And What if Someone Just Did?

Most of the developed world is completely reliant on our electrical and communications connectivity. Our financial system, power grid, water supply, access to police and fire, and even our personal interrelationships are linked by wires, cables, satellites and transmissions through the ether. Our GPS systems, military preparedness and emergency systems are all dependent on a very vulnerable system. The more urban we get, the more dependent we are. Routers, file servers, computers control the electrical power flow, data storage and just about every aspect of modern existence.

The vulnerability is obvious. A villainous miscreant could rely on old-world destructive power – blow up a few key critical components and watch the systems fail – or we might instead watch as hackers (read: criminals, miscreants and malevolent foreign powers) crack into our most critical systems and take down entire cities, perhaps entire regions… and maybe even… the entire nation. It’s pretty clear that that our most critical systems seem wide open to those with the skills to climb in. The fact that our federal personnel records were hacked – revealing the most personal information about federal employees, past and present, and their circle of family and friends (over 22 million records compromised) – tells you that properly trained and motivated hackers can pretty much have their way with our most critical systems.

So if a malevolent government were interested in taking down an entire city, just to show us who’s boss, what would it look like? The August 18^th Washington Post sets the scene: “First the power goes out. It's not clear what's gone wrong, but cars are starting to jam the streets -- the traffic lights are down. And something seems to be going haywire with the subways, too… No one can get to work. And even if they could, what would they do? A cyberattack has driven the city to a halt.” People stuck in elevators and subways. Ventilation systems falling. Maybe some looters get some ideas, and there are only a few surveillance cameras functioning on batteries. Back-up systems fly on line, generators running on gasoline until it runs dry. Gridlock and fallen communications systems make tending to police and fire emergencies impossible. Small fires spread quickly with nothing to stop them. It will be more than just a power outage.

It hasn’t happened… yet. But we are going to see one or more versions of the above scenario sooner or later, and austerity measures pretty much insure that our attempts to secure against such horribles will be “too little, too late.” Like most of our “disaster lessons,” we have become a reactive society, not preparing even for the obvious, reacting at vastly greater expense only when the inevitable disaster redefines the space.  But right now, hacking into critical systems is too damned easy. The electrical communications grids are infrastructure begging for a huge and necessary fix.

“Cities, like the rest of the world, now rely on a lot of computers. But the systems used to make even the most sensitive systems run can still contain security flaws. While the risk of an actual attack may not be imminent, the threat is looming large over cybersecurity researchers who warn that local governments aren't prepared.

“‘The potential attack surfaces of a city is a huge challenge,’ said David Raymond, deputy director of Virginia Tech's IT Security Lab. ‘The digital pathways between all of the entities and organizations in a city is often not well managed. In many cases, there's no overarching security architecture or even understanding of holistically what the city looks like.’

“Researchers have already discovered vulnerabilities with new technology being used in many cities… Last year, researchers found that traffic monitoring system used in dozens of U.S. cities, including Washington, D.C., could allow a malicious hacker to falsify traffic data and manipulate stop lights. District officials say the city is reviewing the security of its traffic sensors. A few years ago, two Los Angeles traffic engineers pleaded guilty to hacking into the city's traffic system and slowing down traffic at key intersections in support of a labor protest…

“Transportation systems are a key ‘pressure point’ for cities, places where technology that is otherwise well secured might intersect in ways that make them vulnerable to a targeted attack that could cascade throughout a city, according to Raymond and fellow researchers Gregory Conti, a professor who teaches cybersecurity at West Point, and Tom Cross, the chief technology officer at cybersecurity firm Drawbridge Networks. Raymond, Conti and Cross presented their research at the Black Hat USA cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas earlier this month.

“‘Each person is looking at their little silo and defending their department or agency -- to varying degrees of success -- but they don't appreciate the relationships between their piece of the puzzle and other people's pieces,’ Cross said.

“And in some cases, older industrial systems never designed to be online end up making their way onto the Internet. Researchers using Shodan, a search engine used to identify systems connected to the Internet, have routinely discovered traffic lights, water treatment facilities and even power plant controls online.” The Post.

In short, we are just begging for it. The first hit might be a small one, testing here, probing there. But think how Kim Jong-Un, who keeps talking about declaring war on the United States for its hostile moves on his little North Korea, could hack into any city’s systems, probably not much more of a challenge than hacking into a movie studio over an insulting films. Actually, we are still technically at war with North Korea, but Kim probably has no real issues with ignoring the armistice and teaching the United States yet another lesson. Oh, he’ll just deny it. Or maybe it will be a couple of pranksters with mayhem on their minds.

I’m Peter Dekom, and until we wake up and cherish and maintain what we’ve got, there is always the question of how long we can expect to keep it.

Missiles of August

Global diplomacy is divided into four basic categories: what you are told, what you know or what you think you know, what the diplomats think is happening and the truth. In August of 2012, after a Turkish jet was downed and Syrian forces shelled Turkish towns with armaments that included Scud missiles, the United States (with Germany, Netherlands & Spain) responded to this NATO ally’s request and supplied (in 2013) a system of Patriot anti-missile batteries in Southern Turkey. OK, got it. We are also the largest part of Israel’s Iron Dome anti-rocket/missile system.

As ISIS rolled forward, taking huge chunks of land in Syria and Iraq, even battling Turkish Kurds on the Syrian border, Turkey sat back. Kurdish independence/separatist groups, lodged in these border towns, were just as much an enemy to Turkey as was ISIS, and so, wink-wink, Turkey became a passageway for foreign ISIS recruits enroute to the battleground to the south. As ISIS later unleased some of its bombing activities against Turkish civilian targets, Turkey finally joined the anti-ISIS fray, or so it seemed. At first, it was just enabling US Air Force jets and drones to operate from within Turkey (from an airbase at Incirlik). Then it seemed as if Turkish forces themselves were joining the offensive against ISIS… except it soon became clear that the offensive was more directed at Kurds, who had been so effective against ISIS.

Turkey had long prioritized taking down the Shiite Assad regime. Turkey’s rather strident President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, an uber-conservative who had been moving his secular nation increasingly towards Sunni values, was watching his power erode despite a recent victory at the polls. Kurds were a big part of the problem. With his nasty parliamentary coalition falling apart, Erdogan needed a miracle. You see, “Mr. Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, which has shaped Turkish politics for more than a decade, was stunned in a June 7 election, losing a parliamentary majority partly because of gains by the pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party.” New York Times, August 18^th. Problems with Kurds, eh? The United States was flummoxed.

Turkey’s direct involvement against ISIS seemed to suggest a large local Sunni power with the wherewithal to make a big difference. As Turkey instead focused on its Kurds, however, it was unclear how without the potential of their boots on the ground – or at least a containment of ISIS gains – anything local could stop ISIS.

Meanwhile, Erdogan’s hold on his own government was getting even worse. “Lengthy negotiations by Mr. Erdogan’s prime minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, ended without an agreement for a [new, going-forward] coalition, first with the largest opposition party, the Republican People’s Party, then with a smaller, far-right nationalist party.” NY Times. It was all but certain that another parliamentary election had to be called and that Erdogan’s efforts to kill the ascension of Kurdish votes might just back fire. Instability rising. Were Turkish boots on the ground against ISIS simply an unrealistic expectation?

Iranian and Iraqi troops, Shiites feared by regional Sunnis often more that ISIS, were the only significant “other” available troops capable of providing the volume of soldiers required. Were the United States and its allies being drawn back into a massive military presence in the Middle East, despite pledges to the contrary? Was Turkey really in the battle against ISIS or was Erdogan simply crushing Kurdish separatists to strengthen his dwindling hand within his own country? Would Erdogan even remain in power?

“Internationally, the decision by Turkey and the United States to work together was hailed as a critical rapprochement between allies who had long disagreed on an approach to the civil war in Syria. The new mission is to clear the Islamic State from a 60-mile-long area along the Turkish border in Aleppo Province and from territory about 30 miles south. But now, two weeks after the plan was announced, it is unclear which forces will fight the militants on the ground, what support they will receive and how long it will take, Turkish officials and Syrian rebel leaders say.” New York Times, August 16^th.

U.S.-Turkish relations frayed again. The Turkish offensive against Kurds seemed to be a betrayal of Erdogan’s commitments against ISIS. Claiming that the decision was joint, the United States just announced that it was withdrawing its Patriot Missiles from Turkey for much-needed “updating,” signaling to the world that the risk of attacks against Turkey from the Assad regime in Turkey were now materially reduced. American diplomats suggested that such anti-missile defense systems might be redeployed, but more likely against potential Iranian and North Korean threats. US military spokespeople also noted that it would only take a week to drop Patriots back into Turkey if needed.

On the surface, it seemed that Turkey understood the changed circumstances. After all, the Patriots were never really used, and with American super jets stationed and operating from Incirlik, that would seem protection enough. So much for logic; symbolism was rising in significance. “Four American officials, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss a diplomatic issue, said [August 16^th] that Turkish officials were livid when told two weeks ago that the United States was withdrawing the Patriots. Patriot systems have been stationed just north of the Syrian border since January 2013.” NY Times. Turkey would be hard-pressed to withdraw its permission for US aircraft from Turkish bases, since Erdogan announced to the world he was fighting ISIS now. But expecting Turkey to up its direct role against ISIS… yeah right…

What’s really going on seems to be a continuation of our basic failure to understand Middle Eastern geopolitics and that ISIS is reconfiguring regional borders whether we like it or not. Unless the 50,000 (and growing) ISIS forces are countered by more than airstrikes and threats to destroy their oil fields, ISIS is digging in, building local administrative capacities and taking deeper control of conquered territories. Nothing is really going the way US policy-makers have intended. The clock is ticking, and ISIS is growing.

I’m Peter Dekom, and American foreign policies needs to be fabricated based on more than our hopes, dreams and abysmally failed schemes.

Has Prison Itself Become Cruel and Unusual Punishment?

The Founding Fathers reacted to a number of British horribles when they declared their independence from England in 1776, but the main human rights sections of the Constitution – the cherished Bill of Rights (the ten amendments) – were not added until 1791. Debates over these amendments have occupied courts across the land ever since, with many interpretative cases winding up before the United States Supreme Court.

“Strict constructionists” have argued that the document is a fixed an immutable set of rules that need to be applied as originally drafted. “Activist” justices have long argued that the Constitution is a living and breathing document that must be read in the moral and social context of an evolving society. How else, they argue, can a 239-year-old democracy apply underlying principles from an era of sailing ships, horse-drawn carriages and flintlock muskets so as to have relevancy in a world of superhighways, automobiles, jets and missiles, automatic rifles, computers and nuclear weapons?

Oddly, even strict constructionists seem to be willing to stretch the plain meaning of those amendments when the notion strikes them, such as the recent concurring opinion of Associate Justice Antonin Scalia in Citizens United who found that corporations were “people” within the meaning of the First Amendment, noting that unions and businesses have “the freedom to speak in association with other individuals, including association in the corporate form.” Scalia pretty much ignored the word “people” and told us that the First Amendment in this case only looked at “speech.” So back to that Eighth Amendment.

I’ve presented a number of blogs with strong statistical evidence, numbers that really have not been refuted by much of anybody, that make it painfully obvious that our massive prison system not only does not work, it causes many more social problems than it solves. I’ve discussed the psychological destructive power of years of continued isolation in solitary confinement, both as a “jail within a jail” as well as the standard of incarceration in our infamous SuperMax facilities. I’ve ripped into the legally-enforced mantle of a closed system, prisons shrouded in mystery, cloaked in secrecy under the false premise of “prison security,” such that most Americans really know little more about our system of justice than what is shown on general-access prison shows.

While many Americans believe that prison abuse falls within the slogan “who cares; they get what they deserve,” the reality is that certain races and classes of people – unable to afford a viable path to prove their innocence and slammed by a bail system that they could never afford – are in prison for the wrong reason… or for crimes linked more to untreated mental illness or drug use, where some alternative form of rehabilitation or care is vastly more appropriate. Or for relatively minor crimes. I have already blogged about their fate in the employment world when released, one more factor that amplifies the recidivism rates accordingly.

So the question arises as to whether the Eighth Amendment (which, among other proscriptions bans cruel and unusual punishment) can be interpreted under current social conditions or whether we must ignore the world around us and apply only the social realities present in 1791 (were there massive, well-armed racial/ethnic gangs dominating jails in 1791?)? And if we accept elevated healthcare and social standards that apply generally in contemporary society as relevant to Constitutional interpretation, exactly what does that mean for Eighth Amendment standards as applied to our prison system? We’ve seen courts find “cruel and unusual punishment” merely in overcrowded circumstances, but are there more obvious violations?

Is a prison sentence, incarceration away from family, friends and an open lifestyle with freedom of movement, the punishment that society has demanded? Or does society also require that incarcerated prisoners also face extreme risks of beatings, stabbings, extortion and horrific living conditions as part of that punishment, regardless of the nature of the criminal act? Solitary confinement is another variable noted above. At what point does incarceration under these conditions move from “appropriate” to “cruel and unusual”? And if the questioning eyes of the press only discover the horribles from an occasional leak that even prison authorities are unable to contain, how is society served when these angry individuals are returned to the world, as most are, with hatred and revenge on their minds?

We have all followed the recent escape of two exceptionally dangerous killer-criminals from the upstate New York Clinton Correctional Facility. We watched as one was shot and killed and the other captured, with clear evidence of collusion with prison guards enabling the prison break. But what we are now learning, due to a flood of reports that prison officials were unable to stop, is how, during the massive manhunt, the prisoners in the honor unit that housed the escapees were interrogated.

“Night had fallen at the Clinton Correctional Facility in far northern New York when the prison guards came for Patrick Alexander. They handcuffed him and took him into a broom closet for questioning. Then, Mr. Alexander said in an interview last week, the beatings began.

“As the three guards, who wore no name badges, punched him and slammed his head against the wall, he said they shouted questions: ‘Where are they going? What did you hear? How much are they paying you to keep your mouth shut?’ One of the guards put a plastic bag over his head, Mr. Alexander said, and threatened to waterboard him.

“For days after the June prison break, corrections officers carried out what seemed like a campaign of retribution against dozens of Clinton inmates, particularly those on the honor block, an investigation by The New York Times found. In letters reviewed by The Times, as well as prison interviews, inmates described a strikingly similar catalog of abuses, including being beaten while handcuffed, choked and slammed against cell bars and walls.” New York Times, August 11^th.  No prisoners have so far been implicated in the above-noted escape.

When it was clear that the abuse was “out of the bag,” the NY corrections department stated: “Any findings of misconduct or abuse against inmates will be punished to the full extent of the law.” Those prison guards actually believed that no one would ever find out about their conduct… because for the most part, no one ever does. As much as we may think such reactions are rare, anyone who has spent any time with open access to our prisons knows otherwise.

The epidemic of “beat up squads” of correctional officers seems to be standard in too many prisons across the land. New York seems to have more than its share. FishKill Correctional Facility inmate, Samuel Haskell (bipolar and serving time for a drug offense), got into a confrontation with his correctional supervisors back in April. “[He] was thrown to the floor and was handcuffed. As many as 20 officers — including members of a group known around the prison as the Beat Up Squad — repeatedly kicked and punched Mr. Harrell, who is black, with some of them shouting racial slurs, according to more than a dozen inmate witnesses. ‘Like he was a trampoline, they were jumping on him,’ said Edwin Pearson, an inmate who watched from a nearby bathroom.

“Mr. Harrell was then thrown or dragged down a staircase, according to the inmates’ accounts. One inmate reported seeing him lying on the landing, ‘bent in an impossible position.’… ‘His eyes were open,’ the inmate wrote, ‘but they weren’t looking at anything.’… The manner of death: Homicide.

“No officers have been disciplined in connection with the death, officials said. A classification of homicide is a medical term that indicates the death occurred at the hands of other people, but it does not necessarily mean a crime was committed… Inmate witnesses at Fishkill say they are the ones who have been punished. Several described being put into solitary confinement and threatened with violence after speaking with Mr. Harrell’s family, their lawyers and with news reporters.” New York Times, August 18^th. That’s the American system of justice? Feel good about that?

We are paying really major tax dollars to train those incarcerated into greater layers of “criminal expertise,” we deny most the ability (with a prison record) ever to get a real job with hope and a future, keep folks in prison far longer than most of the developed world for comparable offenses, and we instill in them an anger and an attitude that truly does threaten the general society when they are released. Recidivism is vastly more probable than rehabilitation. Are we getting what we want? We sure are paying for this system, through the nose.

I’m Peter Dekom, and exactly what does our criminal justice system say about our American human rights values, and does this failed structure simply reinforce a global perception of the great American hypocrisy?

Nuclear Unclear

When you think of the underlying conflict between Iran and a good chunk of the rest of the world, there is this subtle set of undertones that complicate the matter. Iran, if they could speak honestly: “Why do you, United States, get to have nuclear weapons and think you have the right to keep others from doing exactly what you have done? And remember, America, you are the only country on earth to have deployed such weapons directly against an enemy!” Yeah, but we haven’t threatened preemptively to blow another country out of existence. “We, like you, want to have our own peaceful, nuclear electrical power generating plants to bolster our own productivity.” Yeah, but (i) you have more than enough fossil fuel to generate pretty much whatever you want or need and (ii) you are creating weapons-grade fissionable material that is completely unnecessary for bona fide power generation.

We don’t trust them. They don’t trust us. I got it. I don’t like this situation any more than the greatest skeptic in Congress, but sanctions haven’t remotely worked – if anything living with and accepting a harsh life under sanctions has been viewed by the Iranian government as its own people’s commitment to their leaders (and attempt to reject that stance is likely to produce nasty local responses for the protestors) – and the military alternative would be a whole lot messier than anyone can imagine.

Sleeper cells everywhere would be activated, even here. The Strait of Hormuz would be heavily mined, stopping the flow of oil to most of Europe. Russia would smile with its own massive oil reserves suddenly flying through the stratosphere dollar-wise, ready to finance Putin’s anti-Western dreams. Economic disruption and high oil prices could reignite another global mega-recession. And while Iran’s nuclear program would be hit, it has been so widely spread about the country, with very deep underground facilities, that it would be only temporarily impaired. Oh, and ISIS would probably have to declare a holiday to celebrate a major crippling of its greatest regional enemy, while raising the price of their most valuable commodity. They would clearly be invigorated to expand their attacks.  

(i) Treaty, (ii) sanctions that have never worked (pretty much guaranteeing that Iran will soon have nuclear weapons) or (iii) the above military scenario. Pick one. Well, the world itself may have already “picked one,” with neutral Switzerland already announcing its support for the negotiated nuclear agreement with Iran by immediately lifting sanctions against that rogue nation, an effort that opens some pretty major banking benefits to Tehran. Even if the U.S. rejects the treaty, there are enough nations in the world unlikely stand behind the U.S. in maintaining the sanctions in light of the general global approval of the accord and America’s participation in generating it.

But there are even more global questions about even peaceful nuclear power everywhere. On the one hand, sustained lower oil prices (like for the foreseeable future) have discouraged folks from the kind of alternative energy building surge that the planet truly needs to stem the obviously super-destructive impact of global warming that rages around the world daily. On the other, the United States, using its chemical fracking technology, is less dependent on petroleum imports than it has been since the 1960s. But nuclear power generation is a controversial matter that just won’t go away.

The 1979 partial meltdown at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island plant and 1986 full meltdown at the Chernobyl, occurring during the Soviet era, weren’t enough of a global wake up call. The notion of nuclear power generation has only been particularly controversial since the 2011 earthquake/tsunami-induced full meltdowns at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi power plant. Germany began shutting down its nuclear plants almost as fast as did Japan.

The Japanese handed the disaster to the stumbling and bumbling of a totally inept Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency (NISA – part of METI – the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, the cabinet agency charged with economic growth). They had no plan, no path to contain and shut off the leaking reactors, and were forced to scour the earth to identify experts who could. It didn’t help that nuclear power facilities in Japan were held by different companies with vastly differing command, control and safety systems. All this in one of the most earthquake-prone countries on earth, a nation whose very geography is wrapped around tectonic plates in one of the most volatile parts of the Pacific Rim’s notorious Ring of Fire.

Fukushima and the surrounding area remain an uninhabited wasteland, destined to stay that way for thousands of years. Contaminated debris has washed up on distant shores, including our own Pacific Northwest. Industrialized Japan, symbolized by the glitz and glitter of a neon-lighted Ginza in Tokyo, was instantly slammed with an electrical power reduction of 30%. Power prices have increased by 20%. Since 2013, none of Japan’s 48 nuclear power plants have been operational. Japan shifted heavily to subsidize and encourage non-nuclear/non-100%-imported fossil fuel alternatives, but the reaction simply was insufficient to resurrect an economy that so was desperately dependent on massive available electrical power.

The Japanese government has struggled with how to bridge the gap between power supply and demand. Despite popular opposition, they have long recognized that some if not most of those idle reactors would have to be restarted to slake the nation’s power thirst. They had to deal with how to restart plants that have been shut down for four years. Normal plants shut down for a few months every two years for refueling (and to dispose of dangerous spent fuel rods) and every ten years for major updating and repair.

It’s anything but clear that Japan has these issues under control. NISI has evolved, been semi-replaced and rebuilt away from METI into a new Nuclear Regulatory Authority, now under the Ministry of the Environment. The issue of diverse ownership and varying standards of the existing plants has been addressed (national standards have toughened), perhaps only partially, but no one is sure the necessary issues have been solved. Inspectors and regulators have been all over the remaining plants.

So on August 11^th, Japan took its first step to restoring its nuclear-power-generating capacity, as “the country took what appeared to be a decisive step toward resurrecting the nuclear industry and ending a de facto freeze on the use of atomic power, as an electric utility restarted one of dozens of reactors that were taken offline after the Fukushima disaster… The reactor at the Sendai Nuclear Power Plant [pictured above], in Kagoshima Prefecture, was the first to return to service since government regulators introduced upgraded safety standards two years ago.” New York Times, August 11^th.

With doom-sayers (including former PM Naoto Kan) and under 200 protestors, the nuclear power program was back on, with current PM Shinzo Abe insisting that there was no other way to supply Japan’s power needs and resurrect a moribund economy. Surveys suggest that most Japanese favor keeping the power plants shuttered; they’ve adjusted to the higher energy prices and don’t trust the risks of nuclear power. Japan’s business community had other plans, and they have prevailed.

Germany’s story is very much predicated on the Fukushima disaster in Japan: “Within days of the March 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, large anti-nuclear protests occurred in Germany. Protests continued and, on 29 May 2011, Merkel's government announced that it would close all of its nuclear power plants by 2022. Eight of the seventeen operating reactors in Germany were permanently shut down following Fukushima.

“Chancellor Angela Merkel said the nuclear power phase-out, previously scheduled to go offline as late as 2036, would give Germany a competitive advantage in the renewable energy era, stating, ‘As the first big industrialized nation, we can achieve such a transformation toward efficient and renewable energies, with all the opportunities that brings for exports, developing new technologies and jobs.’ Merkel also pointed to Japan's ‘helplessness’ – despite being an industrialized, technologically advanced nation – in the face of its nuclear disaster.

“In September 2011, German engineering giant Siemens announced a complete withdrawal from the nuclear industry, as a response to the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Remaining nuclear companies in Germany are E.ON Kernkraft GmbH, Vattenfall Europe Nuclear Energy GmbH, RWE Power AG, and EnBW Energie Baden-Wuerttemberg AG.” Wikipedia. But Germany also has been feeling the power demand curve pressure and is constantly looking at the viability of keeping some nuclear plants online.

We grapple with the demands of modern industrialization, climate change and some very serious contamination risks that no one is sure will go away. Japan is an island with no local fossil fuels and really heavy energy needs; it just gave up looking for alternatives despite local sentiments. Germany is also warily eyeing hostile Russia as a likely growing source of near-term fossil fuel-generated power. Nuclear power would curtail that ugly dependence.

What’s our longer-term strategy? Can a president remotely counter a Congress and a litigious business community that opposes fossil fuel restrictions without reemphasizing nuclear power as the go-to alternative? How do you feel the United States will fare with its own energy programs (or lack thereof)? Can conservation and more efficient fuel usage in general solve the problem without massive new power sources being brought on line?

I’m Peter Dekom, and we have a very long way to go to create a sustainable balance between our need for energy vs the environmental risks we are still taking.

Seductive Inductive Charging

You’re seeing this technology evolving with smart phones and other small portable appliances like electric toothbrushes: the ability to charge an electrical appliance without having to plug it in. It’s called “inductive charging,” and simply put it’s using an electromagnetic field to transfer energy from one device to another. For the tekkies out there, Wikipedia tells you more (you can skip description this if you “get it” without the nasty details):

“Induction chargers typically use an induction coil [literally, a lot of wire wrapped like a spool of thread] to create an alternating electromagnetic field from within a charging base station, and a second induction coil in the portable device takes power from the electromagnetic field and converts it back into electric current to charge the battery. The two induction coils in proximity combine to form an electrical transformer. Greater distances between sender and receiver coils can be achieved when the inductive charging system uses resonant inductive coupling. Recent improvements to this resonant system include using a movable transmission coil i.e. mounted on an elevating platform or arm, and the use of other materials for the receiver coil made of silver plated copper or sometimes aluminum to minimize weight and decrease resistance due to the skin effect.” Whew! It works.

There are clear advantages: No cords. No electrodes exposed to the elements. No plugs to wear out. Great for medical implants (no surgery required as with replacing old-world batteries). And some big negative issues: “[L]ower efficiency and increased resistive heating in comparison to direct contact. Implementations using lower frequencies or older drive technologies charge more slowly and generate heat within most portable electronics.” (Wikipedia). Slow. Expensive.

But the negatives simply represent challenges to engineers in trying to figure out how to replace fossil fuels as our principal power source. If you can avoid fossil fuels and generate electricity from solar, wind, geothermal, hydroelectric and other green tech… and perhaps make fission and fusion nuclear power safer… the question then becomes how to transfer that electrical power to one of the biggest fossil fuel consuming technologies: cars and trucks. Currently, if you have a plug-in electric, you generally have a rather significant issue with “range.” You cannot drive from Los Angeles to San Francisco today with any commercially-available all-electric vehicle without a major stop for recharging.

A quick battery swap-out is one answer, but how would you field replacing a major section of your car with large part about which you know nothing? How about just a faster recharge? Tesla has created the most efficient mass-charging system for its vehicles – called a “Supercharger” – which can add 170 miles of range in thirty minutes. Kind of makes a long road trip a lot longer, not to mention that there are only about 500 venues that even offer this capacity in the U.S. Compare that to the five minutes it takes to refuel for another 300-400 miles at a traditional gasoline or diesel pump, with stations everywhere.

How about charging while you’re driving? Can we increase efficiencies to make this work? “Newer approaches reduce transfer losses through the use of ultra thin coils, higher frequencies, and optimized drive electronics. This results in more efficient and compact chargers and receivers, facilitating their integration into mobile devices or batteries with minimal changes required. These technologies provide charging times comparable to wired approaches, and they are rapidly finding their way into mobile devices…For example, the Magne Charge vehicle recharger system [developed by Hughes Electronics] employs high-frequency induction to deliver high power at an efficiency of 86% (6.6 kW power delivery from a 7.68 kW power draw).” Wikipedia.

Could we actually use the highway we’re driving on as the power transfer source? “The U.K., through a group called Highways England, is about to begin trials on electric highways which will see inductive charging equipment fitted underneath roads. When electric cars drive on them, their batteries would be juiced up as they drove by wireless technology running under the asphalt.

“Transport Minister Andrew Jones says the U.K. government is committing around $780 million over the next five years to develop rechargeable low-emission vehicles, aiming to ‘keep Britain at the forefront of this technology.’ As part of this overall initiative, the off-road trials will start later this year, and last for 18 months, while the government figures out the cost and feasibility of bringing it to the nation's highways.

“So it'll be a while before Brits can drive their Teslas indefinitely down the M25 without stopping for ‘gas.’ But the U.K. is not the first country to look into smart highways. A similar project in the Netherlands imagined a Smart Highway that could charge electric cars as they drove. This is clearly a path more than one country is considering pursuing.” FastCompany.com, August 13^th.

But both the U.K. and the Netherlands are relatively small land masses with fairly contained highway systems when compared to the vast open spaces that define so much of the United States. Will this happen in the U.S. faster than driverless cars? Simultaneously? Or, given our current infrastructure track record, not at all.

While we have the technology to pass these charging costs (power as well as infrastructure) to those who use the system, it’s reasonably clear that it will take decades to get enough electric cars on the roads economically to justify the implementation of this capacity. But these front-loaded costs are a huge political challenge as we have seen from the current Congress; the one spending vector they seem unwilling to address is preparing for the future, at least as to non-military needs. Bottom line: we really need to adapt, prepare and grow! Now, or do we even have a viable and competitive future?

I’m Peter Dekom, and I agree with this question asked by FastCompany.com: “Wouldn't it be nice if America, which has been letting its own infrastructure crumble for decades, tried something similar?”

How Refined is California?

It’s been awhile since I lived on the East Coast – D.C. area and Southern Connecticut – but I remember the little derisive twitters (can we use that word that way anymore?) of laughter, sometimes spoken in Valley Girl mimics fer sure, about California’s greatest cultural contribution to the world: legally making a right turn on a red light. That was before the Silicon Valley, bolstered by Stanford and Berkeley rose to their present financial heights and before New York conglomerates swallowed up the media and entertainment industry in Los Angeles. But still there remains this cultural smugness from the east, tittering (better?) about the vapid intellectual void they call California.

We are disliked, sometimes more than even self-aggrandizing Texas, but as big as Texas might be, California is bigger. It has the largest economy and biggest population in the United States. If it were a country, while it would rank only 34^thin population, it would rank seventh in economic size. We are America’s fruit and vegetable breadbasket with powerful rural conservative areas, but we are decidedly an urban, ethnically diverse and basically liberal state. Beaches to ski resorts, we seem to have it all… sort of… but we still get those East Coast sneers.

But life out here, despite the better weather and greater emphasis on the outdoors accordingly, is still tough. High rents and real estate prices. Wildfires, drought and earthquakes. Gang wars. In spite of wonderful universities, public schools that are just plain awful. Taxes that make us shudder. And restaurant prices that are only trumped (can I use that word anymore?) only by New York City. Despite a slow layering of modern transportation networks – like B.A.R.T. in the Bay Area and the Metro in Los Angeles – we are decidedly the number one car culture state in the land.

High costs are stemming some of the once overwhelming pattern of easterners flowing west, and even for those who cannot tear themselves away from California, we occasionally (rarely) look with envy to the East Coast. The one area that most Californians just do not understand is the price of gasoline, even when corrected for the gas tax differential. Recently, regular in California averaged well over a dollar a gallon more than most of the rest of the country.

We are told it is because of “refining anomalies” stemming from both California’s stricter environmental standards and the need to switch out fuel types to match the seasonal temperature changes. Huh? We don’t have that much in the way of seasonal changes out here! We understand the higher costs in Hawaii where gasoline has to be shipped across an ocean, but California, itself an oil producing state?

Even as Washington considers allowing domestic oil extractors to sell their crude into overseas markets (they can’t now), refiners are shaking at the prospect of losing that business… and there will be more pressure on them to raise their prices to make up for the loss. The price differential here in California is staggering. “A consumer advocacy group says Californians paid a $4.8-billion premium compared with prices in the rest of the nation during the first half of 2015 because of the state's gasoline price spike, and it proposed legislation to fix what it sees as problems in the market.

“At a news conference [August 5^th], Consumer Watchdog, backed by billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer, criticized the fuel refining industry for overcharging Californians while the rest of the nation paid as much as $1.50 less. In July, Californians paid $1.2 billion extra, the group said.” Los Angeles Times, August 5^th. It’s a simple question, really, are Californians simply being gouged as local refiners move in lockstep to push prices higher? Steyer and his organization want full disclosure of refinery profits and a mandate for minimum reserves to level off any spikes across refinery “changeovers.” They also want violators to pay!

Citing California-specific regulations and high taxes, the local refining industry asks legislators to look at the price cycle and refinery profits over an entire year and not season-by-season. But why were California prices rising fast when the rest of the country was experiencing a drop in the cost at the pump? “For the week of July 13, California refiners garnered gross profits, also known as refinery margin, of $1.61 a gallon, a record. The refinery margin, composed of refiner costs and profits, is calculated each week by the California Energy Commission… The gasoline price surge has been worst in the Los Angeles area, in part because of regional refinery outages and low inventories.

“Braden Reddall, a Chevron Corp. spokesman, said gasoline prices are cyclical, and although some refineries received substantial profits during part of this year, at other times, those margins have been razor thin… ‘It is clearly misleading to focus on one part of the results from one part of the business from just one quarter,’ Reddall said.” LA Times. Is this a political protest against regulation? Does it matter that when California refinery profits were “razor thin” (by the way, Reddall, define “razor thin” in the petroleum industry!) but the price at the pump then matched the rest of the nation when corrected for gas tax differentials? Do the words “because we can” mean anything to you? See any price gouging or antitrust issues anywhere around these numbers?

But then, the oil business is used to a privileged place in our economy: tax benefits, de facto subsidies and deferrals. To this day, by law, the EPA cannot mandate disclosure of the chemicals used by oil extractors in their fracking process. The oil business, at all levels, has strongly opposed just about every environmental control ever suggested by any governmental body (American cities would otherwise look like Beijing!), and wallows in a purposeful lack of transparent details in their economics… You can just guess why.

They decry the attempts to bring this California refining anomaly under control while telling all of us that it’s just too hard to explain their money chain: “Tupper Hull, a spokesman for the Western States Petroleum Assn., said it is difficult to determine what exactly the oil refineries' profits are from the refinery margin figures alone. He called the efforts by Consumer Watchdog and Steyer a ‘campaign of disinformation.’” LA Times. They apparently don’t like the numbers even from the California Energy Commission, numbers that do not separate out actual profits anyway. Transparency, it seems, is just not something the oil business is really comfortable with. Hmmmm…

I’m Peter Dekom, and big business is clearly entitled to make big profits… as long as those profits are legally garnered with a full conscious consideration for overall social and consumer needs.