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The Next Big Idea: An Infrastructure Bank
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The late, great senator from New York Daniel Patrick Moynihan used to lament that Americans had lost the courage for big projects like the one he championed for the lower West Side of Manhattan, Westway. He wondered what had happened to the civic courage that allowed the building of the Erie Canal, the Hoover Dam (a giant jobs project), the transcontinental railroads and the Interstate Highway System.
And his lament was when we could still afford to build big things.
Civic timorousness has now been joined by fiscal constraint. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has canceled a project to build a much-needed new tunnel from his state into Manhattan. A station on a new subway line between Dulles Airport in Virginia and Washington, D.C. hangs in the balance, as local jurisdictions throw up their hands at the cost. The issue is whether a less-costly station above ground should replace a planned, underground station in the airport terminal. High speed rail was rejected in Florida ostensibly over cost fears.
But it is the lack of big projects, in a time of financial crisis, that are beginning to threaten the competitiveness of America’s future.
Our infrastructure — once the envy of the world — is in deplorable shape, and declining faster than it is being rejuvenated: airports, bridges, canals, passenger rail, ports, roads, sewage and water systems are all falling apart.
In short, America seems broken. And those things that are not yet broken, like the air traffic control system and the electric grid, are showing signs of mortal strain.
An additional blow to infrastructure has been the zeal of Congress in getting rid of earmarks; a funding device that, at its best, when done openly, directed some miniscule parts of the federal budget to places where the infrastructure was strained to breaking, or simply did not exist.
Because it was abused in the middle of the night, with dollars going to dubious projects and firms, Congress has, to quote Sen. John Kerry (D –Mass,) “thrown the baby out with the bathwater.”
Against this background of impotence, brought on by budget paralysis, there is a stirring in Washington among academics, some politicians (particularly Kerry and Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Tex.) who have introduced a bill), the think-tanks, the craft unions and the columnists — in short, the establishment — that there should be an infrastructure bank, a public-private partnership bank, devoted to the long-term (up to 45 years) financing of infrastructure projects.
The idea, as espoused by panelists at a recent meeting on Capitol Hill, representing interests from the construction contractors, financiers like The Carlyle Group, to the AFL-CIO, is that the bank would make direct loans, guarantee private-sector loans, and verify the creditworthiness of projects that could be financed by the private sector on favorable terms with guarantees from the bank against default. Robert Dove of The Carlyle Group beamed when he described a model project of public-private cooperation along highways in Connecticut.
Although it is very unpopular to say in Washington that anything in Europe works, the model for an American bank might well be the highly successful European Investment Bank with a nod to the Export-Import Bank of the United States, a successful public-private financial partnership.
Whether the bank is the institution proposed by Kerry and Hutchison, talk of an infrastructure bank that would create jobs and help reverse years of infrastructure decay will be coming to a town hall near you soon.
The concept of “infrastructure” is vague, but the word “jobs” is a powerful political opiate. And there are plenty of sound-bite-friendly statistics, such as one from the American Society of Civil Engineers that says that it will take $2 trillion over five years to restore the U.S. infrastructure, or that we spend less than 2 percent of our Gross Domestic Product on fixing up the country while China is spending 9 percent.
No wonder Kerry gets misty-eyed when he talks about the shame he feels at riding the fastest train in the world in China or of sliding from London to Paris in two hours and 15 minutes with his cell phone and computer plugged in.
– For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
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Merkel Finds German Engineering not Good Enough for Nuclear
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Question: What is Germany most famous for these days? Answer: engineering.
In light of the worldwide respect for German engineering, precision and management, why has Chancellor Angela Merkel taken up arms against her most admired national talents?
For that is what she has done in turning Germany against its nuclear future — a future she endorsed last fall. She has closed seven reactors permanently and has the 10 others set to cease operating sequentially by 2022.
Ostensibly, she has taken this draconian action in light of the Fukushima-Dai-ichi crisis in Japan; but more especially because her conservative-led Christian Democratic Union party and its coalition members have taken a drumming from the Green party in local elections.
Since the Japanese crisis, the German Greens have mobilized large anti-nuclear demonstrations throughout Germany. Indeed, the party was formed immediately after the Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania in 1979. Since then it has been a force to be reckoned with in German politics — always there, but sometimes more vocal than others.
To German commentators, Merkel’s about-face speaks of just one thing: opportunism. Fearing the dissolution of her fragile coalition, she gave the Greens what they wanted: complete surrender on the nuclear issue.
While buying a political-life extension, Merkel has cast a shadow over Germany’s future as the economic engine of Europe. Without nuclear, Germany will face severe economic and even environmental challenges ahead.
Merkel says that the nuclear slack will be taken up by boosting its renewable energy sources – wind, solar and hydro — from 17 percent of the mix today to double that. Nuclear has been providing 25 percent of German electricity. It would take about 20,000 windmills alone to replace that.
Also, Merkel says, electricity consumption will be cut by 10 percent.
Quite how any of this will be achieved is uncertain. Already, conservation is a high priority in Germany and alternative energy has been a high priority for years.
Most likely there will be electricity shortages in parts of the country, mostly in the south; there will be more brown coal burned; and Russia will further extend its energy hegemony over Northern and Eastern Europe by upping the amount of gas provided to Germany for electricity production. Another ironic likelihood is that as Germany will have to import more electricity and it will have to do so from countries with a large nuclear base like France.
The three German utilities that own various nuclear plants are in a state of shock, even disbelief. One, Eon, already is talking about billions of euros of compensation for loss of business and capital goods. The others are likely to follow suit. There is likely to be litigation in the German and the European courts.
Early polls show that while the German people do not want nuclear, they also see the Merkel move as political and cynical. One poll found that 70 percent of the electorate found the chancellor’s actions to be opportunistic.
First calculations, not denied by Merkel’s administration, expect electricity prices – already among the highest in Europe – to bound by nearly 20 percent.
The untold damage is to the concept of the invulnerability of German engineering – that something special that has made German cars the gold standard of the world. If Germany does not believe that it can engineer its reactors to levels of safety and manage them with Prussian zeal, then what has happened to the German ethic?
Brown coal — the dirtiest there is, being somewhere between bituminous coal and peat in its makeup — is the default position in German energy. Dirty to burn but plentiful, it may now make a comeback with severe environmental consequences for Germany and its neighbors.
When Merkel talks about alternatives, she is really talking about wind and at thousands more turbines will now have to be added in a country with limited land area for diffuse energy sources.
Although the Germans have been more successful than thought possible with solar, it remains a cold, gray northern country that requires a lot of reliable affordable electricity to keep its place in the global economy. Merkel appears to have put her own future above that of her country. –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
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Natural Gas Is not Exactly Environmentally Clean
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If you live in the United States — almost anywhere in the U.S. — there may be a gas well coming to a site near you. Even on property you think you own, a gas well may be on its way.
Then there is the problem of how much air and water pollution that neighborhood gas well will bring with it. So far pollution has brought the most public outcry, largely because it is the issue that environmentalists are concerned with.
The new abundance of natural gas is a bonanza, but it is not a free lunch. Gas wells near or in your backyard are dividing communities, particularly in rural areas, and could eventually divide the environmental movement.
For decades natural gas has been the benign fuel without the pollution of coal, the geopolitical ramifications of oil, or the politics of nuclear. In fact, natural gas is almost too good to be true — or it has been until this latest chapter in its history opened. New supplies and new ways of liberating them are tarnishing the image of gas as the best energy available.
Traditionally, drilling for gas was like drilling for oil. A hole went deep into the ground until it penetrated a big cavern of gas with tributaries, which would yield more gas if the rock there was broken up. This rock-breaking was called hydraulic fracturing, and this was accomplished by injecting various liquids including water, chemicals and gas that had seeped to the surface outside of the piping.
Fifty years ago, there were even two experimental programs to use nuclear detonations for fracking gas. That method didn't go forward.
Since then, things have come a long way in the search for more gas and new technologies have evolved. Chief among these are seismic mapping and horizontal drilling. The former gives geologists a very exact picture of what is underground, and the latter makes the collection of it much more efficient.
Horizontal drilling finds the lock and fracking turns the key. Whereas once drillers put down one straw and sucked, now they put down one straw and then send out others horizontally in many directions.
Thus enabled, gas can now be exploited where it was previously unreachable — in shale rock. But to get the rock to give up its harvest, fracking is essential. With it come problems, and gas — if you will — loses its innocence.
Fracking is environmentally contaminating:
a. The fracking agent along with the methane could seep into drinking water and alarm farmers and communities.
b. Methane tends to escape around the well and is a major greenhouse gas.
c. A gas well using fracking demands millions of gallons of water. Many pollutants, like mercury and nitrates, are borne to the surface with the discharged water, which is then held in leach ponds.
This negates the big environmental virtue of gas that it burns with half the carbon dioxide emissions of coal and none of the nitrous oxides. The lunch tab has gone from nearly free to quite pricey.
The problem for the environmental movement is that it has favored natural gas for electricity production over its bete noirs: nuclear and coal.
The problem of an unwanted gas well landing on land you thought you owned is an historical one which recognizes "split estates." This was a concept in law that the land had two values: the surface and the oil and gas contained under the surface.
These two estates could be split and a landowner could sell the rights to the subterranean estate. Historically, many have done so. Now with the value of shale gas rising in 30 or more states, homeowners are finding that grandpa or a previous owner may have tried to capitalize too early by selling the underground rights.
As Amy Mall of the Natural Resources Defense Council told a meeting on fracking in Washington this week, the law's results can be devastating. A family in Wise County, Texas, lost all value in their 10-acre holding when a gas company, which leased the mineral rights from neighbors who had bought them earlier, set up a rig and occupied five acres of land for their operations.
This is part of the back story on the new bonanza of natural gas that is giving so many so much hope for our energy future. The new gas is not your father's gas and while it is a boon, it is not all blessing. – For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
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Twitter Rides to the Aid of Britain’s Gossip Press
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A mighty battle is shaping up between the British government and the American-controlled social networking sites, primarily Twitter and Facebook.
The government of Prime Minister David Cameron is committed to extending the harsh libel and privacy laws, with which it attempts to control the notorious tabloids, to social networking sites. The sites not only carry salacious gossip, but also provide tools for circumventing laws on the books for newspapers.
This state of hostilities between the government and the social media is a new front in a war that has raged in Britain since the first tabloids appeared in the 1920s.
The appetite for gossip in Britain is at the heart of the government's schemes to discipline the media, or at least hold it accountable, for the violation of the privacy of the famous, infamous and titled. Notwithstanding Lindsay Lohan, Charlie Sheen, Jennifer Aniston and assorted American glitterati adorning the supermarket tabloids, the British passion for the sex lives of the rich and famous dwarfs its American equivalents by orders of magnitude.
In turn the energy, resourcefulness, deceit and intrusion of the British tabloids is appalling. No electronic device, trick or bribe is overlooked in the endless campaigns to shame the famous, embarrass the wayward and, in general, romp around their boudoirs and places of assignation.
The tradition of paying informants – maids, butlers, nurses and old lovers –handsomely for lurid details (or anything that can be made to sound lurid) means that the prominent love at their own risk. Yes, it is sex, far more than money or corruption, that sells the British tabloids; and sales push up the revenues. The ability with modern technology to eavesdrop on private conversations has made things worse.
Despite the toughness of British libel law, the battle rages, led by two of a bunch of tabloids, the daily Sun and the weekly News of the World, both owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, the parent company of Fox and The Wall Street Journal in the United States.
It is not that these two are more amoral than the rest, but rather they are better at the game than their competitors. They pay more to informants and the paparazzi than the rest.
For these scoundrels, the United Kingdom in general and England in particular, are target-rich. It starts at the top with the monarchy. Yes, the tabloids cheered the royal wedding but they are ready – indeed, anxious – for the first hint of an indiscretion, domestic discord or even wardrobe malfunction. Then there are the aristocrats, often ignored, but center stage at the suggestion of sexual impropriety.
On to the rest, the footballers, the television personalities, the movie stars. Know what “bonking” is? It is the word favored by the tabloids for sex, as in footballer Y is bonking actress X.
No detail is too private or sick-making not to be rushed to millions of breakfast tables. To keep things spiced up, The Sun has a young, busty woman, naked to the waist on Page Three most days. Helps the corn flakes go down.
To protect the private lives of public figures, the British courts enjoin newspapers from publishing specific reports, if the victim is forewarned — and the preemptive “gagging” orders are feared and loathed in the media. They are so restrictive that it is illegal even to say that one has been taken out. But these themselves may have rebounded against the government the courts and the celebrities.
Frustrated journalists and gossip lovers have taken to Twitter and sometimes Facebook to list, often erroneously, which celebrities are hiding behind preemptive injunctions. The implication of such outing is that there are dark goings on.
Now celebrities are taking to the Internet to deny that they have taken out restraining orders or have a need to. So the government is ham-fistedly going after the social networks. It wants them to reveal the names of the Twitter and Facebook account holders.
As with a lot of regulation, the government and courts have made things worse. But if it goes after the American firms that provide Internet services in American courts, they will run into the First Amendment.
Even the European Court has sided in the past with the press. Generally governments are suspected of wanting to curb political speech and investigation, not tales from the bedchamber. Britain rules the sheets, apparently. – For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
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The European Dilemma: Austerity or Growth
May 14th, 2012
Guests: Darren Gersh, PBS's "Nightly Business Report"; Laure Mandeville, Le Figaro; Michael Fauntroy, George Mason University
Radio’s impact in Washington and the nation
May 7th, 2012
Guests: Tim Farley, Host and Program Director, Sirius XM Radio’s POTUS Channel 124
Elections here and abroad; crises in Syria and Sudan
April 30th, 2012
Guests: Arnaud de Borchgrave, CSIS; Ed O'Keefe, The Washington Post; and Christopher Chambers, Georgetown University
Word and phrase origins in the U.S. presidency
April 23rd, 2012
Guests: Paul Dickson, author; Carl Cannon, RealClearPolitics.com
Political “wars” in the 2012 election, and real wars elsewhere
April 16th, 2012
Guests: Michael Fauntroy, George Mason University; Ed Kelley, The Washington Times; Chuck Lewis, Hearst Newspapers