Correspondence

...Tell disputes this...

...And even there the Post—and Massing—are mistaken...

...I don't dispute that power companies are scaling down their plants, but that doesn't necessarily support Lovins's soft-energy thesis...

...Bush's own treatment director, Dr...

...And I'm amused that he accuses me of bias while noting that many staff members of The Weekly Standard are friends of Walters and that some—including himself—worked for him...

...As likely targets for cutback or elimination on the "supply side" of the equation, he identifies the government's entire annual appropriation for source-country programs, border security, and the Drug Enforcement Administration...

...It is such hard-line views that disturb me, and the editors of the New York Times, and the many other Americans— conservative as well as liberal—who have become frustrated with the excesses of America's failed drug war...

...He ignored or failed to grasp everything I told him...

...In his Washington Post essay, Massing scored Walters for alleged active hostility to federal drug treatment programs...

...Another 30 percent comes from natural gas plants around Los Angeles...

...There was such a strategy, employed by the DEA during the Reagan administration...

...One reason that Lovins took our rather amiable conversation to be "insulting and accusatory," I suspect, is that he has hardly ever before encountered skeptical questioning from the press...

...So long as California followed my advice to do the cheapest things first, chiefly efficient energy use, that state had ample electricity (one-third of it renewable), held per capita use of electricity flat for a quarter-century, added 15 billion watts of efficiency and renewable resources, and saved billions of net dollars...

...It is micropower, not megapower, that the market favors, thanks to the far smaller financial risk involved...

...This was one of Walters's central goals...

...Tell describes as "perhaps" a "lie" (obviously he doesn't know for sure) my observation that Walters subscribed to the "kingpin" theory of drug enforcement...

...The power industry has abandoned 1,000-megawatt plants because they created too much "supply overhang...

...Tucker is controversial and in no way underlies my and the major energy firms' identical view of abundant natural gas resources...

...But I cannot see how our frustration can fairly be used to minimize what considerable good we did manage to accomplish...

...And that was only because President Clinton, the previous year, had signed revised legislation and two national security directives which newly authorized the practice...

...Here are his exact words: "You might want to ask yourself, as Tommy Gold does, why there are very large objects in the solar system that have enormous amounts of methane on them and as far as we know nothing has ever lived there...

...I will close by pointing out that the terms of my long-ago interview with Massing obliged him to call me for permission before ever using my words in print...

...Massing's fallback argument here makes frivolous an extremely complicated question...

...Using electricity from the grid to replace the electrical grid, as I pointed out, defies the laws of physics...

...During the four years Walters led the White House drug office staff, Bush administration treatment budgets doubled, to an annual $2 billion, a record Massing now concedes is unsurpassed...

...The crisis has many complex causes, but the main one is nutty restructuring that created a ticket-scalper's paradise...

...Here are the figures: LADWP gets 50 percent of its power from coal plants in Utah, Nevada, and Arizona, plus 10 percent from the Palo Verde nuclear plant near Phoenix...

...Even such a radical as George Pataki, the Republican governor of New York, has come around to this view, announcing his intention to soften New York's draconian drug laws...

...Tucker seems blissfully unaware of these modern energy options and trends—or that his favorite technologies are failing in the marketplace...

...But "most bloated of all," he contends, is the Federal Bureau of Prisons, "which spends about $2 billion a year...

...He even claims that my hydrogen transition proposal "defies the laws of physics"—laws he evidently doesn't understand as well as do the major energy and car companies that are implementing my approach for profit...

...This theory holds that trafficking organizations can be destroyed by hunting down and capturing their heads...

...While he's correct that treatment spending increased more under Bush than under other administrations, this in no way contradicts my point that such funding fell far short of the demand...

...Finally, I do not dispute that Lovins has been "recognized by leading awards and featured in top business publications...

...What Massing never explicitly acknowledges is that such a move would make necessary an effective federal amnesty for many, if not most, past and future trafficking offenses...

...This is the kingpin strategy...

...military's involvement in it...

...And at the end of Fiscal 1999, the same year The Fix was published, there were only 525 such inmates...

...No joint U.S.Peruvian mission resulted in an actual shoot-down until 1995...

...It is ubiquitous and abundant on earth as well...

...John Walters has never believed that genuine "low-level drug offenders" should be "locked away for years"—or locked away at all—and Michael Massing cannot produce a shred of evidence to the contrary...

...Wrong again...

...The April 29 Washington Post does not, in fact, date purported American support for that policy to 1990, but to 1992...

...No matter: It would be "beneficial in its own right" if a full $2.65 billion were hacked out of the drug enforcement budget...

...Or worse...

...Then there is Massing's bewildering insistence that my job as deputy chief of staff in the Bush drug office was a fiction, and that a "former Navy SEAL' was actually John Walters's Svengali...

...All this occurred on Wal-ters's watch...

...ONDCP's 1992 Annual Strategy (which Walters supervised) states that a top U.S...

...Shame on him...

...The market disagrees and is vigorously investing in those alternatives: Wind and photovoltaics are the fastest-growing energy sources worldwide, and wind alone, now the cheapest new generating option in the United States, is adding more global capacity each year than nuclear power did through the 1990s...

...MICHAEL MASSING New York, NY DAVID TELL RESPONDS: Michael Massing is flattered that I have spent five paragraphs discussing my doubts about his honesty...

...My argument is with Lovins's supplementary hypothesis that electricity generated by a fleet of hydrogen-powered cars can—as he told Fortune—"end the car, oil, steel, aluminum, nuclear, coal, and electricity industries...

...Nuclear power, concludes the Economist, has gone from too cheap to meter to too costly to matter...

...No, the sentence Massing quotes from the 1992 National Drug Control Strategy, lifted almost verbatim from an earlier document I wrote myself, is very much not the "kingpin strategy...

...AMORY B. LOVINS Chief Executive Officer (Research) Rocky Mountain Institute, Inc...

...Professor Gold's projections of almost unlimited natural gas supplies are essential to Lovins's "hydrogen transition" because—as emphasized in the article—hydrogen is only a carrier of energy...

...This travesty of competition is not a test of my ideas but their opposite...

...And whose name Massing does not know how to spell...

...Disguised...

...Which may be why his name does not appear in Massing's book, even in mangled form...

...But in a series of inter-agency meetings led by John Walters over the first few months of 1989, DEA was persuaded to set aside its "decapitation" emphasis in favor of "lateral" efforts against the entire crop-to-crack-house trafficking chain...

...Finally, Tell attacks me for writing that, during Walters's time at ONDCP "federal spending on treatment did increase some, but not nearly enough to meet the demand...

...The municipal utility has become the beacon of hope in the California debacle because it has kept electricity flowing without raising its rates...

...Yet now, all of a sudden, Massing has decided to resurrect Grabowsky as Edith Wilson to John Walters's Woodrow Wilson...

...Seven firms control two-thirds of the biddable market, so each can move the market and can earn more profit by generating less electricity at a higher price than more at a lower price...

...Tell himself, in an interview several years ago, mentioned Grabowski to me, dismissing him as a "schmuck...

...In The Fix Massing argues that the federal drug budget is grossly imbal-anced as between law enforcement and treatment services—and that some $2.65 billion should be transferred, presto, out of the former category and into the latter...

...Based on everything I've seen, John Walters still believes that low-level drug offenders should be locked away for years...

...But a major change was nevertheless understood to have taken place by everyone in the business...

...And somehow imagines that the slur he attributes to me—dismissing my friend as a "schmuck"—helps fortify, rather than explode, the charade...

...It obviously struck a nerve...

...Lovins thinks 500-mw gas generators are still too big and opposes everything larger than 250-mw gas-fired co-generation plants...

...As a favor to a fellow municipal authority, the California Public Utilities Commission set LADWP "replacement costs" very low...

...Regardless of what you think of Gold's theories about methane formation in the deep, hot biosphere, the fact is there's a hell of a lot of methane in the solar system that does not appear to come from living things...

...In those days, Washington "encouraged" (and helped) Peru only with real-time tracking of drug flights, so as to facilitate the identification of clandestine airstrips for future destruction...

...Several former ONDCP employees told me that Walters came to rely heavily on Grabowski...

...Has he truly forgotten about Ted Grabowski, a former Navy captain whom Walters brought over from the Pentagon to advise him...

...is controversial and in no way underlies my and the major energy firms' identical view of abundant natural gas resources...

...There are none...

...If Massing were half the expert he pretends to be, he would understand it, too...

...Where are the alternative energies...

...Tucker's belief system rests on denial of any practical alternatives to building more coal-fired and nuclear power plants...

...That's why the European Union expects to get 22 percent of its electricity from renewable sources in 2010, and Denmark plans to get half its power from wind turbines in 2030...

...The charge was demonstrably false...

...Tucker further attacks me as a "bit of a crackpot" with "sloppy or ill-thought-out ideas," some "on the fringes of scientific speculation" (apparently a reference to Professor Gold's deep-methane hypothesis, which I mentioned in passing but told Mr...

...As the current Economist remarks, "In fact, the trend since the mid-1970s has been toward smaller plants...

...Tell asserts that I have "masterfully disguised" a "stubborn bias" in favor of reducing the criminal penalties for drug offenses...

...Distributed generation is the hottest electricity market trend, simply because it's cheaper and more reliable than the now-obsolete central-station-and-grid solutions...

...this policy, he alleges, began only under Bill Clinton...

...Massing's calls for reduced penalties must involve a different breed of criminal altogether...

...I will flatter him some more...

...Granted, White House publications were nowhere so crude as to announce that DEA's past "kingpin" work had been fruitless and stupid, and subsidiary efforts against "key traffickers" certainly continued...

...Massing's misconceptions about the history of Peru's "shoot-down" policy are embarrassing...

...As for the auto companies trying to build hydrogen cars, I certainly don't dispute that...

...Among other things, I noted that Walters hired as his top aide a former Navy SEAL...

...He evidently has in mind a man named Ted Grabowsky, yet another friend of mine, a then-active-duty (not "former") Navy officer who worked in the office's "supply reduction" shop...

...And it means Michael Massing has violated the confidence of a source...

...It has also always suffered a significant vacancy rate...

...Nationwide drug treatment capacity has always fallen "far short" of theoretical "demand...

...It is precisely because the Los Angeles municipal utility was spared the forced march down the soft path that it is in reasonably good shape today...

...Perhaps these authorities know something he doesn't...

...As the Washington Post reported on its front page on April 29, the United States from 1990 to 1992 "encouraged" Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori to unleash his military "to attack clandestine airstrips, patrol transit routes and, most important, shoot down suspected traffickers...

...In my article, I described Walters's determination to step up the drug war in Latin America and the U.S...

...The resulting article is a tissue of falsehoods written with reckless disregard for the truth...

...The Bush administration formally and publicly opposed, as illegal under the 1984 Aircraft Sabotoge Act, any American participation in mid-air attacks on civil aviation...

...CRITICAL MASSING I'M FLATTERED that David Tell devoted so much of his editorial about John Walters ("John Walters and His Critics," May 21) to attacking my article about Walters in the Washington Post...

...The supposed unreliability of renewable sources is an old canard debunked two decades ago...

...to warehouse small-time drug offenders...

...Tell also describes as "perhaps" a "lie" my statement that Walters's Andean strategy marked the start of the Peruvian air force's shoot-down policy of drug planes...

...Herein lies the disguise, maintained in his letter above: Massing's picture of the federal inmate population is a fantasy...

...In real life, as it happens, Ted Grabowsky was assigned to one of those lower floors...

...This meant that the producers of wind and garbage-burning "alternatives" found it uneconomical to force the LADWP to sign long-term contracts to buy their expensive and often unusable power, as federal law allows...

...Before Tucker wrote this article, I gave him a lengthy interview, ignoring his insulting and accusatory tone and carefully correcting in detail his misunderstandings of each of the topics he misrepresents—my supposed errors about hydrogen and gasohol, what happened to California electricity and U.S...

...Lovins says he told me "Professor Gold's deep-methane hypothesis, which I mentioned in passing...

...There is no indication in subsequent statistics that offense-profiles for inmates serving marijuana or other possession sentences have changed much at all since then...

...The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power is the prime example...

...We could set all of them free and still not produce but a fraction of the savings Massing says are needed to fund new treatment services...

...The California electricity crisis was caused by the state government's rejecting in the mid-1990s, over my protest, what had worked well—and still does for the municipal utilities that continued to follow it and weren't restructured...

...This is all California has built in the last 20 years and that is why it is short of electricity...

...renewable energy, etc...

...In 1991, the last year for which comprehensive data are available, the average prisoner serving time for marijuana possession—the very smallest of "smalltime" federal offenses—had been sentenced for a crime involving 4,631 pounds of the stuff, with a minimum street value of $1.85 million...

...My point is that much of this praise has been naive and uncritical...

...The final 10 percent is from hydro, half of that from the federally owned Hoover Dam...

...In my book The Fix, I explicitly argue that drug penalties are too severe...

...It can only store energy generated from natural gas or other natural resources...

...Snowmass, CO WILLIAM TUCKER RESPONDS: Amory Lovins holds up the "municipal utilities that continue to follow [my advice] and weren't restructured" as proof that his "soft path" could have worked...

...Even during the 1990s, California installed more decentralized generating capacity than its total nuclear capacity...

...He proposes doing this with either (1) virtually unlimited supplies of natural gas or (2) electricity from the grid...

...As to my good friend Herb Kleber: I am quite certain he was frustrated by ONDCP's failure to do more for victims of addic-tion—as were we all, John Walters included...

...objective in the Andes was to "strengthen" the capacity of local authorities "to arrest, prosecute, incarcerate, and, where appropriate, extradite key traffickers...

...Shame on you...

...What no one in the press has asked, though, is, "How does LADWP generate its electricity...

...If the scores of major energy and other firms that have benefited from my advice over the past few decades shared his skepticism, they would hardly continue to pay the Rocky Mountain Institute for that advice, prestigious journals would not publish it, and my work would not be recognized by leading awards and featured in top business publications...

...Herbert Kleber, resigned out of frustration with ONDCP's failure to do more to treat addicts...

...If indeed I once for some inexplicable reason called Ted Grabowsky a "schmuck," it means I owe my friend an apology...

...Instead they are proposing and building 500-mw plants—including the possibility of some 500-mw nuclear plants— because smaller plants are more economical...

...The Fix contains a cartoon account of the Bush-era ONDCP as dominated by a handful of inexperienced political hacks and college professors (yours truly and John Walters), while the agency's true drug-policy experts were consigned to lower floors of the building—and studiously ignored...