Yes, as some of us older guys and gals will recall songwriter and singer Bob Dylan warning us:
"Come gather 'round people wherever you roam and admit that the waters around you have grown and accept it that soon you'll be drenched to the bone.
"If your time to you is worth savin' and you better start swimmin' or you'll sink like a stone . . . For the times they are a-changin'"
Speaking of major watershed moments, this writer can't recall a time so many are a-changin' so rapidly nor dramatically.
Take tidal wave erosion of foundational American ideals and principles for example.
It seems not so long ago that the vast majority of us felt very fortunate to live as citizens of a country bequeathed to us by very wise and brave people who valued equal merit-based economic opportunities and rewards to everyone with charity to those who truly need and deserve it.
Sure, it never entirely worked out that way, but nevertheless, it continuously got better, fairer.
This is a far cry from advocating equity for all, the central theme of Marxist philosophy which has produced pernicious social and economic consequences everywhere it has been tried.
Who could have imagined that New York, our nation’s largest city and iconic business citadel, would be on the cusp of electing a Marxist mayor?
The basic concept of national sovereignty is no longer universally assumed, as evidenced by open border policies of the preceding presidential administration and inactions of its U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Costly consequences of a Trump administration now having to drain urban floods of illegal migrants including criminal gangs enticed here by offers of free services in exchange for Democrat-voting loyalty should inexcusably never have become necessary.
As reported by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) this year, this foreign invasion has tragically included more than 300,000 unaccompanied children with unvetted sponsors, many of whom were placed with smugglers and sex traffickers during the Biden administration.
Of these, the Trump administration has located about 13,000.
On the global sea front, America's ship of state has encountered turbulent international waters entirely unrelated to climate change with previous captain Joe Biden sound asleep in the wheelhouse.
With top admiral Trump at the helm, Israel, together with the U.S. has decisively terminated Iran's nuclear threat in the Persian Gulf and has brought Middle Eastern countries into a historic peaceful armistice with Israel in the Eastern Mediterranean.
Our commander in chief now indisputably leads the free world in efforts to end military conflicts between Russia and Ukraine in Black Sea regions that pose special threats to NATO alliance countries which quite likely would never have commenced under his presidency.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration is releasing a powerful fossil-fueled American economy from regulatory climate-alarm-premised bondage while also ending and reversing feckless foreign tariff trade policies that have contributed to staggering national debt with more than $500 billion in annual interest alone presently exceeding military and Medicare expenditures combined.
We’re going to need all the energy we can produce — including clean coal and modern nuclear — to supply electrification necessary to power massive waves of new artificial intelligence data centers projected to support an American future awash in AI transformation while ensuring global economic and military competitiveness with China in particular.
Prompted in part by concerns that China will overtake America in global AI military and economic leadership, the Trump administration proposes to release growing backlogs of investment-backed data center proposals by reforming "power markets to align financial incentives with the goal of grid stability."
Whereas U.S. electricity demand was flat for two decades until around 2020, its current rise of about 2% a year is largely attributable to AI operating power demands which can cause a search on a generative AI platform like ChatGPT to use huge amounts of computing power, at least 10 times the amount of energy as a Google search.
Meanwhile, as electricity demand by power data centers is projected to increase by 13% to 15%, compounded annually through 2030, an energy shortage is already delaying new centers by two to six years.
As Federal Energy Regulatory Commissioner Mark Christie has warned, "The problem is that utilities are rapidly retiring fossil-fuel and nuclear plants. We are subtracting dispatchable [fossil fuel] resources at a pace that's not sustainable, and we can’t build dispatchable resources to replace the dispatchable resources we’re shutting down."
Or as Bob Dylan providently put it, "The line it is drawn, the curse it is cast, the slow one now will later be fast, as the present now will later be past.
"The order is rapidly fadin' and the first one now will later be last, for the times they are a-changin'."
Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and the graduate space architecture program. His latest of 12 books is "Architectures Beyond Boxes and Boundaries: My Life By Design" (2022). Read Larry Bell's Reports — More Here.
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