Our Future

I am generally not one to proselytize religion on this blog, as evidenced by the more or less complete absence of religious reference on here. However, I went to church this past Sunday and the minister said something that really hit home with me. I will do my best to paraphrase:

While it has become a popular, feel-good message to state that the children are our future, it simply isn't true. The children are no more our future than are seeds our salad. It is incumbent on us, the adults, to ensure that the children are properly brought up to care for and tend the future. If we fail our own children, the failure of the future belongs to us in greater proportion than does it belong to our children. It is our responsibility to save the seed corn from today's crop, plant that seed corn, tend to it, harvest it, and save a new batch of seed corn.

In other words, when I stop paraphrasing a man who is considerably more eloquent than I, insofar as we adults (and I say "we" to very much encompass myself, at 41 years old) complain about the "kids these days," that complaint should be directed inward, as we have collectively failed to raise the "kids these days" in a way that is satisfactory for us. Insofar as the "good old days" were better than the present days, this is our fault. The world today is what we made out of the world of yesterday. For the mathematically inclined, it can be represented by an equation: [today] = [yesterday] + [our influence].

I suppose the proper question for our public policy, at every level, is twofold: (1) is "our influence" a positive or negative input to the world of yesterday; and (2) are we properly saving, planting, etc., our seed corn and teaching the next generation to do so, or are we eating it with no thought for the future?

Those Pence Brothers . . . They're Just so Nice!

Ugh! I think I need to go punch myself in the face just for writing that headline! Hopefully anyone who has ever read this blog recognizes the sarcasm in the title.

Anyway, this recently came to my attention:

Vice President Mike Pence turns nostalgic when he talks about growing up in small-town Columbus, Indiana, where his father helped build a Midwestern empire of more than 200 gas stations that provided an upbringing on the “front row of the American dream.”

The collapse of Kiel Bros. Oil Co. in 2004 was widely publicized. Less known is that the state of Indiana — and, to a smaller extent, Kentucky and Illinois — are still on the hook for millions of dollars to clean up more than 85 contaminated sites across the three states, including underground tanks that leaked toxic chemicals into soil, streams and wells.

Indiana alone has spent at least $21 million on the cleanup thus far, or an average of about $500,000 per site, according to an analysis of records by The Associated Press. And the work is nowhere near complete.

Well, I mean, what's $21m when you're a "christian first, conservative second, and Republican third" here in Indiana? It's not like you're some selfish school kid who wants to, you know, eat lunch or something. Million-dollar pollution problem? Great! Poor kids want lunch? Feed 'em to Rokita!

Kiel Bros. has paid for only a fraction of the overall effort.

OK. So here we are, the Pence family business has imposed tens of millions of dollars on us, the taxpayers, and people are still willing to believe in his so-called "fiscal conservatism." I tell you what, next time I'm looking for someone to get my spending under control, I'm not just going to let him (or her) do my spending for me!

In a statement, Pence’s older brother Greg Pence — who was president of Kiel Bros. when it went bankrupt and is now running for Congress as a Republican — distanced himself from the cleanup costs.

“Greg Pence has had nothing to do with Kiel Bros since 2004. This is another attempt by the liberal media to rehash old, baseless attacks,” campaign spokeswoman Molly Gillaspie said. 

A few things: first off, I forgot that the Pence brothers were multiplying . . . God help us! 

Second, Ms. Gillaspie, perhaps you weren't aware that underground pollution plumes take decades to develop. In fact, I'll bet that someone on one of the Pence teams has already acknowledged this:

Pence spokeswoman Alyssa Farah called the findings “a years old issue” that the vice president has addressed before. She did not elaborate.

So, what is it? Did the pollution occur during the Pence family's "stewardship" of Kiel Bros. or did it occur after? Maybe before? All I've seen is blah blah blah liberal media blah blah blah old blah blah blah liberal media blah blah baseless.

The fact that the company stuck taxpayers with the lion’s share of the cleanup bill rankles some observers, especially in light of the family’s reputation as budget hawks critical of government spending.

You don't say. It's like I've seen this tragicomedy before.

 Greg Pence, who is seeking the vice president’s old congressional seat, has total assets worth $5.7 to $26 million.

Nearly a decade after going under, Kiel Bros. sites still ranked among the top 10 recipients of state money for such cleanups in Indiana in 2013, the last year for which the petroleum industry has reliable spending data for the company. That was out of more than 230 companies seeking cleanup money that year, including major gas station chains with a substantially larger presence in the state.
Founded as an oil distributor by businessman Carl Kiel in 1960, the company expanded into the gas station business. Pence’s father, Edward, joined in the early years and, by the mid-1970s, rose to corporate vice president.
Mike Pence says he worked for the business — which mostly operated under the name Tobacco Road — starting at age 14. But it was his brother who took over after Edward Pence’s 1988 death and eventually became president.

Just so we're clear: the Pence family made a ton of money running this company. This company cut costs by polluting our air and water. Now we get to pay to not be poisoned while the Pence family gets to go and bring their special sauce to the nation as a whole.

 When an underground tank leaks, companies are liable for the damage, but Indiana has been especially amenable to using public money to pay for heavily contaminated soil to be excavated and for high-powered pumps to suck toxic liquid and vapor from the soil.

The state’s payout limit was $2 million per site until Mike Pence signed a 2016 law as governor, increasing it to $2.5 million. In 2016, Indiana paid out nearly two-and-a-half times the national average per incident, according to records.

I for one can't imagine why the state can't afford to do such trivial things as reform its child welfare issues, after a mere 15 years of studying the issue.

Pence 2018: Starve the kids and poison the water!

More on Speedway Public Transportation

And I don't mean a train or even a bus system going through Speedway.

Rather, and I've talked about this before, I think that designating Winton Ave. as a pedestrian-friendly, bike-friendly corridor, from Lynhurst to Crawfordsville, would do wonders for connecting each end of Speedway to its counterpart. In addition to the basic designation, I think that painting the actual roadway, as well as some signage, would be beneficial as far as notifying motorists. Finally, it would be absolutely essential to have some manner of controlling the traffic light on Crawfordsville from a bicycle on Winton . . . something akin to a pedestrian button.

To ride a bicycle from Meadowood Park to 10th/Main doesn't take much more than 10 minutes, tops. It is a simple ride, and there is no reason that someone should have to drive from the Meadowood Park neighborhood to Big Woods. This is easy enough to accomplish, would barely require any public funds, increases quality of life for Speedway residents (and is a targeted measure to improve the quality of life for Speedway residents, i.e. we aren't spending a bunch of money to make someone else's life better without any return thereupon), and as a bonus just happens to promote public health and be good for the environment.

I fail to see the downside.

Geo-Engineering - Interesting Proposal

Being Speedway's Resident Liberal (I guess), I'm sure it is no surprise when I say that I (a) believe the global climate is changing; (b) believe that this change is anthropogenic; (c) global climate change is problematic, from a human existential standpoint; and (d) we should do something about it.

My initial instinct has always been to advocate for "lesser impact" living where possible. Reuse; Reduce; Recycle, as they taught us in school. I read an interesting article tonight in The Atlantic, which I highly recommend. A few highlights:

For the past two years, Wolovick has studied whether a set of targeted geo-engineering projects could hold off the worst sea-level rise for centuries, giving people time to adapt to climate change and possibly reverse it. He is exploring whether building underwater walls at the mouth of the world’s most unstable glaciers—huge piles of sand and stone, stretching for miles across the seafloor—would change how those glaciers respond to the warming ocean and atmosphere, dramatically slowing or reversing their collapse.

If they work as planned, these large walls could make glaciers last as much as 10 times longer than they otherwise would. In rudimentary simulations, the walls make a glacier that would collapse in 100 years last for another millennium.

More and more, I find myself thinking that my own focus on preventing global climate change, or at least minimizing it, has perhaps blinded me to the other end of the stick, so to speak, as to solutions. We not only need to focus on living more sustainably, but we also need to focus our building codes and engineering projects with an eye toward mitigating what we have already done.

The idea referenced above is interesting to me because it takes for granted that upon which we do agree, i.e. that the glaciers are melting. It then moves forward from a position of pragmatism. What can we do that will minimize this problem?

Another idea that occurs to me is that, particularly near rivers, creeks, and streams, we ought to be building and refraining from building in such a way as to promote the natural function of creekbeds: absorb and purify water. Reclaiming wetlands goes right along with this. I used to live in Ft. Wayne, and there is an enormous wetland directly south, and a little to the north of, Engle Rd. there. This used to be a fallow field that could easily have been sold for commercial development; it was right off U.S. 24/W. Jefferson Blvd., which is kind of the big E/W thru-way in the Fort.

Anyway, the wetland is more than just hippy-dippy tree-hugger stuff. Directly to the southeast of the wetland is the largest landfill I have ever seen. The landfill is more or less built on an enormous, industrial, clay shower floor that drains to a series of pipes. Imagine all of the pollution in that drainage, but it has to go somewhere. Hence the wetland. I am given to understand that this landfill drainage ("leachate") is filtered a few times, in various ways, and then sprayed out over the wetland. The landfill operators get an environmental-donation tax benefit; migratory birds get a stopping point; the landfill gets drained; the water gets cleaned. We can only hope that this is a win-win.

I am meandering off the point, though. Go read the article in The Atlantic.