Riding on the City of New Ordeals
I can’t help myself. I am a child of the sixties and Arlo Guthrie is never far from my consciousness. Consider yourself lucky that I am not ready to give you my rendition of the Alice’s Restaurant Massacree in four part harmony as Arlo would say. My pal Arthur “Living Legend” Einstein, a founding member of my motorcycle gang knows Arlo well enough to have sold him his Indian Chief motorcycle (a rejuvenated and reproduced version of the original brand that ceased production in 1953). I have to add that the company’s greatest racing moments spanned twenty years after that with the 1950’s “Wrecking Crew” and Burt Munro, who, in 1967, rode his 1920 Indian Scout to a 205.67mph world record on the Bonneville Salt Flats, making him the subject of Anthony Hopkin’s The World’s Fastest Indian. But I digress. I am thinking of Arlo because I am riding the rails this morning. I am just old enough to think that train travel is a fun way to travel, and yet not so old that I romanticize it too much. I’ve been on the Eurail system and the Japanese and Chinese high-speed trains enough to know that Amtrak won’t be winning any medals for service, speed or comfort. But here I am on the 6:00am Acela from New York to Washington D.C.
It’s a pretty day with the sun rising to my left and the Amtrak service staff in the First Class Car (I treated myself for the sake of comfort…not for the free breakfast) are quite attentive with glasses (not plastic cups) of ice for my Diet Coke to jolt me into full wakefulness. I am heading down to the center of the universe, our nation’s capital, the scene of many crimes, the City of Impeachment, Washington D.C. I sort of like the sound of my new moniker in honor of Arlo’s rail-riding song, Riding on the City of New Orleans. The City of New Ordeals sounded a bit contrived at first, but as I think about it, it’s actually very appropriate. I cannot ever remember being so agonized over our political climate and the world’s overall prospects as I am today. I don’t know how to sort out how much of that is the real and unique state of the world and how much of that is that I am at one of those “passage moments” in life when I am particularly contemplative. Well, “I’ll be gone five hundred miles ‘fore the day is done” since I am doing a round trip today and will be safely back at Penn Station by 7:00pm, so I will have lots of alone time to think this all through.
I am heading to DC for a meeting with a research university consortium, the U.S. Department of Energy and a group of Chileans in a government institute set up to promote Chile’s future in clean energy. This is all an effort we have been recruited to join to form this clean energy institute and access a big bucket of money from the Chilean government to build out this enterprise in the northern Atacama Desert of Chile, one of the most barren and beautiful spots of the world. If you think sunrise over Philadelphia is nice, you should see sunrise over the Andes in the high desert. Chile has put the Atacama on the map several times. It is the center of much of Chile’s natural resource wealth and is a big mining spot for copper and lithium (can you say Eveready?) as well as gold, silver, iron, boron and phosphates. Now, looking to the future, Chile wants to become a world leader up there in clean energy. They have lots and lots of renewable energy potential with solar, wind and geothermal. There is more than enough energy for all of Chile’s needs and probably for the rest of the Andean countries as well. But Chile is a geopolitical mouse that likes to roar. So they want even more impact.
Back in the 1980’s when the global Less Developed Country (LDC) debt crisis hit, Chile was at the front of the line of countries trying to solve that and other economic problems. It was all happening because the dictator, General Augusto Pinochet, who had tossed out communist Salvador Allende in 1973, had installed his famous Chicago Boys (disciples of University of Chicago’s Milton Friedman) to revamp the economy with technocratic elegance. As they say, I was there. I was studying economics and government, majoring in modern revolutions (even considering going on for graduate work in the field at the behest of a favorite professor) in 1973. And then, lo and behold, in 1985 I was assigned by my bank to take over all the LDC debt and “find a better way out” than the normal debt restructuring path. If that sounds like I had changed sides over those dozen years, I will have to sit you down as I did my UN diplomat mother and explain it all to you very, very carefully. The point is, I was working with Chile and we did one of the first great debt-for-equity deals by buying the largest pension and insurance company in Chile. Chile was a pension pioneer under those Chicago Boys and got way out ahead of the world working a problem the rest of the world wanted to kick the can on down the road. Does that sound like today’s climate crisis to you? It should.
So I am going to see if the next chapter in Chile’s world leadership efforts (Go Greta Thunberg!) can lead to our little scientific research and development company, that is trying to accelerate and perfect the synthesis of green hydrogen, belonging at the center of the effort. So far all the people in the research consortium and the Chilean institute are seriously interested. This will be a “whites of their eyes” visit for me to see if it is as likely and near a prospect as they say it is. New companies cannot spend too much energy (pun intended) on dead-end efforts. I have many camels I can choose to chase, but I am trying to keep getting us the funding needed to keep our little group of a dozen scientists and engineers, working away in their world-class lab and testing facility in northern Scotland (with efforts also in the outskirts of Boston and even some in Iceland) and that ain’t easy. Investors rarely have long-term perspectives and in the absence of short-term indications of increasing value, they tend to get investor fatigue. I’m out here rabble-rousing to get money and generate enthusiastic adoption of our fundamental research proposition. We are high-tech ceramics gurus. High-tech ceramics done right make for solid-state electrochemical efficiency. We are one of the only girls at that dance right now so I’m feeling pretty. I will have Chileans blowing in my ear today I suspect, but I’ve been there before. We bought that Chilean set of companies in 1985 for $43MM in debt worth $27MM. Within ten years our interest was worth $1 billion. Not bad. If I can turn that Chilean trick one last time and help save the world as well, I think that’s worth a trip riding on the City of New Ordeals back and forth for a day.