow into adulthood: They will live in a more dangerous world with fewer friends. Hubris is an expensive luxury.

They may also not live in a world where the climate is as predictable as it once was. Already aberrant, unpredictable weather is the norm with hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and tinder-dry regions.

Politicians may deny that the climate is changing, but the evidence is there. Sea levels are rising, city streets are flooding, and beachfront homes are being swept away. Hurricanes and tornadoes, part of our usual weather cycle, are getting more severe. Drought and floods, recurring phenomena, are worsening.

Texas and the Southwest, which have long attracted working and retired residents, are facing prolonged droughts and water shortages that will curb future growth.

Dealing with the environment is a challenge that AI may meet quite dramatically. Its ability to predict, organize and find the exit in dense data is without peer.

Graduates, as the generation coming of age in 2026, you shouldn’t fear AI; rather, you should throw yourselves at it and learn what it can do for you. Gradually, it will be understood, regulated and you will come to terms with it as a tool, not an aggressor.

We have left you a messy world, but it was always that way.

Over two and a half centuries, America has absorbed and changed. Along the way — including civil war — it produced a society in which there is still opportunity; there is still freedom, although the door may be closing; and much has been perfected here.

Remember, more people live better in the world today because of America, its ideas, its inventions and its heart. Go forth and be that American.

On X: @llewellynking2

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS, and an international energy-sector consultant. He’s based in Rhode Island.

White House Chronicle

 

Llewellyn King: The disastrous outcomes when politicians ignore cause and effect

Ishikawa diagram on cause and effect

—FabianLange graphic

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

Anyone who has spent time in criminal court knows this: One of the characteristics of lawbreakers is a poorly developed sense of cause and effect.

At the low end, the folly of the defendants is always on display. The young man who takes a gun with him on a night’s drinking. He has increased his chances that he might use it, and spend the rest what might have been his most useful years in prison.

The shoplifter who keeps at it despite past convictions and faces undetermined years behind bars. The burglar who robs a house and while there calls home on a cell phone, which will ping off the nearest cell tower, negating any alibi. The murderer who posts on social media.

This poorly developed sense of cause and effect isn’t confined to the lawless. It is rife in the political class, in both cohorts of the class, but primarily these days in the ruling Republican cohort. 

We, as a nation, appear to have forgotten that actions have consequences. Those consequences ricochet down through the decades, even the centuries. 

Bomb people and you will get a massive refugee problem. 

Deny medical funding and you will get overburdened emergency rooms. 

Underfund science and the talent will pop up somewhere else, such as the universities of Europe and Asia. 

Cut off immigration and you will have deflation from population decline. 

Create stateless people — they are still people, still there — and they will become a burden.

Don’t raise taxes to cover the $39 trillion national debt and the interest payments on the debt will be so enormous that there will be little left for the business of governance.

Action has consequences just as inaction has consequences. Winston Churchill said: ‘’A decision not taken is nonetheless a decision.”

Here are just some areas where the effect may linger long after the cause has lost its currency — long after the action, which seemed to be “a good idea” at the time, was taken:

Cause: Traduced allies, vitiated treaties and long-term friends abandoned with abusive disdain while rewarding the deplorable with praise, recognition and encouragement. 

Effect: The slights and the negations won’t be forgotten, but the reason for them will have faded with the perpetrators. America diminished as a global power, taking a seat beside Brazil or Argentina, damned by a history of causing damaging effects for passing motives.

Cause: Profligate use of the presidential pardon. 

Effect: A further temptation to abuse power and advance corrupt patronage. Friends go free.

Cause: The abandonment of the sacred right to see a judge, to identify the accuser, to be tried by a jury of your peers. 

Effect: A lawless state of injustice and cruelty, the state out of control, thugs loosed on the people.

Cause: Undermine the elections by claiming falsely that they were rigged. 

Effect: A fundamental weakening of democracy and the supremacy of the ballot. All elections are doubted and more easily overturned. The system is undermined.

Cause: Sustaining a lie in the belief that if you claim it long enough, it will sow doubt. 

Effect: Truth becomes what those who have power say it is, whether it is about an election, immigrants, the cost of wind turbines or climate change. Truth becomes a commodity in short supply in the political marketplace.

All governments make mistakes and most go too far in the service of political ideas, which have legitimacy for a time and then fade. This time it is different.

The list of political actions that will have detrimental effects in the future and substantially threaten our world leadership is long. 

Since the end of World War II, we have led the world in everything from creativity to moral example, from generosity in foreign aid to genius in medical science, from legal thought to environmental protection.

Now political exigency is undermining that. Petty, small triumphs in what are often just the culture wars have effects that diminish us worldwide, and harbinger a more troubled future for us and the world.

Any day, in the heat of a political moment, another cause may leave an effect that will damage the decision-making mechanisms of the U.S. Senate. If the filibuster goes, both parties would rue the effects of that, long and often. 

If it goes, the cause will be forgotten but the effect will endure.

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

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Llewellyn King: Looking at New England’s electricity future with some trepidation

Offshore-wind projects will be a growing source of regional electricity.

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

These days, in terms of resources, New England is poorly positioned to make electricity. As Gregg Cornett, president of Rhode Island Energy, told me in an interview, it doesn’t sit on abundant coal reserves and natural gas — the latter the critical fuel in today’s electricity-generating mix — or hide beneath the surface, waiting for the gasman’s drill.

Going forward the prognosis is that New England will make it through without electricity disruption unless there is severe cold, in which case the system will be stretched and blackouts could result.

The North American Electric Reliability Corporation, the industry-supported, not-for-profit authority that studies electricity supply and predicts problems, says New England is at “moderate risk” this summer, but sees changes and stress in consumption patterns as the region shifts from summer peaking to winter peaking. This will put further pressure on the delivery of gas into the region. 

Winters are going to be tough for the New England electric grid and the collective transmission organization that distributes power from and between the region's utilities, the New England Independent System Operator (ISO-NE).

Rhode Island Energy’s Cornett points out that the area has continued to grow, but the infrastructure to support that growth — especially of pipelines bringing in natural gas — has languished. 

In part, environmentalists have been responsible because of their desire to restrict all fossil fuels. Times of crisis, though, lead to the burning of oil — a much greater environmental challenge. 

Also, because of the lack of pipeline capacity, New England imports liquified natural gas (LNG) from as far away as Norway, adding to the cost of electricity throughout the region. It also imports electricity from Canada.

This means that New England has some of the highest electricity rates in the country. Inaction has consequences.

The bright spots for the future are renewables, wind and solar. 

At present they contribute only 12 to 15 percent of the total New England mix, but they represent the one resource that the region has aplenty, especially offshore wind. Currently, this is hamstrung by opposition from President Trump, but there are hopes that these sources will play much bigger roles in coming years.

Cornett says that Rhode Island Energy is enthusiastic about solar and expects this to grow, although power from rooftop installations now represents a decided challenge for the utility. It is by law obliged to pay top dollar for this electricity, and that is more than the power is worth in the market.

The law guaranteeing the high rate was passed by the Rhode Island General Assembly in 2014 to encourage solar installations, not to hobble Rhode Island Energy with high costs. Cornett says the utility, which is the dominant one in the state, gets no gain from the solar power which it has to buy under this arrangement.

There is irony in the energy shortage in New England because twice in its history, it has led the nation in energy production.

According to the 1840 U.S. Census, there were 5,000 water-powered log mills in the region and many other mills, making cloth and grinding corn. New England had dominance in milling of all kinds, thanks to its abundance of rivers on which mills were granted “privileges.” 

Rhode Island — with five rivers that had sufficient flow for mills — was a beneficiary of the boom. Most of the mills that survived were converted to steam and those that survived after that, mostly textile mills, turned to electricity. 

In the 1990s, there were six operational nuclear-power plants with eight reactors. Today there are just two: Millstone, in Waterford, Conn., with two reactors, and Seabrook,in Seabrook, N.H. with one reactor.

All six New England governors have signed a commitment to investigate the deployment of small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs), but at present there are no commitments to build. This may reflect a national uncertainty about which of the many competing SMR designs with their various technologies will eventually be market-dominant and lead the way to a nuclear renaissance.

Meantime, power executives across the region are grateful they aren’t feeling pressure from data center developers and are hoping for mild winters ahead. 

Electric-utility executives used to list cybersecurity as their No. 1 worry. Now they say it is the weather. 

You can engineer defenses against cyberattack, but when it comes to the weather, the answer is to hope for the best and respond quickly if there is an outage. The supply future is cloudy.

On X: @llewellynking2

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

White House Chronicle

Llewellyn King: I remain a lover of riding the rails, even Amtrak with its frustrations

A Northeast Regional train, with an ACS-64 locomotive and Amfleet I passenger cars, at New London, Connecticut’s Union Station.

— Photo by Pi.1415926535

This is being written on Amtrak’s Northeast Regional Train 171, in coach, en route from Providence to New York. I am in my happy place.

I am a trainman. Given a choice, I would ride the rails over any other mode of transport — except flying when I owned a plane. 

Something happens to me when the train pulls out of the station. I get a sense of well-being.

Rail travel does things for my soul, puts me into a place of euphoric comfort. Everything becomes possible; things are good and may get better. 

Ships do something similar — not cruise liners but ships going somewhere; ships providing transportation not geared to escapism, working ships.

I can trace my train addiction to a journey when I was 5 years old. It was the longest train trip ever and I wouldn’t care to repeat it, although it was the greatest: the adventure of adventures. 

It was a train trip from Cape Town, South Africa to Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia (now Harare, Zimbabwe). It took six days; it was a long, long time on the train.

The distance from Cape Town to Harare is slightly over 1,500 miles, but the train wound through endless miles of desert in what was then Bechuanaland (now Botswana) and stopped for long periods for water. 

It was, of course, a steam train and steam engines are big, beautiful, thirsty monsters. They could carry enough coal for a fair distance of travel, but water was essential and pumping in remote stretchers of the Kalahari Desert was a slow business, and at times the pumps had to be operated by hand. That could mean hours to water the engine.

But as someone said to me years later, “There is plenty of time in Botswana.”

Later, I would ride an overnight train from Salisbury to Umtali  (now Mutare, Zimbabwe) to supervise the production of a newspaper. I rode second class and usually shared a carriage with another man, and sometimes a third and a fourth. As a teenager, I thought of those long discussions through the night as my university.

More steam trains in England, but much faster. The British steam locomotives, before the switchover to diesel, scooped up water from open rail-side troughs as they rushed by at speeds of up to 100 miles per hour. 

My work took me weekly by train to Scotland or the North of England, and at times to the Midlands. Those trips were always an adventure in the people I talked to, the great meals on board, and the wonder of falling asleep to the click-clack of the rails.

I took the overnight train to France, before the Channel Tunnel, when the train would leave London, make its way to the coast, be loaded in the dead of night onto a steamer, and continue in France the next day. Good night in England and bonjour in France.

In the 1960s, you could still take a sleeper train from Washington to New York. It isn’t very far and doesn’t require a sleeper, but many took it because it was fun and saved a stay in a hotel in New York. Now Amtrak will get you there in three hours, no muss, no fuss, no romance.

I have train-traveled in Russia, Belgium, the Czech Republic, France, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland, and I am frequently on Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor trains. Amtrak’s on-train service is excellent, with courteous and helpful conductors, but booking tickets on its site requires an AI agent or a tech-savvy kid to fathom.

Twice this year, as my wife and I were heading from Washington to Rhode Island on the last Northeast Regional train of the day, we were told that the train would “terminate” in New York, due to a problem on the line north of the city. Things do happen in train travel.

Both times, Amtrak failed to offer any suggestion as to how the stranded passengers might finish their journeys. Many of the stranded were students and people who couldn’t afford a New York hotel room or rent a car. Quite a few of the stranded didn’t speak English very well. 

In the first stranding, we were warned by the sole representative Amtrak had helping abandoned passengers at the Moynihan Train Hall, in New York, that not everyone would be able to get the first train out in the morning or the second. He said graciously that our original tickets would be honored on whichever train we were able to continue our journey north.

On neither occasion did we wait for Amtrak’s gracelessness to play out: We took an Uber home on the first, and a Lyft (a bit cheaper) on the second. For each road trip home, we paid, with tips, over $600.

But I am a constant lover, and I am still riding the rails. Happy man typing!

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

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Llewellyn King: How Trump might sabotage the mid-term elections

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

After some long, dark months, there is an optimism afoot among Democrats, many independents, and a few old- school Republicans that the clouds will part and the sun will shine brightly again on Nov. 4.

Most votes in the midterms will be counted, and Democrats believe that the House will have flipped Democratic with a decent majority. They are daring to hope that the Senate, too, will be theirs.

The Trump presidency, its opponents hope, will be firmly marked “lame duck.” Better, they hope that the years of Trump raging, as they see it, outside of his constitutional authority and acting illegally will be over. 

It is fantasized that he will be trussed and restricted from authoritarian governance; that his claims of having a mandate will have been repudiated.

But Trump isn’t a man who takes reversal easily. So there is widespread fear that he will find some way of negating the results of the ballot on Nov. 3 and that Nov. 4 will see him crowing, declaring victory, and being more determined than ever to act as an authoritarian.

Two of the most revered and admired members of the hierarchy of the Democratic Party, Tim Wirth, who represented Colorado for 12 years in the House before entering the Senate, and Richard Gephardt, who represented Missouri for 26 years in the House and rose to become majority leader, have been studying the emergency powers they fear might be used to obstruct the midterms.

The Democratic graybeards state: “Over the past several months we have been examining the structure of presidential emergency authorities, particularly presidential emergency accurate action documents (PEADs) and related to continuity of government provisions. These authorities have existed for decades. What has changed is the context in which they might be used.”

It is these documents, and how they might be used with new intent by Trump and his allies, which alarms the senior Democrats.

They point out that the cadre of Trump loyalists that supported his lie that he won the 2020 election are seeking ways to overcome Democratic victory in the midterms.

Wirth and Gephardt state: “Actors involved in efforts to contest the 2020 election remain active and are again discussing the use of a national emergency to justify federal intervention in election administration. 

“At the same time, federal law enforcement has been used directly in relation to contested election processes, and the president has called for federal control over aspects of voting while describing domestic opponents in terms that go well beyond ordinary political language.”

Wirth and Gephardt wonder if “taken together” these developments raise the question of “whether emergency authorities of uncertain scope, capable of rapid implementation and subject to limited oversight, could be brought to bear in a domestic political context before Congress or the courts can respond effectively.”

Clearly the former members of Congress believe that the administration will find pretexts to either subvert the vote, challenge the result or set aside the entire election on emergency grounds.

The first moves are underway to limit mail-in voting, and not to count mail ballots that arrive after Election Day. The SAVE America Act before Congress would impose what its opponents say is excessive voter- identification requirements, including proof of citizenship, supposedly to prevent non-citizen voting. No evidence that this is a problem has been produced. 

Trump has added to uncertainty in one statement, suggesting that his administration is so successful that no election is needed. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt walked that back, but the intimation lingers.

My belief is that in no way will there be a smooth transfer of power if the Democrats win in the midterms, and that the full apparatus of emergency powers could be employed to negate the result.

The president has produced an extraordinary convulsion in the country, and it is unlikely to be corrected as easily as by the midterm elections. 

Trump, who can widely be inconsistent in what he says, even in the same speech, remains consistent in his lie that the 2020 election was fraudulent. No evidence of this has ever been found despite exhaustive investigations, but he remains firm on that allegation. 

He will at least make that assertion about the midterms result if it goes against him. 

Of course, a lot happens in a single month of the Trump administration, and there are seven months until the elections. 

What is certain is that if the Democrats triumph in the midterms, Trump will use every tool of the executive to frustrate the new Congress. A wild elephant is a dangerous creature when antagonized.

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

Llewellyn King: The tech bros won’t cut your electricity bill

The Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant, in Seabrook, N.H., one of the only two remaining such plants in New England. The other is the Millstone Nuclear Power Plant, in Waterford, Conn.

The Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center (MGHPCC) is an intercollegiate high-performance data center facility in Holyoke.

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

There is an abiding faith that if someone is good at one thing, they must be good at many things. At heart, it is a belief that outside the metaphorical box, there is much greater ability than inside it.

This is once again on display with widespread enthusiasm for the idea that the looming shortage of electricity can be solved by companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Meta because they have been so wildly successful at what they do — and have mountains of cash to demonstrate it. Also, it is thought they will somehow do it better than the entrenched utilities.

The argument is that those who use vast new quantities of electricity for data centers will pay for its generation, and somehow the rest of the electricity supply system will be unaffected. It won’t.

The new dedicated generators will still buy steel, connectors (wires), transformers, switches, and the myriad bits that go to generating and transmitting electricity. They will still buy uranium, natural gas, strain the gas pipelines and the transmission system.

They will still buy available solar cells, wind turbines and dominate the competition to site these. They will be exerting four-square price pressure for all supplies, including utility-scale batteries.

The data center-dedicated generator will still compete in the labor marketplace for precious skilled workers, now in perilous short supply as the utility industry, without counting data center generators, spends well over $2 billion yearly on upgrading its systems.

I am not saying it isn’t a good thing to shake up the utility industry. I am saying not to expect magical new electricity developments that won’t affect everyone. The bills will still come, and they will be hefty.

Also, big tech will learn some sharp and costly lessons.

The thing about the Internet and the world of computing is that they have been a zero-sum game. There are no rules, there is no legacy drag, and every invention, every step forward, enters the marketplace unencumbered.

There was nothing and no one to hold things back. There still isn’t, except for the availability of power for the data centers.

Not so in the electricity ecosphere. There are rules — local, state and federal. There is political oversight, and issues such as land use, water supply and air pollution must be factored in.

The new generation has to accommodate the rules of yesterday. It will be examined, debated, disputed and delayed.

For big tech and artificial intelligence, its latest frontier, everything is possible. But in their new role of making kilowatt hours, there are entrenched stakeholders and they are vociferous and opinionated, and NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) is an ever-present reality.

Building a power plant isn’t like designing an algorithm. It isn’t done in secret and then released to the world, as ChatGPT did in November 2022. It must be collaborative and transparent at every step.

The tech giants are betting on nuclear power for their future power needs. Two of them, Microsoft and Google, are supporting restarting mothballed reactors, Three Mile Island, in Pennsylvania, and Duane Arnold, in Iowa. All of them are interested in small modular reactors and have working arrangements with SMR developers.

In this way, the future of nuclear power may rest with the tech giants: They have the money to take the risk. Microsoft has even signed an agreement with Helion, a company planning to bring fusion power to market.

These developments favor a bright future for all electricity as the tech giants assume the challenges and risks of new nuclear technologies. But they won’t contain electric bills in the years ahead. These will continue to rise.

The utilities are doing what they can to contain these bills. The future demands significant expenditures, and, in some way, these will be reflected in consumer electricity costs.

The fact that the tech giants with money aplenty are going to shoulder greater risks doesn’t mean that their presence as ever more demanding electricity consumers won’t affect the commodity’s cost.

The war with Iran will affect global electricity demand. Countries will seek to substitute electricity for oil and gas where they can, thereby straining already-tight supply chains for generation and transmission components.

The essentiality of electricity is growing, as is the household outlay on it. Ouch!

On X: @llewellynking2

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS, and an international energy-sector consultant. He’s based in Rhode Island.

Llewellyn King: Loving Ireland on St. Patrick’s Day, with all its contradictions

A St. Patrick's Day procession in Downpatrick, Northern Ireland, where St. Patrick is said to be buried.

The Chicago River dyed green for S. Patrick’s Day.

— Photo by Scott M. Liebenson

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

St. Patrick’s Day is Tuessday, and I won’t let it pass without wearing something green and reaching for a glass of something that has been produced through fermentation or distillation. It is the least I can do for all the ways the Irish have enriched the world, but especially the English language, and me.

When it comes to writing, the Irish have what might be termed an ethnic advantage, from the literary game-changers in the last century — George Bernard Shaw, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett and Brendan Behan — to two of the top practitioners of novel-writing today, Sally Rooney, who is only 35, and the prolific and so-readable John Banville.

When it comes to poets, William Butler Yeats is, to my mind, seated among the immortals.

Yet, as I enjoy my St. Patrick’s Day libation, I shall reflect on the contradictions that are Ireland. These are summed up in a personal experience. 

I was, for over 20 years, the American organizer of the Humbert Summer School in Ballina, Co. Mayo. One of my missions was to take Americans — often Irish Americans who had never been to their ancestral land — to Ireland and the school.

Summer schools in Ireland are akin to Renaissance weekends or Aspen Institute meetings in America. Some are literary, like the Yeats Summer School in Sligo, or political, like the Parnell Summer School in Co. Wicklow, or musical, like the Willy Clancy Summer School in Co. Clare. 

Mine, alas, is defunct, but it was named after the French General Jean Joseph Humbert who landed in Killala Bay to help the United Irishmen’s rebellion against the British in 1798, which was celebrated in Thomas Flanagan’s novel “The Year of the French,” and the movie based on it. 

The Humbert School was the creation of its director, John Cooney, a distinguished journalist and major historian. Its mission was to discuss Ireland’s future at home and abroad.

Before the start of one year’s summer school, I briefed my Irish American charge, Ray Connolly, on just how awfully the British, my people, had behaved in the northwest of Ireland, from colonization in 1611 to the 1798 rebellion, to the famine of 1846, when so many perished or fled in the great diaspora, to the notorious Black and Tans after World War I. They were a paramilitary force formed in 1920 to reinforce police posts, act as escorts, and conduct counter-insurgency operations. But their cruelty caused many Irish people to join the Irish Republican Army. 

I spared nothing in the telling of Albion’s perfidy in Ireland.

After the weeklong summer school, on our drive to Dublin Airport and our flight back to Washington, we stopped in a pub. When the publican heard my English accent, he asked, ”How’s the weather over there?” I knew he meant in England. I had to explain that I was now an American and had been for years.

The publican threw his arms around me and declared, “God bless you. You never lost your accent.” 

Our exchange confused Ray. He reminded me that I had recounted the full litany of English horror in the northwest of Ireland including, after the 1798 rebellion, how Gen. Charles Cornwallis, chagrined after his defeat in America, hanged 20 Irish rebels per day.

“That,” I said of the enthusiastic publican, “is part of the wonder of Ireland: its contradictions.”

Ireland’s relationship with Britain is a fine example of those. 

Britain is a prime destination for work and for career opportunities for the Irish. They talk of London with affection, although they may still sing rebel songs with gusto, and mention the horrors of the past as though they were last week.

Under a treaty, the Common Travel Agreement (CTA), Irish citizens have the right of abode in England. For them, there is no frontier; although, I learn, that may change as people who have acquired Irish citizenship, but aren’t Irish-born, are abusing it, adding to the immigration woes in Britain.

If the CTA should end, Britain will lose much, just as America is set to lose Irish talent because of immigration restrictions.

When talking about the impact of Ireland on America – 23 presidents were of at least some Irish descent — it should be noted that America has also had an impact on Ireland.

On the downside, there is fast food. When I asked a cab driver in Dublin about where to get good fish and chips, he said he preferred Kentucky Fried Chicken.

On the upside, there is the celebration of St. Patrick’s Day, which started in America. 

But before Americans went crazy for all things Irish on March 17, it was a quiet religious day in Ireland. Now it is more of a celebration there, as it is here and much of the world. Sláinte! 

On X: @llewellynking2

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS.

Llewellyn King: Electronics is robbing Us of much Human contact

1897 photo

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

You don’t have to be sitting by yourself on an island to be lonely. Loneliness is everywhere.

Studies from universities, governments and public health groups find that the world is in the grip of a loneliness pandemic. More than half the U.S. population is said to be suffering from loneliness. It is classified globally as a mental health problem.

Paradoxically, the studies place most of the blame on our interconnected society and social media: If we communicate electronically, we isolate ourselves. The COVID-19 pandemic also increased our social isolation, and working from home accelerated the trend.

I would suggest that we have been drifting toward loneliness for a long time. Years ago, I wrote about what I called the “box culture.”

In the box culture, people live in a box (apartment), ride down in a box (elevator), get into a box with wheels (car), drive to a stack of boxes (building), ride up in a box (elevator), enter another box (office), and stare into a box (computer).

That, I believe, led to greater isolation. No common dwelling; no common transportation, like a bus or train; and little common work habitat.

The phrase “my space” began to be part of the conversational language. A social networking service named Myspace was launched in 2003.

Email and texting gave isolation a boost even before COVID-19 gave it a massive steroid shot. Now we might be inhabiting “my isolated space.”

Adding to this world of paradox is perhaps the biggest paradox of all — the death of the telephone for the purpose it was invented: talking.

Not only has the telephone declined to near-oblivion as a way of talking to others, but it has also become something of a burden. I find that when I suggest a telephone call, the recipients want to set a time.

When did setting times for calls creep into our lives? It wrings the pleasure out of the telephone, which was always a spontaneous instrument.

When Irving Berlin wrote the song “All Alone by the Telephone” in 1924, he didn’t envisage that people would make appointments to talk.

We have robbed ourselves of the glorious spontaneity, or heartbreak, of the telephone. I have always thought of it as the instrument that can transmute life’s leaden metal into gold unexpectedly, as Omar Khayyam wrote, or as a ray of sunshine you didn’t expect to break through the fog, as Noel Coward wrote. Even just the laughter of an old friend can break out the sunlight on a dismal day.

I can’t catch the laughter in a text. Email is fine for a joke, but it fails where the telephone succeeds: catching the sublimity of laughter, the warmth of love.

Another source of isolation has been the conversion from shopping — the operative part of that word is “shop” — to online buying, a different experience. Or rather, another way of removing the warmth of human interchange from the transaction.

If you are among the legions of the lonely, I would like to suggest, aside from the highly recommended places people meet, like volunteering at a charity or an amateur theater group, going to a pub or to church, do something radical: Speak to a stranger.

My wife and I became friends with two people and their families because I spoke to a stranger in a hotel in Washington, and we spoke to one at a concert in Rhode Island.

We have friends who met while standing in line at an ATM and married not long after. Weight Watchers, when they held meetings, was recommended among the cognoscenti as a place to meet people.

These suggestions may sound trivial, but they are the commerce of life, some of which we have shelved in favor of electronic communications.

In particular, I feel for those who are shut-in by disease and suffer terrible loneliness. They are the loneliest of the lonely.

For many years, I have written and broadcast about Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, also known as Myalgic Encephalomyelitis. It is a terrible disease whose victims have no energy, get no refreshment from sleep, and suffer a plethora of pain, usually for life.

Electronics may have robbed us of much human contact and caused a pandemic of loneliness, but not for those sentenced to loneliness by disease.

On X: @llewellynking2

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS, and an international energy-sector consultant.

Llewellyn King: Big tech has become a ruthless autocratic oligopoly

Standard Oil's monopoly at the turn of the 20th Century was often depicted as an octopus, its tentacles infiltrating all aspects of American life. Vanderbilt Law Prof. Rebecca Allensworth says Big Tech companies are like octopuses — "every tentacle is a new set of products."

— Wikimedia Commons

Mark Zuckerberg, in 2005, as another rich kid at Harvard. See the movie The Social Network.

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.’’

—Lord Acton (1834-1902), English Liberal Party politician, and writer.

For me the most remarkable thing about Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg’s appearance at a Los Angeles court, to answer questions about the addictive aspects of social media, was that he was there at 8:30 a.m. wearing a suit.

Sarah Wynn-Williams, in her excellent book about Facebook, Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed and Lost Idealism, said Zuckerberg doesn’t see anyone before noon because he has to sleep, having been up most of the night.

This had Wynn-Williams, who rose to head Facebook’s international relations team, sometimes telling heads of state that they would have to wait for the great man to alight from his bed at noon or later.

Zuckerberg could be uninterested or uninformed about the country from which he was trying to get favors for Facebook, she wrote. As Facebook had electorates in its thrall, countries’ leaders were prepared to defer to the sleeping titan.

This doesn’t mean that Zuckerberg is evil, but it does point to enormous self-regard. His sleeping routine is a de facto declaration: I am so rich and so powerful that I can command world leaders to rearrange their schedules to accommodate mine. They did, according to Wynn-Williams.

While the venerable observation by Lord Acton in 1887 is nearly always directed at politicians and autocrats, it is as true for billionaires and their companies.

More so with the tech gargantuans that are a force in the financial markets, a force in politics, and will control much of the future if their investments in artificial intelligence pay off. Among them are Meta (Facebook), Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, Nvidia, Microsoft, Tesla, Anthropic and OpenAI. 

Another point, which Wynn-Williams made in her book, is that most of the heads of state whom Zuckerberg treated with minimal respect won’t be in power in 10 years, but Zuckerberg, who is 41, may be around for half a century. The long game is his, along with his colleague-companies and their CEOs, especially when they own a commanding amount of the stock, such as Tesla’s Elon Musk.

The impact of Big Tech as a lobbying force is apparent: Any CEO has access to the White House and is in turn cultivated by the White House. Congress has a permanent welcome mat out to Big Tech lobbyists – and their campaign contributions.

A more damaging impact might be what Big Tech does to new tech.

The biggies buy up every startup that looks as though it might become a mega company. All of the Big Tech companies are conglomerates, and history has shown that conglomerates discard unprofitable enterprises and favor the cash cows. Tech autocracy is no kinder than any other autocracy.

Startups are what keep America ahead of the world in tech, and they are keenly watched for any sign that they may grow into another agent of change. Whereas at the beginning of the tech boom successful startups headed for an initial public offering, now they calculate from the get-go which behemoth tech company will buy them. The circle is closed.

The big get bigger and the startup is absorbed into a giant organization, where it might prosper or whither. Either way it is out of reach, including regulatory reach. It is in the castle walls.

As we see with the fate of CBS and The Washington Post, Big Tech can play havoc with the media and our right to know what is going on. The money is so large that it is almost impossible for politicians not to seek the favor of the mighty techs and their Vesuvian cash flow.

The obverse of that is what they might do if they overreach, as they may be doing now with AI investments, and bring down the stock market.

Big Tech has showered us with wonders that can make life easier and fun for many, but there is a price. The price is that we have handed the future to a group of companies that, understandably, are interested in self-preservation first, as with all autocracy.

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

whchronicle.com

Llewellyn King: Washington press corps is swollen, but the news evades it

President Trump, Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi and Deputy Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche take questions in the White House Press Room last June.

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

The Trump administration — with the power of the White House being felt from the universities to the Kennedy Center — isn’t the only top-heavy institution in Washington. The media is top-heavy, too.

While state houses around the country go uncovered and local courts go about their business without the light of press scrutiny — a frightening reality — the White House and Congress have more general coverage than they have ever had.

The press briefings at the White House are tightly packed with more standing than sitting. Droves of reporters roam the halls of Congress.

Washington, in media terms, is a two-ring circus.

This doesn’t mean that either the administration or Congress is being better covered. Here, more is less.

The politics that bitterly divide the country have also crippled the old camaraderie between those who made the news and those who reported it.

In the Capitol, reporters thought to have strong political views are favored accordingly. The old repartee, the fun, has gone. Access, the coinage of Washington, is only for those who are subservient.

The White House is a daily pitched battle between the press in general and the administration. Information doesn’t change hands in that atmosphere.

The White House press staff, led by the gladiatorial Karoline Leavitt, abuses and baits the press. It responds with barbs. It’s “Saturday Night Live” every day of the week.

The trend of over-coverage of Washington has been building for a long time, but it has accelerated in Trump’s second term. From day one, it has been a news gusher, a Roman candle of shining, and some dark things, to write about.

Incessant coverage has also been stimulated by the maturing of technology, allowing fast delivery of the product with minimal cost. When the threshold of entry is low, many will avail themselves.

What is harder to get is the real news, what is really happening.

No more do reporters, as I did once, stroll though the West Wing. No more do high officials brief reporters confidentially. And, worse for governance, no more do members of the administration or Congress seek input from the media.

New Hampshire’s John Sununu, President George H.W. Bush’s chief of staff, once told me,“What you tell us is as valuable as what we tell you.” The exchange of information, once seen as vital, is no more.

One phenomenon of the new media ecosystem has been that magazines have started daily feeds, dedicated to what is or isn’t happening in Washington; and what has been triggered from Washington, like the unrest in Minneapolis.

Weekly magazines and a few monthlies are now reporting daily. They are an inbox coagulant. These include Newsweek, The Economist, The New Yorker, The Spectator, The Atlantic, The American Prospect and many others. Even Vanity Fair often files daily.

Add to these the British newspapers that now treat the United States as part of their universe. The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Daily Express, The Daily Mail and The Daily Mirror all have daily American news feeds and virtual editions.

Then there are the noncommissioned combatants, the bloggers, some of whom are favored by the White House and hold White House press passes. No wonder you can’t get a seat when Leavitt’s daily briefing is underway.

It is theater. It is the greatest daily show on earth. The jugglers and the clowns are at work, tossing and catching, and somersaulting. Catch Leavitt on the high wire. Watch CNN’s Kaitlin Collins try to bring her down.

This lack of communication from officialdom extends across the Washington spectrum. Television producers have tired of inviting Cabinet secretaries and members of Congress to come on their programs only to get talking points. That is one reason so much cable television consists of reporters talking about the news they covered or the news they chased but didn’t catch.

As the late Arnaud de Borchgrave, the world-traveling Newsweek correspondent, once told me,“When you and I were young reporters, we wanted to be foreign correspondents. Now everyone wants to cover politics.”

True, and good luck with that.

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

whchronicle.com

Llewellyn King: The energy sector and government are inconstant lovers

U.S. energy consumption in 2023.

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

Politics and science are always falling in love, but they seldom live happily ever after. Quick to embrace, messy to separate is the pattern.

Nowhere has this been clearer than with energy, where projects are dependent on some form of government approval, endorsement, funding and sometimes direct involvement — for example, when the Army Corps of Engineers designs a hydroelectric project or the government’s commitment to take nuclear waste.

The late Financial Times science editor, David Fishlock, with whom I collaborated for many years, advised me to be wary of government falling in love with science, because of the catastrophe that ensues when government falls out of love with it.

Consider the love affair between successive U.S. presidential administrations, from Dwight Eisenhower to Gerald Ford, and nuclear power. The administration of Jimmy Carter was cold to nuclear — a cooling that lasted long after he left office.


Carter, a nuclear engineer himself, delivered the lethal kiss when he described nuclear as the choice of last resort. He favored coal and conservation as the best energy policy, and created the U.S. Synthetic Fuels Corp. to exploit coal. Carter envisioned a time when coal would answer most energy needs: coal in the form of synthetic gas, liquid fuel for transportation, and plenty of coal-fired electricity.

Options were few.

I had worked with the Atomic Energy Commission’s Gorman Smith — who later became executive director of the U.S. Energy Association — on a study for President Richard Nixon on the crisis after the Arab Oil Embargo of 1973, and we found the energy cupboard bare. At that time, only nuclear and coal were options. Natural gas was believed to be a resource of the past — the first deputy energy secretary, Jack O’Leary, described it as “a depleted resource.”

Wind and solar were in the dream stage, although the national laboratories were doing yeoman’s work on them.

What wasn’t known was the extent to which technology would upend the energy ecosystem and take it from dearth to abundance.


While Ronald Reagan’s heart was with nuclear, his energy secretary, John Herrington, spooked the debate with his constant leaking to The New York Times about the problems with nuclear waste, and particularly with the large nuclear reservation in Hanford, Wash., where defense waste is stored, dating back to the early days of the Cold War.

Reagan significantly advanced natural gas by deregulating the market and easing the restrictions imposed on it.

Deregulation primed the pump for the explosion that was to come with the perfection of an old technology, fracking, and other technological breakthroughs, particularly horizontal drilling and 3D seismic imaging in gas and oil exploration. A final tech boost to gas was the surge in deployment of aeroderivative turbines — jet engines on the ground — in the late 1980s. They burn gas far more efficiently than placing it directly under boilers, a so-called thermal gas system.

The Joe Biden administration was committed to reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, primarily carbon. It shifted dramatically away from coal and gas and embraced renewables. That administration’s embrace was part of a worldwide transition to renewables, sometimes with aggressive encouragement through loans and tax breaks.

Now with Donald Trump, we have an administration that worships gas, venerates coal, and has come down heavily against wind, especially offshore turbines, even as the world — including China and Europe — has embraced them. It has also criticized solar power, but with less vehemence than its criticism of wind generation.

Nuclear is a favorite now with Democrats and Republicans. However, the Trump administration continues to hamper wind energy, going so far as to cancel offshore leases, while trying to resuscitate the coal industry.

Politics is at work, orchestrating what the administration hopes will be the end of wind and solar.

It also puts them at odds with the big tech companies, which are desperately seeking more green power for their data centers.

Another victim of the administration’s energy policy is hydrogen, a darling of the environmental movement.

The utilities have been here before and have developed a quiet skill in appearing to go along even while they plan — which they do in 25-year cycles — against the four-year political horizon. They have chosen not to challenge the administration’s position with a collective voice.

At present, the administration’s official line is that there is no global warming. The president has called it a hoax and a con. However, utilities are struggling with extremes of winter cold and summer heat that they haven’t historically experienced.

Keep quiet and keep the lights on is the undeclared utility strategy.

On X: @llewellynking2

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS, and an international energy-sector consultant.

Llewellyn King: Trump regime uses ICE as part of its assault on the rule of law; we are all imperiled

“Equal Justice Under Law,” by Robert Ingersoll Aitken, over the western façade of the U.S. Supreme Court Building.

—Photo byMattWade

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

The men you see in masks on your television savagely arresting people may not seem like your affair. But they are your affair and mine, and that of every other American.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement operates outside of the law. It doesn’t disclose charges, and no one arrested sees a court of law.

ICE agents are also the affair of the whole world, for while they are symbols of local terror, they are also symbols of America’s withdrawal from the one critical underpinning of civilization: the rule of law.

Without it, society isn’t much. No one is secure, even those who are in charge.

At another time, the victim may be the oppressor. When there is no law there is only fear. One day, the persecutor behind the mask may find himself persecuted by another man behind another mask.

Once power is wielded indiscriminately, it is free to serve many masters.

During a campaign by the government of Argentina to suppress left-wing political opponents, known as the Dirty War, from 1976 to 1983, a new way of settling personal disputes arose.

The police arrested so many and killed them secretly — between 10,000 and 30,000, and the victims became known as the “disappeared” —  that soon murder became easier. If you didn’t like a rival or even a family member, you “disappeared” them — and that was that. No one would report such disappearances to the police for fear that it was the work of the police.

When I was in Argentina after the Dirty War, I was told about a man who didn’t like his mother-in-law and disappeared her. Lawlessness breeds lawlessness.

Currently, in areas of America where ICE is present, there is a common assumption that if someone suddenly goes missing, it means that ICE has detained them, and they are likely being sent to a detention center for deportation. 

Mickey Spillane, the American crime writer, once said the only difference between the police and the criminals was that the police were employed by the government. We see that with ICE.

In 1215, at Runnymede, the nobles of England told King John to cut it out. They demanded an end to the arbitrary confiscation of property and his majesty’s habit of handing out sentences without trial.

Habeas corpus (“that you have the body”) dates in English law to before the Magna Carta, but it was codified there. The Napoleonic Code embraces many of the same elements as the Magna Carta, although Napoleon eschewed English common law when he revised French law into the code in 1804.

Now, about half of the world’s legal systems are based on the French code and half, including 49 U.S. states, are based on English common law. Louisiana has a hybrid of the two.

Nonetheless, it is a tenet of both systems that the individual will face trial and know his or her accusers, that the accused could be tried by his or her peers, and that the accused has rights.

Historically, the British relied heavily on the rule of law. In fact, law and its application became a mainstay of maintaining order in Britain and in the Empire. It was part of the concept of British exceptionalism.

The dignity and openness of trials were an important part of the colonial ethos. In Southern Rhodesia, before the country suffered a civil war and became Zimbabwe, I was a defendant for a minor dispute with a hotel over a bill. Even though I had settled the bill, I was ordered to appear before the native commissioner’s court in the remote area of the country where the hotel was situated.

The court was a room with a single table and chair. Everyone else sat on the floor. It was crowded with justice-seekers and defendants, all of them black. 

Only the commissioner and I were colonials. I thought the process would be nothing more than a courtesy call, a wink and blink.

Finally, the great man with bushy, unkempt, white hair and a mustache called me to the table. He read the now-moot complaint and dressed me down in terms I have never been dressed down, before or after, ven by irate readers.

He said I was a disgrace to Britain, to my ancestry, to my family, and to my school. But, he said, I had especially let down the Empire. I was warned that if I ever faced him again for any reason, no matter how minor, I would get strict punishment.

It was really a rough way to treat a teenager, but it was part of the justice of the day that had to be seen as being even-handed and blind.

In Oliver Twist, Dickens wrote that “the law is an ass.” I think it is a beautiful beast, despite running afoul of it in colonial Africa. We need it back in the U.S. stable.

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

Llewellyn King: In ‘25 we lost the metaphor of America

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

Come on in, 2026. Welcome. I am glad to see you because your predecessor year was not to my liking.

Yes, I know there is always something going on in the world that we wish were not going on. Paul Harvey, the conservative broadcaster, said, “In times like these, it helps to recall that there have always been times like these.”

Indeed. Wars, uprisings, oppression, cruelty and man's inhumanity to man are to be found in every year. But last year, the world lost something it may not get back. You see, '26 — you don't mind if I shorten your title, do you — we lost America. Not the country but the metaphor.

We were, '26, despite our tragic mistakes — including slavery and wrongheaded wars — a country of caring people, a country that cared (mostly) for its own people and those who lived elsewhere in the world.

It was the country that sought to help itself and to help the world. It was the sharing country, the country that showed the way, the country that sought to correct wrong, to overthrow evil and to excel at global kindness.

It was the country that led by example in freedom of speech, freedom of movement and in free, democratic government.

When John Donne, the English metaphysical poet, described his lover's beauty as ‘‘my America" in the 1590s, he foreshadowed the emergence of the United States a nation of spiritual beauty.

From World War II on, caring was an American inclination as well as a policy.

We helped rebuil Europe with the Marshall Plan, an act of international largesse without historical parallel. We rushed to help after droughts, fires, earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis and wars.

We were everywhere with open hands and hearts. America the bountiful. We had the resources and the great heart to do good, to show our own overflowing decency, even if it got mixed up with ideology. We led the world in caring.

We bound up the wounds of the world, as much as we could, whether they were the result of human folly or nature's occasional callousness.

We delivered truth through the Voice of America and aid through the U.S. Agency for International Development. Our might was always at hand to help, to save the drowning, to feed the starving and to minister to the victims of pandemic — as with AIDS and Ebola in Africa.

In 2025, that ended. More than a century of decency suspended, suddenly, thoughtlessly.

America the Great Country became America Just Another Striving Country, decency confused with weakness, indifference with strength, friends with oil autocracies.

It wasn't just the sense of noblesse oblige, which not only distinguished us in the 20th Century, but also earlier. In the 19th Century, we opened our gates to the starving, the downtrodden and the desperate. They joined the people already living here to build the greatest nation — a democracy — that the world has ever seen. First in science. First in business. First in medicine. First in agriculture. First in decency.

These people brought to America labor and know-how across the board, from weaving technology in the 18th century to engineering in the 19th century to musical theater in the 20th century, along with movie-making and rocket science.

I would submit, '26, that it is all about American greatness, and last year we slammed the door shut on greatness, abandoned longtime allies and friends. We forsook people who had been compatriots in war, culture and history for the dubious company of the worst of the worst, aggressors, oppressors, liars, everyone soaked in the blood of their innocent victims.

Yes, '26, America stood tall in the world because it stood for what was right. Its system of law — including the ability to have small wrongs addressed by high courts — was the envy of foreign lands where law was bent to politics, where democracy was an empty phrase for state manipulation of the vote. The Soviet Union claimed democracy; America practiced it.

America soared, for example, with President Jimmy Carter's principled and persuasive pursuit of human rights and President Ronald Reagan's extraordinary explanation of its greatness: the “shining city upon a hill.”

It sunk from time to time. Slavery was horrific; Dred Scott, appalling; Prohibition, silly; the Hollywood blacklist, outrageous.

But '26, decency finally triumphed and America was great, its better instincts superb — and now worth restoring for the nation and for the troubled, brutalized world.

Good luck, '26. You will bear a standard that the world has looked to. Lift it high again.

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. Based in Rhode Island, he’s also an international energy-sector consultant and speaker.

On X: @llewellynking2

Llewellyn King: In 2026, 70 percent effort should be enough

An ice sculpture for First Night in Boston

A remarkable autobiography by Anthony Inglis, the English conductor and musicologist, is titled, Sit Down, Stop Waving Your Arms About! Quite so.

This admonition occurred while Inglis was conducting a musical. Someone sitting in the front row tapped him on the shoulder and told him to sit down and stop waving his arms about.

My admonition to you for the new year is to sit down and stop stressing yourself.

We are plagued with the idea of stress, and yet we start the new year with resolutions. We order a raft of these stress-making endeavors.

Want a stress-free new year? Stop your New Year's resolutions right now.

Do you need to tell yourself that you will stay on your diet? No. You won't anyway.

Do you need to set a goal of going to the gym five times a week? No. You won't get to Planet Fitness more than once or twice, in the whole year.

So, your desk looks like a dump, leave it alone. You will promise yourself that for the first time ever you will get organized in 2026. You won't. So why get stressed about it?

You have promised yourself that this year you are going to improve your mind and read 20 great books. You won't. Best case, you will flip through a James Patterson thriller or a Danielle Steel romance. Maybe the detective novel you purchased at an airport will make it to your nightstand, alongside the classic you plan to read when you get around to it. That is never, so get rid of that reproving volume. Give it to charity. You will shed stress and feel good at the same time by doing that.

Sloth clothed as virtue is so, so stress-relieving.

Put aside the stress of resolutions in the new year and relax into a year of self-indulgence.


If a work colleague comes over to you and starts talking about productivity, cross your arms, sit down and, if your system allows, break wind.

Approach work as a card-carrying slough-off. In the Soviet Union, which was supposed to be the “workers' paradise,” workers used to say, “They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.” Good on them.


If striving is pointless, stop striving. Give it a rest.

I suggest that there is a terrible national lack of malaise. At every turn, we are urged to learn more, work harder and innovate, innovate, innovate. You don't need innovation to have a second helping, open a beer or take the day off.

You may need to be a little innovative, explaining why you aren't at work. But that isn't so hard: Claim a mental-health day. Particularly if you are well and fit enough to enjoy it at the beach, at a movie theater or snuggled down into your bed.


If people are telling you to “lean in” and “try harder or the Chinese will get ahead,” go to dinner at a Chinese restaurant and wonder at the number of dishes which can be prepared almost instantly — none of which you would cook. Then conclude that the Chinese have already won and stop stressing.

Think back to when we stressed mightily about the Japanese and the Germans beating us at everything. Then enjoy a suffusing, warm gladness when you realize that all that leaning in and trying harder hasn't helped them beat us. Maybe we should have a national academy for failing upward.

Lloyd Kelly, a fine artist and a friend, teaches Tai Chi in Louisville, Ky., particularly in one of the city's hospitals. He advises his students — some of whom are in wheelchairs — to stay within their comfort level, “to give just 70 percent.”

There is something beautiful about that admonishment at a time when people are stressed out and society is mindlessly urging you to struggle, to achieve, to conquer.

Here, then, is a resolution you can keep: I am only going to give a 70 percent effort. That way, perchance, you will have a great new year by default.

On X: @llewellynking2
Bluesky: @llewellynking.bsky.social

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS, and an international energy-sector consultant. He’s based in Rhode Island.

Llewellyn King: Trump gave us a year of fear: And 2026?

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

Of all the things that happened in 2025 — a year dominated by the presidency of Donald Trump — not the least is that great fear came to America.

It's reminiscent of the fear that African-Americans knew in the days of the lynch mob, or that Jews have felt from time to time, or that Hollywood felt during the blacklist of the 1940s and 1950s, or the fear that people of Japanese descent from the West Coast, who were mostly U.S. citizens, felt when they were rounded up and interred following the attack on Pearl Harbor.

For some, it is a low-grade fear of reprisals, financial ruin and humiliation. And for some, it is a fear of ruin by litigation. But for others, it is fear of faceless arrest, the jail cell and plastic handcuffs.

All of this has made us a nation in fear and removed our faith in our laws, our Constitution, and our plain decency.

This is a new kind of fear that is acute in places, such as immigrant communities, but more universal than in the past.

It isn't the fear of a foreign power or an alien ideology or a disease, but a fear generated domestically — generated by our own government. Fear in our workplaces, our schools, our movie studios, our newsrooms and our universities.

For the first time, this year we saw troops on the streets of cities when there was no civil unrest — as there was, for example, during the riots of 1968, which followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

We saw troops deployed in cities where they weren't wanted, opposed by the local government and local people. But those cities got the troops courtesy of an assertion by the president that troops can manage law enforcement better than the local police. Or was there some more sinister purpose?

For the first time, we saw arrests without charge or evidence, carried out by masked ICE agents, of people simply suspected of being here illegally.

Often the suspicion is no more than the color of the arrestee's skin, their dress and their demeanor. No crime needs to be proved by this army of the state, dressed to intimidate. To the ICE men and women, appearance is tantamount to conviction.

Nightly on television we watched agents drag away men, women and children without due process; they would been held and deported without charge, trial or having any avenue of appeal. Justice denied, nonoperational. Often deportees go to countries that are alien or different from their homelands.

Fear has come home.

Immigrants are frightened even if they are citizens. If you have olive-toned skin, you can be dragged and held incommunicado. No appeal, no trial, no court appearance, no access to help. Habeas corpus suspended.

Pinch yourself and ask: Is this the America we cherish for its freedom, its justice and its generosity of spirit?

The fear isn't confined to those who might be swept up in the mindless cruelty of ICE but extends throughout society. People with stature fear that if they speak out, if they do what at other times they might have seen as their civic duty, they will endanger themselves and their families. All the government has to do is to start an investigation or threaten one and the damage is done, the first level of punishment is delivered.

Investigations can target anything from how you filled out a mortgage application to whether you wrote something that may be viewed as objectionable, and the punishment begins.

Fear stalks the schools where teachers and professors can be punished for what they say or teach, and where the institutions of higher learning are subject to political scrutiny. Politics has become the law, capricious and savage.

There is fear in business, where so many companies rely on government loan guarantees or tax credits for their growth. There is fear that if they say anything that can be construed as disloyal, they will be punished.

Political opponents fear that their mortgage applications may be deemed to be irregular and they are to be censured or prosecuted. Political prosecution is now a government tool.

Others just fear that Trump will ridicule them in public with his schoolyard denigrations, particularly members of Congress. They fear they will be reprimanded and marked for defeat in the polls.

There is an awful completeness about the Trump rampage: his systematic ignoring of norms, shredding of the rights of the individual, destroying families and bringing about untold misery.

A question for all America: How is the spreading of fear — sometimes an acute fear and sometimes low-grade fear — throughout society beneficial and to whom?

We, the people, deserve to know.

X: @llewellynking2

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS, and an international energy-sector consultant. He’s based in Rhode Island.

Llewellyn King: AI and our robotic future

The robot Maria from the 1927 German expressionist film Metropolis

Editor’s Note: Visit the fabulous MIT Museum, in Cambridge, Mass., to check robotic-related stuff.

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

The next big thing is robots. They are, you might say, on the move.

Within five years, robots will be doing a lot of things that people now do. Simple repetitive work, for example, is doomed.

Already, robots weld, bolt and paint cars and trucks. The factory of the future will have very few human workers. Amazon distribution centers are almost entirely robot domains. Robots search the shelves, grab items, pack and send them to you — often seconds after you have placed your order.

Of course, these orders will be delivered in vans, which must be loaded carefully, even scientifically. The first out must be the last in; small items must nestle with large ones. Space is at a premium, so robotic brains will do the sorting and packing swiftly, efficiently and inexpensively.

Very soon, the van will be self-driving: a robot capable of navigating the traffic and finding your home. At first, it may not get further in the delivery chain than calling you to say that your package has arrived. Eventually, humanoid robots may ride in the vans and, yes, hand your package to you. No tipping, please.

When we think about robots, we tend to think of the robots that look like us. The internet is full of clips of them climbing stairs, playing sports and doing backflips.

There are reasons for humanoid robots: They are less intimidating with their humanlike heads, two arms with hands and two legs with feet than a machine with many arms or legs. Also, most of the tasks the robot is taking over are done by humans. The tasks are fitted to people, such as pumping gas, preparing vegetables or painting a wall.

The first big incursion may be robotaxis. Waymo taxis are already operating in five cities, and the company has plans to roll them out in 19 cities. Several cities are concerned about safety, including Houston and Seattle, and want to ban them. But there are state-city jurisdictional issues about implementing bans.

A likely scenario, as with other bans, is that the development will go elsewhere. Travelers tend to eschew places where Uber and Lyft aren’t allowed to operate in favor of those where they are.

You are already dealing with robots when you talk to a digital assistant at an airline, a bank, a credit card or insurance company, or any business where you call a helpline. That soothing, friendly voice that comes on immediately and asks practical questions may be a robot: the unseen voice of artificial intelligence.

In the years I have been writing about AI and its impact on society, I have consistently heard the AI revolution and its impact on jobs compared with the Industrial Revolution and automation. The one led to the other and in the end, many new jobs and whole new ecosystems flourished.

It isn’t clear that this will happen again and if so on what timetable. A lot of jobs are already in danger, from file clerks to delivery and taxi drivers, from warehouse workers to longshoremen.

AI is also changing the tech world. A whole new tier of companies is emerging to carry forward the AI-robot revolution. These are companies that make robots; companies that write software, which will give robots brainpower; and companies that will have a workforce that maintains robots.

These emerging companies will need a workforce with a different set of skills — skills that will keep the new AI economy humming.

What is missing is any sense that the political class has grasped the tsunami of change that is about to break over the nation. In just a few years, you may be riding in a robotaxi, watching a humanoid robot doing yard work or lying on a couch and chatting with your robot psychiatrist.

Our species is adaptable, and we have adapted everything from the wheel to the steam engine to electricity to the internet. And we have prospered.

Time to think about how to prosper with AI and its robots.

Llewellyn King, based in Rhode Island, is host and executive producer of White House Chronicle, on PBS, as well as an international energy-sector consultant. He’s also a former publisher and editor.

Llewellyn King: Journalism is a business of serial judgment under pressure

An example of the nonobjective newspapers that dominated American journalism until ideals of objective rep0rting slowly started to take hold around the turn of the 20th Century in larger cities.

The Linotype machine was very important in newspaper printing until computerization doomed it.

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

The BBC has fallen on its sword. The director general has resigned and so has the head of news over the splicing of tape of President Trump's rambling speech on Jan. 6, 2021, which preceded the sacking of the Capitol by his fanatical followers.

The editor and the technician who did the deed for the esteemed BBC program Panorama haven't been publicly identified.

Agreed, they shouldn't have done what they did. But was there malice?

Journalism is a business of serial judgment. It is replete with mistakes — things that we who practice the craft wish we hadn't done.

I have worked as an editor in film, with tape and on newspapers, and I have seen how the paranoia of politicians can cast a whole news organization as a biased enemy when that wasn't the case.

Before a single sentence or an article appears in a newspaper or a video appears on television, dozens of judgments have been made — not by teams of academics or by ethicists or by juries, but by individuals responding to time pressure and what they judge to be newsworthy.

The unsaid pressure to keep it interesting, to have news worth something, is always there. The reader has to be kept reading or the viewer watching.

After something is published or broadcast, it can be beacon-clear what should have been done or corrected, but in the moment, those defects are opaque.

Let me take you behind the veil.

It is a hot night in 1972. There is a presidential election brewing and among those running for the Democratic nomination is Henry “Scoop" Jackson, the well-known Democratic senator from the state of Washington.

I am working in the composing room of The Washington Post as the editor in charge of liaising between the printers and the editors. The job is sometimes called a stone editor after the “stone’’ — big metal tables that held the pages and where the newspaper was assembled in the days of hot type via Linotype machines.

It was a busy news night, and it was when David Broder was the political reporter without rival. He was industrious and thorough, dedicated and prolific. As the night wore on, Broder would often add new stuff to his story, and it would grow in length.

In desperation when things got tough and deadlines were pressing, we would cut back the size of the photos, which had run in the first edition. The editor on duty would just ask the printers to do this: It was known as “whacking the cut."

In short, the photo would be reduced in size by cutting it down physically. The engraving would be put in a guillotine and some of it would be cut off, whacked.

That night, we had a large photo of Jackson addressing a large crowd.

But as the night wore on and different editions and mini editions, known as replates, were assembled, I ordered the cut whacked and whacked again. The result was that by the time the main edition went to press, the good senator was talking to a much smaller audience — although it did suggest that many more were there but not seen.

Jackson thought that this was a deliberate bias by The Post to suggest that he couldn't draw a large audience, and he called the legendary executive editor Ben Bradlee.

Bradlee asked the national editor, Ben Bagdikian, who was to become an authority on newspaper ethics, what happened. When they came to me, I explained how we trimmed the pictures.

While Bradlee was amused, Bagdikian added it to his concern about newspaper ethics.

Journalism is executed by individuals under pressure, much of it intense. It is a business of multiple judgments made sequentially, often without a lot of contemplation.

I once worked at the BBC in London, and the same pressures were present. I was scriptwriter and editor on the evening news. You made decisions all the time: This frame in, those 20 frames out. An outsider might imagine prejudice and foul intent in the way one clip was used and others were not.

In the news trade, judgments can trip you up, but making judgments is essential. Later the judge is judged, as at the BBC.

On X: @llewellynking2

Llewellyn King, based mostly in Rhode Island, is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. He was a long-time publisher and remains an international energy-sector consultant.

Llewellyn King: The biggest sources of stress for air-traffic controllers

Air-traffic-control zones in the southeast corner of New England.

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

If you don't know about the stress that air-traffic controllers are reportedly under, then maybe you are an air-traffic controller.

The fact is that air-traffic controllers love what they do — love it and wouldn't do anything else.

The stress comes with long hours, Federal Aviation Administration bureaucracy and a general lack of recognition, not with moving airplanes safely about the sky.

Of course, I haven't interviewed every controller, but I have talked to a lot of them over the years and have been in many control towers.

Controllers love the essentiality of it. They love aviation in all its forms.

They love the man-and-machine interface, which is at the heart of modern aviation. They love the sense of being part of a great system — the power, the language, the satisfaction.

They love the trust that every pilot puts in them. It is rewarding to be trusted in anything, but more so when the price of failure is known.

Nearly everything that is true of pilots is true of controllers. At its heart, the job is about flight, arguably the greatest achievement of mankind, the fulfillment of millennia of yearning.

There is a saying often attributed to Winston Churchill that was actually said by a pilot and insurance executive in the 1930s: “Aviation in itself is not inherently dangerous. But to an even greater degree than the sea, it is terribly unforgiving of any carelessness, incapacity or neglect."

That is true both of pilots and those at the consoles on the ground, who co-fly with them.


After President Ronald Reagan fired more than 11,000 striking controllers in 1981, some of the saddest people I knew were air-traffic controllers.

They were denied the right to do the work that they loved and suffered immeasurably for that. A few were able to get work overseas, but mostly it was a light that went out and stayed out.

I ran into one former controller, working as a baggage handler. He said he just wanted to be near the action even if he couldn't go into the tower anymore and do his dream job.

My only major criticism of Reagan in this case has always been that he didn't rehire the strikers after he had won, proving that they were wrong in striking illegally and that they weren't above the law.

Reagan was often a compassionate man, but he showed the controllers no compassion. I think that if he had understood the psychological pain he had inflicted, he would have relented.

Controllers have explained to me that if a controller finds the job stressful, then he or she shouldn't be a controller.

About one-third of the candidates for controllers' school, most of whom are trained at the FAA Academy in Oklahoma City, flunk out.

It takes longer to train a controller than a pilot — maybe not to work in the cockpit of a passenger jet, but certainly to fly an aircraft, including jets. It takes at least four years of schooling, simulator and then supervised controlling to qualify to be an FAA controller. Some controllers come from the military.

There is just one movie about air-traffic control, released in 1999, Pushing Tin. It flopped at the box office but has a cult following among pilots and controllers. It is funny and accurate. Pushing tin is controllers' jargon for what they do: push airplanes around the sky.

The fabled stress, in my mind, is the adrenaline factor. It is present in air-traffic control, and it is present in the cockpit of everything that leaves the ground, from single-engine Cessnas to Boeing 777s — and in ATC facilities.

It interests me that pilots rarely mention stress. It is, however, always mentioned by people writing about or talking about air-traffic control. I would venture that the most stress that controllers deal with is the stress imposed on them by the FAA.

I will aver that in the recent and record-long government shutdown, the largest source of stress for controllers was how they were going to put food on the table and pay their bills, not the stress that they feel at the console, pushing tin and keeping flying safe. Now they are stressed about back pay.

Llewellyn King, based in Rhode Island, is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS and an international energy-sector consultant.