News round-up, March 21, 2023
Most read…
Global energy use and emissions hubs set to shift by 2050
Over the past century, China, the United States, and Europe have accounted for the bulk of historic carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and energy use, as well as the majority of spending on renewable energy and emissions reduction.
Reuters by Gavin Maguire, editing by Germán & CoSwitzerland's secretive Credit Suisse rescue rocks global finance
Behind closed doors, the struggle to save the country's second-largest bank was underway even though Credit Suisse was publicly considered sound by the country's central bank and financial regulator.
Reuters by John O'Donnell and Andres Gonzalez, editing by Germán & Co“UBS agrees to buy Credit Suisse in shotgun merger…
POLITICAL MEMO
‘The Circus Continues’: For Trump, Legal Woes Resurrect Old Habits
The former president strengthened his political position in recent weeks, but an impetuous response to his potential indictment could alienate voters he will need to win back the White House.
NYT by Michael C. Bender, March 21, 2023
The Marvellous Boys of Palo Alto
From Silicon Valley Bank to Sam Bankman-Fried, the recent scandals upending the tech industry are rooted in a longer tradition of innovation and impunity.
The New Yorker By David Leavitt
“We’re living in a volatile world…
it’s easy to get distracted by things like changeable commodity prices or a shortage of solar panels. But this wouldn’t be true to our purpose – we can’t allow ourselves to lose sight of our end goal; said Andres Gluski, CEO of energy and utility AES Corp
Image: A general view of power plants of Adani Power is seen at Mundra town in the western Indian state of Gujarat April 1, 2014. REUTERS/Amit DaveGlobal energy use and emissions hubs set to shift by 2050
Over the past century, China, the United States, and Europe have accounted for the bulk of historic carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and energy use, as well as the majority of spending on renewable energy and emissions reduction.
Reuters by Gavin Maguire, editing by Germán & CoLITTLETON, Colorado, March 20 (Reuters) - The Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa will overtake China, North America and Europe as the key drivers of world energy use through 2050, with implications for global emissions potential and accountability.China, the United States and Europe have been the main sources of economic growth and pollution for the past century, accounting for over half of all historic carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and energy use, but also the majority of spending on renewable energy and emissions abatement.
In contrast, the emerging markets within South Asia, Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa currently account for less than 20% of worldwide energy use and emissions, data from Norway-based risk assurance firm DNV shows, and have less funding available for energy transition efforts than larger peers.
Global primary energy use will remain fairly flat through 2050 despite steep cuts from China, North America & EuropeEven so, thanks to strong investment and demographic trends within several key countries including India, Indonesia, and Nigeria, these regions will boost their collective consumption of primary energy supplies - which includes transport fuels - by nearly 60% through 2050, according to DNV data.
This collective rise in energy use across emerging Asia and lower Africa will more than offset the expected contraction in energy consumption in China, Europe and North America through 2050, DNV data shows.
Combined primary energy use in the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa will grow from roughly 115,000 petajoules in 2023 to nearly 194,000 petajoules by 2050, an expansion of more than 78,000 petajoules.
Over the same period, China, Europe and North America are expected to trim their collective energy use from around 326,000 petajoules to 250,000 petajoules, or by around 76,000 petajoules.
South Asia, Southeast Asia & Sub-Saharan Africa to be main drivers of global energy use by 2050This means that global energy consumption will continue to grow from current levels by 2050, despite the efforts of current energy transition leaders to reduce energy use by mid-century, DNV data shows.
FOSSIL FUELLED
In addition to growing overall energy use, most Asian and African countries will remain overwhelmingly reliant on fossil fuels for at least the next decade, due to the slow roll out of green energy and underdeveloped electricity grids that will struggle to accommodate intermittent renewable energy supplies.
This will likely result in a widening in the number of heavy emissions hubs from mainly in China and South Asia currently to parts of Southeast Asia and lower Africa, undermining efforts to cap pollution totals in all areas.
South Asia's largest economy, India, is expected to rely on coal, natural gas and oil for more than 70% of primary energy needs through 2040, after which solar, wind and other clean energy supplies will emerge as the dominant sources of power.
Indian subcontinent source of primary energy 2020-2050In Southeast Asia, more than 70% of primary energy is set to come from coal, natural gas and oil through 2035, while in Sub-Saharan Africa the share of fossil fuels in primary energy supplies is set to continue expanding until the mid-2040's, despite steep simultaneous advances in renewable energy supplies.
MANUFACTURING MOMENTUM
Adjustments in manufacturing capacity are set to be a key driver of energy demand growth across Asia and Africa over the coming years.
Downsizing of outdated or uncompetitive capacity is set to reduce Greater China's energy demand from manufacturing by 23% between 2025 and 2050, DNV data shows.
Over the same period, Sub-Saharan Africa is set to experience a nearly 200% climb in energy demand for manufacturing as more factories and industrial plants emerge in the region in response to favourable labour market and capital investment trends.
Strong growth rates in manufacturing energy demand are also expected in the Indian subcontinent (up 93% from 2025 to 2050), Southeast Asia (up 42.5% from 2025 to 2050) as well in as the Middle East, North Africa and Latin America.
Manufacturing energy use is seen growing sharply in Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia & Sub-Saharan Africa from 2025 to 2050Currently, coal, natural gas and biomass are the primary sources of power for manufacturing in Africa and Asia, where abundant and affordable energy supplies are often more important to a manufacturers' bottom line than the emissions toll linked to its fuel source.
However, given the widespread global support for rapid renewable energy deployment in all regions, it is likely that increased volumes of cheap green energy may displace some fossil fuels in certain markets over time.
If so, the global energy landscape of 2050 will not just have drastically different geographic concentrations of energy use, but also a cleaner emissions profile that may support energy transition efforts.
The opinions expressed here are those of the author, a columnist for Reuters.
Image: Germán & Co by ShutterstockSwitzerland's secretive Credit Suisse rescue rocks global finance
Behind closed doors, the struggle to save the country's second-largest bank was underway even though Credit Suisse was publicly considered sound by the country's central bank and financial regulator.
Reuters by John O'Donnell and Andres Gonzalez, editing by Germán & Co“UBS agrees to buy Credit Suisse in shotgun merger…
ZURICH, March 21 (Reuters) - Days before a hastily convened press conference late on Sunday that would make the world's front pages, Switzerland's political elite were secretly preparing a move that would jolt the globe.
While the nation's central bank and financial regulator publicly declared that Credit Suisse was sound, behind closed doors the race was on to rescue the nation's second-biggest bank.
The chain of events, led to the erasure of one of Switzerland's flagships, a merger backed by 260 billion Swiss francs ($280 billion) of state funds and a move that would upend global finance: favoring the bank's shareholders to the detriment of bond investors.
The events that unfolded in the landlocked nation -- long a bastion of political neutrality that has secured its standing as a safe-haven favourite for wealthy elites -- go against one of the key lessons of the 2008 financial crisis. The rescue concentrates even greater risks into one banking behemoth, UBS Group AG.
What is more, making bondholders cushion the blow to stock investors from the UBS-Credit Suisse tie-up rattled lenders, pushing up their borrowing costs in a threat to world economic growth.
The Swiss National Bank declined to comment while the finance ministry did not respond to a request for comment.
Reuters Graphics Reuters GraphicsBattered by years of scandals and losses, Credit Suisse for months had been battling a crisis of confidence of its own making. In a matter of days its demise was sealed.
Soon after news broke on March 12 that the United States would step in to guarantee all the deposits of two mid-sized lenders struggling to keep up with demands for cash, the spotlight was on Credit Suisse and how it would maintain depositor confidence.
Customers had already pulled $110 billion from the Zurich-based bank in the last three months of 2022, outflows that it was fighting to reverse.
A rainmaker who brokered a number of European bank rescues during the financial crisis, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Reuters that after seeing the U.S. banking collapses there was little doubt UBS would be called upon to shore up Credit Suisse.
The banker on March 13 rang up UBS warning the world's biggest wealth manager that it should prepare to receive a call from Swiss authorities.
By Wednesday, two days later, Credit Suisse was swept up in a full-blown crisis. Comments by the chair of Saudi National Bank, Ammar Al Khudairy, who said that he could not invest further in the Swiss bank sent Credit Suisse shares into a tailspin.
It mattered little that Credit Suisse's biggest investor also reiterated confidence in the lender. "They're a globally systemically important bank so ... monitored on a daily basis," he told Reuters. "There's no surprises like you would have in a middle-sized bank in the US. It's a completely different ecosystem."
Significant deposit outflows followed, the source who would go on to advise UBS on the merger told Reuters, declining to put a number on them.
In banking center Zurich and Bern, the Alpine state's capital, pressure was building. Yet as the discussions to salvage Credit Suisse got underway, Swiss regulators FINMA and the Swiss National Bank said that "the problems of certain banks in the USA do not pose a direct risk of contagion for the Swiss financial markets", conceding, however, that they would fund the bank with unlimited access to funding.
Credit Suisse too was conveying stability. The bank told Reuters on Thursday that its average liquidity coverage ratio, a key measure of how much cash-like assets the bank has, did not change between March 8 and March 14, despite the global banking crisis.
Swiss Finance Minister Karin Keller-Sutter, a former translator and teacher just months on the job, told the Sunday media conference that additional support for Credit Suisse had been agreed but held secret for fear of panicking people with a succession of emergency announcements.
She said was in close contact with U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and British finance minister Jeremy Hunt. Both countries have large Credit Suisse subsidiaries employing thousands.
Reuters Graphics Reuters GraphicsThere was far less communication with the European Central Bank in Frankfurt, said one person familiar with the matter. Credit Suisse's arms in Luxembourg, Spain and Germany were far smaller.
European regulators were, in particular, worried that the Swiss could impose losses on bondholders - a radical step that they did take, as the costs of a rescue spiralled for taxpayers.
"They did this on their own," said the person, asking not to be named, describing the outcome as a "big surprise".
A spokesperson for FINMA said that although it laid emphasis on Britain and the U.S. because of the scale of Credit Suisse's business in those countries, it had also informed European authorities.
Not everyone, however, was kept in the dark.
Saudi investors, with roughly a 10% stake in the bank, put pressure on the Swiss, warning that they could take legal action if they did not recover some of their ill-fated investment, said another person with knowledge of the matter.
Saudi National Bank did not immediately respond to a request for a comment
"The money had to come from somewhere," said one of the officials involved in the negotiations.
The Credit Suisse board, interested in preserving some unity in an increasingly fractious setting, stood behind them, and argued for a payout to shareholders, said the person.
Regulators too wanted to avoid a wipeout for shareholders that would have resulted in the winding up of the bank, potentially a bigger headache for the nation and a loss of face just hours after standing by Credit Suisse.
In the end, the Swiss agreed, choosing to wipe out 16 billion of francs of bonds, compensating shareholders with 3 billion francs and turning a key principle of bank funding on its head - namely, that shareholders rather than bondholders take the first hit from a bank failure.
It marks an ignominious end for an institution founded by Alfred Escher, a Swiss magnate affectionately dubbed King Alfred I, who helped build the country's railways. Credit Suisse banks many Swiss companies and citizens - including finance minister Keller-Sutter.
On Sunday, as a panel of Swiss officials and executives announced the deal, they were unrepentant.
"This is no bailout," Keller-Sutter told journalists. Thomas Jordan, the central bank chief, defended the package, as necessary to counter any wider shock.
"The taxpayer in this scenario has less risk," said Keller-Sutter. "The bankruptcy would have been the highest risk because the cost to the Swiss economy would have been huge."
Still, markets are reeling from the extraordinary turn of events.
"When you are a bank for billionaires, deposits can fly away very quickly," said one of the people involved. "You can die in three days."
Image: MediaPOLITICAL MEMO
‘The Circus Continues’: For Trump, Legal Woes Resurrect Old Habits
The former president strengthened his political position in recent weeks, but an impetuous response to his potential indictment could alienate voters he will need to win back the White House.
NYT by Michael C. Bender, March 21, 2023
Donald J. Trump, the former prime-time reality TV star known for his love of big stages and vast crowds, has embraced a more humbling and traditional style on the campaign trail in recent months.He held intimate events in New Hampshire and South Carolina. He fielded questions from voters in Iowa. And in multiple cities, he surprised diners with unannounced visits to restaurants where, with his more familiar Trumpian flair, he made a dramatic show of sliding a wad of cash from his pocket to buy everyone a bite to eat.
This strategy has highlighted the billionaire’s counterintuitive political strength at connecting with voters on a personal level — while also underscoring the chief weakness of his main potential Republican rival, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who can often come across as snappish or uncomfortable.
But now Mr. Trump faces a likely indictment in New York in the coming days, and how he responds to this moment could determine whether he continues to stabilize his standing as the Republican presidential front-runner or whether he further alienates the voters he will need to return to the White House.
The result will help answer a pressing question about his candidacy for many Republican primary voters: Can Mr. Trump show enough restraint to persuade moderate Republicans and independent swing voters to choose him over President Biden in 2024?
The Looming Indictment of Donald Trump
So far, he has returned to old habits.
Since Saturday, Mr. Trump has unleashed a series of personal, unproven and provocative attacks against investigators, Democrats and fellow Republicans. He accused Alvin L. Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney bringing the case against Mr. Trump, of being a “woke tyrant” who was “destroying Manhattan.” He called his Democratic opponents “animals and thugs.” He insinuated baselessly that Mr. DeSantis might be gay.
It was the kind of behavior that swing voters and moderate Republicans tend to dislike most about Mr. Trump: the long tail of chaos that often drags behind him; an inclination to focus on personal attacks instead of policy solutions; and his inability, particularly in 2020, to settle on a forward-looking message to explain his candidacy.
For three consecutive elections, these voters have largely abandoned Mr. Trump, as well as the candidates and causes he has endorsed. In 2020, he bled twice as much support among Republican voters as Mr. Biden did among Democratic ones, an outcome the former president will have to address in order to win in 2024.
“The circus continues,” former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, a Republican and a former federal prosecutor, said on Sunday on ABC. “He only profits and does well in chaos and turmoil, and so he wants to create the chaos and turmoil on his terms — he doesn’t want it on anybody else’s terms.”
“But, look, at the end, being indicted never helps anybody,” Mr. Christie continued. “It’s not a help.”
How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.
Taylor Budowich, a Trump adviser who now runs the main super PAC supporting the former president’s White House bid, defended Mr. Trump’s approach, saying he was “campaigning harder than every other candidate combined, while staying focused on the issues voters care about.”
“This is allowing the contrast to be made,” said Mr. Budowich, whose group filed a complaint last week accusing Mr. DeSantis of breaking state ethics law. “Donald Trump is the true fighter for the people, while every other candidate is different versions of the same.”
Some Trump allies believe that becoming the first former president to face criminal charges would carry a political upside for Mr. Trump, at least in a Republican primary. The former president has skillfully persuaded many supporters to metabolize critiques from opponents, investigations by law enforcement and impeachments by Congress as deeply personal attacks on them.
Mr. Trump has started to amplify the anger and the energy of his most ardent followers as he tries to fight his legal battle on a political playing field.
His muscular online fund-raising machine has started leveraging the potential indictment in appeals for campaign contributions, returning to a well-worn page in his campaign playbook. Mr. Trump and his team turned his first impeachment into tens of millions of dollars, and collected similar amounts as he made false claims of a stolen 2020 election. Last year, his two single biggest fund-raising days came after the F.B.I. searched his South Florida home for missing government documents.
But whether Mr. Trump’s attempt to galvanize his base is worth the political cost that he may pay in a general election is far from certain.
The first signs of regression appeared early Saturday, when Mr. Trump surprised his campaign aides with a social media post that declared he would be arrested on Tuesday. (A spokesman later clarified that Mr. Trump did not have direct knowledge of the timing of any arrest.)
On Sunday, he resurfaced his lies about the 2020 election, which had recently started to fade from his public speeches. But as a reminder that Mr. Trump still hasn’t turned the page, he injected false claims of election fraud into a social media post complaining about the Manhattan district attorney’s office.
On Monday, he hurled a crude joke at Mr. DeSantis after the Florida governor broke his silence about the potential indictment, criticizing it as politically motivated but drawing attention to Mr. Trump’s sordid behavior at the center of the case, which revolves around hush-money payments to a porn star who said she had an affair with the former president.
Whether three consecutive days of escalation was a temporary or lasting step away from the relative discipline that defined his last few months of campaigning remained to be seen.
But at the very least, it signaled a long week ahead. On Saturday in Waco, Texas, Mr. Trump is set to host the first large event of his 2024 campaign, returning to his cherished rally stage — where he is often at his most reckless.
Image: Germán & CoThe Marvellous Boys of Palo Alto
From Silicon Valley Bank to Sam Bankman-Fried, the recent scandals upending the tech industry are rooted in a longer tradition of innovation and impunity.
The New Yorker By David LeavittNot long before his death in 2007, my father told me that he “thought he might have” coined the term information technology. It turns out he was right. In an article titled “Management in the 1980’s,” published in the November, 1958, issue of the Harvard Business Review, Harold J. Leavitt and his co-author, Thomas L. Whisler, identify a “new technology” that “has begun to take hold in American business, one so new that its significance is still difficult to evaluate.” Since this technology “does not yet have a single established name,” the article notes, “we shall call it information technology. It is composed of several related parts”: “techniques for processing large amounts of information rapidly”; “the application of statistical and mathematical methods to decision-making problems”; and “in the offing, though its applications have not yet emerged very clearly . . . the simulation of higher-order thinking through computer programs.” By the end of his life, my father had adopted a far more skeptical attitude toward the organizations he earned his living trying to understand and improve. I am convinced that, if he soft-pedalled his immense if unwitting contribution to twenty-first-century English, it was because, in the deep pessimism of his old age, the last thing he wanted was to be remembered as the progenitor of the I.T. guy.
When my father co-wrote “Management in the 1980’s,” he was thirty-six and a professor at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon), in Pittsburgh. He was married and had two children. I was born in 1961, and in 1966 he accepted a position at the Stanford Graduate School of Business—an upheaval for my mother, who was forced to give up the dream house in Pittsburgh that they had just built, and a trauma for my brother and sister, who had to face the unhappy prospect of changing schools as teen-agers.
For me, on the other hand, the timing couldn’t have been better. At five, I hadn’t had enough of a life in Pittsburgh to register the loss. Instead, from the morning I started kindergarten at Stanford Elementary School (now defunct) to the afternoon I graduated from Henry M. Gunn Senior High School, Palo Alto was my home, its streets my streets, its parks my parks. When I wasn’t at school, I could usually be found biking around the some eighty-thousand-acre Stanford campus, which I regarded as my own personal back yard. The campus opened out directly from our house, a 1917 exemplar of the “California Cottage Style,” situated amid redwoods and sloping lawns in a neighborhood known colloquially as the faculty ghetto. Because Stanford’s charter forbade the sale of any of its some eighty-thousand acres in perpetuity, only professors and administrators could buy houses in the faculty ghetto—and only houses. To the land on which the houses were built—Stanford land—they were given a fifty-one-year lease, a policy that has led to what Theresa Johnston aptly termed the Stanford inheritance quandary, since it effectively bars homeowners from leaving their houses to their children, and that provided the jumping-off point for my novel “The Body of Jonah Boyd.”
My parents were the house’s third owners. We owed to their predecessors the fire pit that had been dug as a swimming pool but repurposed during the Depression, and the koi pond in which the koi kept dying, and the orchard of guava and persimmon trees where, as a small child, I played barefoot, sometimes stepping on bees. All told, it was an idyllic place to grow up, adults kept assuring me, the very threshold of a future that promised to be progressively governed, spiritually fulfilling, and technologically mind-blowing—which may be why, as I hit puberty, my intellectual and emotional compass began to point ever more intently East, or “back East,” as Californians say, since, for us, the East signified regression, retrogression, withdrawal into a stodgy and mildewed past. Yet this was precisely what I wanted. I wanted the stodgy and mildewed past. “Haunted” is the word that Malcolm Harris uses to describe Palo Alto, in “Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World,” his welcome and necessary new book—and it’s exactly right. To grow up in Palo Alto is to grow up amid obsolete visions of the future (“Management in the 1980’s”), unsettling relics of the past, marvellous dead boys. It is to grow up haunted.
Of course, if you keep travelling west to east, you end up back where you started. In 1992, in the wake of my mother’s death and my father’s remarriage, he called to tell me that he had decided to sell the house in which I’d grown up. By then, I was living in Italy, the third stop in an eastward journey that had already taken me to New Haven and New York. My brother was in Montreal. Only my sister remained close enough to home to suffer any real pangs of loss when our father, forbidden by Stanford to leave his own house to his own daughter, sold it instead to Joe Bankman and Barbara Fried, married law professors. That same year, the elder of the Bankman-Frieds’ two sons was born. His name was Sam.
I met the Bankman-Frieds once, in 2015. “Houses have no loyalty,” Geoff Dyer writes, in “Out of Sheer Rage,” a sentiment that echoed in my mind as Joe and Barbara, in shorts and T-shirts, took me on a tour of the rooms in which I had grown up and that, after nearly forty years, I barely recognized. Both of them struck me as intellectually restless and professionally ambitious in a way that reminded me of the adults I had known as a child—my parents’ friends and my friends’ parents. In addition to teaching at the law school, Joe was getting a doctoral degree in psychology, and Barbara had started a second career as a fiction writer. (The previous year, I had published one of her stories in the literary journal that I edit. A few years on, she would help to found the Democratic fund-raising organization Mind the Gap.) My memory of the hour or so that I spent with the Bankman-Frieds is tinged with an unease of which even now I have trouble locating the source. Possibly, it was an intimation of Palo Alto’s hauntedness, but one that seemed to emanate more from the future than the past—as if the multibillion-dollar failure of FTX, which Sam Bankman-Fried would not co-found for another four years, and as a result of which he would be placed under house arrest in his family home (my family home), were already exerting a proleptic influence, as if his fall were foreordained. Probably it was just the disquiet you experience when your childhood quarters take on the patina of new inhabitants and reveal the truth that they were never really yours.
The legend of Stanford is the legend of a marvellous boy. On March 13, 1884, Leland Stanford, Jr., Leland and Jane Elizabeth Lathrop Stanford’s only son, died of typhoid in Florence, two months shy of his sixteenth birthday. Demolished, his parents decided to memorialize him with a university, and in so doing unleashed upon the land they owned south of San Francisco the ghost of the tall, handsome, white boy genius who wanders its porticoes to this very day. True, Leland, Jr., himself died before his potential could be tapped, but that didn’t mean there weren’t plenty of other tall, handsome, white boy geniuses for Stanford to foster—an ethos that led Lewis Terman, who introduced the Stanford-Binet I.Q. test, to undertake the famous “genius study.” Using his own test as a measure, he winnowed out from California’s population of schoolchildren those who scored higher than 135—they were known colloquially as the Termites—and set about monitoring their intellectual progress. As Harris observes in his book, Terman’s belief “that the adult’s potential was always already observable in the child” effectively defined “potential” as a marketable commodity in its own right, and initiated a Stanford version of the drama of the gifted child.
“The children of California shall be our children,” Leland Stanford told his wife when they decided to found the university. The next question—a contentious one, as it turned out—was what the university was supposed to do with these children. For her part, Jane Stanford hoped to cultivate what she called the “soul germ” in her students. She also wanted to make psychical research part of the Stanford curriculum, much to the chagrin of the university’s first president, David Starr Jordan, whose vision of Future Stanford was as a training ground for the cadre of (tall, handsome, white, male) geniuses into whose hands its legacy—and money—could be safely passed. The conflict came to a head in 1905, when Jane, at a moment when Jordan was trying to scrape together the funds needed to pay his faculty what he felt they deserved, allocated five thousand dollars to bring no less a star of psychical research than William James to Palo Alto. But then Jane died of strychnine poisoning. At last unfettered, he diverted the psychical research money to psychology studies and went full steam ahead with his plan for a technocratic Stanford, leaving its appendix, Palo Alto, to absorb the soul germ, which flourished in its soil.
The Palo Alto of my youth was a far stranger and more remarkable place than I gave it credit for being. On California Avenue, there were head shops and herbal-medicine shops and an old-fashioned pharmacy with Clairol boxes and comic-book racks. There was the Fine Arts Theatre with its Art Deco façade. There was Sheik’s, the Indian restaurant where you sat on metal chairs exactly like the ones at my elementary school and ate off paper plates. Other streets offered other wonders: Plowshare Books, on University Avenue; East West Books and the legendary Kepler’s, on El Camino Real; both World’s Indoor Records and Chimera Books and Music were situated in the grid of streets that made up downtown Palo Alto. (With the exception of East West and Kepler’s, all these places are long gone.) At the Stanford Coffee House, my guitar teacher, Linda Waterfall (her real name), performed on Friday nights. Transcendental meditation, Gestalt therapy, and E.S.T. (Erhard Seminars Training) were at the apex of their popularity in the Bay Area, as was IAMathon, a sort of junior version of E.S.T. that my chemistry teacher suggested I join in order to alleviate my test anxiety. (Test anxiety! The middle school I’d attended was named after Terman. In such an atmosphere, how could one not have test anxiety?)
At the Printers Inc. bookstore, where I worked in the summer of 1979, the biggest sections were Computer Science and New Age, with Poetry coming in a close third. This coupling of hard science and soft theology wasn’t anything new. On the contrary, it dated back at least to the early years of the twentieth century, when the Irish poet John Varian moved to Palo Alto with his wife, Agnes. Ardent theosophists, and part of the Dublin literary circle in whose center W. B. Yeats stood, the Varians belonged to the Temple of the People, a theosophist community with headquarters in Halcyon, near Pismo Beach, and a thriving Palo Alto base. They had three sons, two of whom, Russell and Sigurd, would go on to develop the klystron tube and subsequently found Varian Associates, one of Palo Alto’s first tech firms. (As Harris notes, it was in Halcyon, just inland from the Oceano dunes, that the Varians did their initial work on the klystron—further evidence of the extent to which technological and New Age endeavors, which Jordan regarded as inimical, were becoming elsewhere in California ever more entwined.) Every weekday, I biked past the Varian headquarters on my way to school. A good friend of my sister’s lived in Ladera, a neighborhood that had begun life in the mid-nineteen-forties as a housing coöperative organized along Halcyonic lines. Sigurd Varian and the novelist Wallace Stegner were among its early members. The coöperative failed, and today a house in Ladera costs upward of three million dollars.
Seaboard: pioneers in power generation in the country
…Armando Rodríguez, vice-president and executive director of the company, talks to us about their projects in the DR, where they have been operating for 32 years.
More than 32 years ago, back in January 1990, Seaboard began operations as the first independent power producer (IPP) in the Dominican Republic. They became pioneers in the electricity market by way of the commercial operations of Estrella del Norte, a 40MW floating power generation plant and the first of three built for Seaboard by Wärtsilä.
