The oil spill in the Gulf Coast is just heartbreaking for the families, the fishermen, the shrimpers and the small businesspeople affected. Even once they stop the flow of oil into the ocean, years will pass before the region fully recovers.

The question is – can something good come out of this tragedy?

It’s my hope that this spill in the gulf can be the catalyst that unites our country behind a “go-to-the-moon” project to greatly reduce, and eventually eliminate, our reliance on oil.

The real question is, how do we get there?

Today, there are a number of possibilities for generating cleaner energy: fuel cells, solar and wind energy are just a few. The costs to produce energy from these sources is still far higher than burning fossil fuels.

There are some who think that taxing fossil fuels – or as the new terminology goes, “putting a price on carbon” – will solve this problem. Make fossil fuels more expensive and everyone switches to cleaner energy.

I can think of nothing more shortsighted or detrimental to the economic recovery we so desperately need.

I was discussing this with an advocate of these policies recently, who told me that it’s the equivalent of fair trade coffee at $5 vs. regular coffee at $3. If they can just drive the price of a cup of regular coffee up to $5, everyone will switch to drinking the “good” coffee.

Here’s a better idea.

Let’s harness the entrepreneurial spirit and intellectual firepower that took us to the moon, invented the Internet and built the iPhone, and let’s unite our country behind building the technologies that will, in effect, drive the price of clean energy down to at or lower than the price of fossil fuels.

I have the benefit of a front row seat to some of the “clean tech” startups that are beginning to blossom, and there are some incredibly exciting technologies that have potential for making radical changes to our energy economy. We just need to multiply the number of new startups and the investment by about 100x.

Taxes and regulation do not create new markets and allow new technologies to thrive. Investment, research, development and competition do.

Illustration Credit: naturallyadvanced.wordpress.com

I was at the gym this morning and CNN was on. While public flogging was abolished in Britain in 1948, that didn’t stop Congress from summoning the CEO of British Petroleum for its version of the ritual.

As I’ll write more about tomorrow, I’m surprised, saddened and angered by the tragedy in the Gulf Coast. It’s affecting people’s lives in ways we can barely comprehend. The effects will be with us for a long time.

I know that congressional hearings serve as a deterrent for other companies or government agencies that have a responsibility to safeguard the public trust – avoiding a public flogging is a great incentive to perform your duties with care.

Still, am I the only person who hits mute on CNN because I already know how this will go? Each congressman will drone on for what seems like hours, reading their prepared statement. The CEO of BP will express profound apologies for the corners that were cut, while professing ignorance that any of it was happening until he saw it on TV. Then the legislators will huff and puff and demand he resign.

Yes, this process is sure to stop the oil from flowing.

I’ve got to tell you, the notion of Congress offering its perspective on responsibility gave me something to laugh about.

While these legislators lecture BP on the failure of its blowout preventer, they themselves built a blowout preventer for the federal budget so full of loopholes, nobody even noticed when it exploded. And today, poisonous deficits are spewing out of the federal budget in volumes that no one thought possible just a few years ago.

Those effects will be with us, our kids and our grandkids for a very long time as well.

We need deep and profound change in our government. Here’s hoping November brings some new perspective to Washington DC.

Photo Credit: CNN

This post is part of a series on the cause of orphan care, adoption and social change that I hope to make you as passionate about as I am. You may want to start from the beginning if you’re just joining us.

We met our little girl for the first time on Christmas morning, and several days later, it was time to head into the southern part of Ethiopia to see where she was born, tour our agency’s operations there, and meet her birth mother. Except for Christmas morning, it was the highlight of our time in Africa.

Our motorcade consisted of three white vans, each seating about 10 people. Included in our traveling party were ten sets of adoptive parents. Three excited new siblings. A new grandmother. A passionate social worker. Several Holt Ethiopia staff members, including their development director Tesfaye. And our three drivers, native Ethiopians, led by a great fellow named Tsegaw.

Southern Ethiopia – at least the part we had the chance to see – isn’t the way you picture it from the movies. We saw nothing but beautiful rolling hills. Lots of little villages along the main highway. And more than a few small herds of cows or lines of donkeys, tempting fate by crossing the road while leaving small gaps for the vans to whisk through.

A caravan of “ferange” (foreigners) is a sight to behold, and the people we saw along the road all smiled and waved as we passed. When we would stop, the call would go out, children would come running and we’d be surrounded within moments – giving and receiving high fives, and taking photos of each child and showing them their picture on the digital camera screen. That always resulted in wild laughter.

At one stop in a small town called Butajirra, we parked and went inside a hotel to use the restrooms, and drink some Coca-Cola. A few of us wandered out on the balcony overlooking the main street, and quickly found ourselves waving at the kids passing by.

Two boys with a wheelbarrow carrying a third came to a stop, and all three came bounding up the stairs to the hotel balcony, the two oldest smiling and waving the entire time.

Achiro (middle) reached me first, and stuck out his hand. He spoke some English, which he proudly told me he was learning in school. He had no shoes, but no complaints, either. He introduced me to his brothers, Yusuf (left) and Kalu (right – clearly the skeptic of the three). The three boys were headed to the other end of the village with the wheelbarrow, to pick up some old vegetables for the family cow.

They lived in a small shanty on the north end of town. Judging from the looks of all the other shanties he pointed out to, theirs likely had a TV antenna sticking up out of the roof as their only link back to the rest of the world.

We conversed for a few minutes, and then he smiled and said he had to go – his mother and father were expecting him back to feed the cow. And with that, the three boys shook our hands and took off. We saw them again about ten minutes later, headed back with a wheelbarrow full of corn cobs and rotting greens.

Achiro, Yusuf and Kalu were some of the fortunate ones – they had parents who loved them, were raising them, were sacrificing to get them a basic education, and working to build a better life. As I watched them disappear down the muddy street, I couldn’t help but think of the other kids I was seeing on that street who weren’t as fortunate – most of them focused on begging for a few birr to buy some bread.

In other words, picture three young boys, who lived in a one-room dirt or concrete-floor shanty with a tin roof, and whose family income likely depended on a single cow that was fed rotten vegetables – you’ve just seen the typical middle class Ethiopian family.

One thing was patently obvious: it takes very little misfortune for a family to fall from the middle class to complete destitution. One illness, bad storm, death or tip of the wheelbarrow could be the difference. No savings account, no credit card, no emergency room, no safety net. These families live in the danger zone. Being middle class in the third world is a fragile thing.

The thing is, for every Achiro that exists in the developing world, there are about 9 kids living in deep and desperate poverty – ravaged by hunger, lacking clean water, wracked by diseases conquered elsewhere and exploited by corruption, violence or human trafficking. 145 million of those kids don’t have parents who are able to care for them. And every 18 seconds, another child joins their ranks.

It’s what led Africa to be called “a continent of orphans.”

I’m convinced that we will not change this reality unless we attack the problem at three separate points (I alluded to them in my first post).

Yes, we should adopt the precious kids whose birth parents are unable to care for them, and love them enough to make an adoption plan for them.

Yes, we must engage in caring for orphans worldwide, who are hanging in the balance between adoption or being reunited with their birth families.

But if we’re truly going to solve this problem, we’ve got to stop millions of these kids from becoming orphans in the first place.And you do that by helping families stay intact – either by giving them the tools to lift themselves out of poverty, or by helping them put some distance between themselves and the danger zone.

So let’s talk about poverty. I hope you’ll keep reading.

Next Post: Why Developing World Poverty Exists…and Persists

Photo Credit: Aaron and Cacey Klein in Ethiopia

Last night was election night here in California.

I was supporting a number of my friends who were on the ballot – I wrote about a few of them on this blog. Several of them won, several of them lost.

All of them had great ideas for making government better and worked hard to connect with voters. I’d support all of them again even if I knew the result in advance.

One thing is clear: big slices of voters got turned off by the TV ad war in the gubernatorial election and didn’t vote at all. While those of us who are a little closer to politics have a hard time understanding that, it’s just the way it is with average voters. They don’t live and die by the results of a single election.

It worries me when I see some people get so attached to the candidates they support that they feel the need to hubristically attack supporters of their candidate’s opponent.

I like it when candidates and their supporters win – and lose – with a good dose of humility.

After all, it’s the voters who decide those things. I’ve been grateful to win the support of the voters both times that I’ve run for Sierra College Trustee, and I’ve never taken that for granted.

Public service is a great way to affect change, but I know the candidates who lost tonight will still be able to make valuable contributions in the future – and that’s as it should be. After all, life is about more than just politics.

Congratulations to those who won and lost for playing an important role in our 234-year-old representative democracy.

Today is primary election day in my home state of California, and 11 other states across the country.

While I have my own opinions about who I hope prevails in today’s election, the most important thing is for each and every citizen to get out and vote.

Our men and women in uniform have died protecting your right to participate in our great representative democracy. There’s no reason you can’t drive your car down a peaceful street to your polling place and let your voice be heard.

Go vote! And then encourage a friend to do to the same.

Illustration Credit: 3.bp.blogspot.com

Imagine if your power company had the ability to control which brand of refrigerator you could use in your kitchen. Or your telephone company could decide which model of telephone you were allowed to plug into the wall. Or your cable company had cut a deal with a TV manufacturer, and you couldn’t watch TV on anything but their brand of television?

We wouldn’t put up with this kind of behavior by our utility companies. There’s a movement afoot called “Net Neutrality” that is working to apply the same principal to the Internet, ensuring that it remains the hotbed of freedom and innovation that has driven our economic growth for the last fifteen years.

Like most things that matter, Net Neutrality has suddenly become a hot topic, and I find myself agreeing more with President Obama’s FCC chairman (for the most part) than the Republican leaders in Congress, who are taking the side of the big telecom carriers.

First, let’s discuss what net neutrality is and is not.

Net Neutrality is not about controlling the price of broadband or eliminating the ability of telecom providers to manage their networks through tiered pricing. The forces of free market competition, even though there is too little competition in broadband, can keep pricing in line far better than government can.

(In fact, it’s very possible that tiered pricing could actually create competitive pressure and reduce prices for those of us who use less bandwidth. On AT&T’s wireless network, the top 3% of its smartphone users consume a whopping 40% of its network capacity.)

Net Neutrality is about keeping the Internet “fair” for all of the different web sites and applications that run on it. When you type in a web address or download your e-mail, you’re transmitting data over your local telecom company’s network, and they transmit it out to the public Internet for you.

We’re at risk of the telecom companies trying to use their control of the “pipe” to determine what can and can’t flow through the pipe, or slowing some applications while letting others run at full speed. In theory, this could one day extend to Yahoo cutting a deal with AT&T to be the “exclusive” web mail provider on their network, blocking Gmail or Hotmail.

Without Net Neutrality rules, cable companies could also slow or disrupt YouTube or Hulu video streams to promote their own television or online video offerings.

Government is at its best when it ensures that businesses tell the truth, do what they said they were going to do, and behave in a way that allows fair competition – and no more.

Net Neutrality is about that last part – requiring telecom companies to compete fairly for customers and act in a way that allows innovation on the Internet to continue to drive economic growth and prosperity for us all.

Illustration Credit: neoseeker.com

Board Meeting Details:

• June 8, 2010 at 2:00PM (public session at 4:00PM)
• Sierra College Rocklin Campus, Room LR-133
• Main agenda items begin at 4:00PM, public comment for items not on the agenda at 5:40PM
• Meeting Agenda
• Contracts (General / Capital Projects)
• Warrants

This meeting will include the board’s self-evaluation, planning for our board retreat, potential action on the board policy for program vitality (see my related post here) and an update on facilities and budget planning.

Use the comments below to answer the Question of the Month! How should Sierra College measure the vitality of our educational programs? What criteria should we use to determine when programs should come to an end and resources be redirected to other industries with growing job needs?

This post is the first in a series on the cause of orphan care, adoption and social change that I hope to make you as passionate about as I am. I hope you enjoy it!

If you’ve been a reader of this blog for any period of time, I’m sure you know that I’m proud to be an adoptive dad of two incredible kids: Spencer, who is 3 and was born in South Korea…and Emma, who is 1 and was born in Ethiopia.

Cacey and I didn’t adopt these two because we wanted to do something special for them. The reality is, they did something very special for us – they made us parents. We are convinced that before the beginning of time, there was a plan to make what we laughingly call our “typical Korean-Ethiopian-American family” out of Aaron, Cacey, Spencer Daniel Sang-Jin and Emma Nichole Asnakech Klein.

The foundational principle of adoption is the belief that every child deserves permanence. Children weren’t designed to grow up in institutions or even temporary homes. They were designed to grow up in permanent, loving families.

Yet the world’s “systems” aren’t aligned with this reality yet.

Here in the United States, we have a foster care system without a strong emphasis on permanence. The result: 1 out of every 2 children who age out of the system without a permanent family will end up in prison, unemployed, on welfare or dead. It’s the most at-risk subgroup of our population by far.

In the third world, we see countries frantically trying to facilitate the building and staffing of new orphanages, in a desperate effort to shield children from poverty, exploitation, human trafficking, prostitution, hunger and disease. Yet there are 145 million children without parents to care for them – and that number grows by one child every 18 seconds.

The cause of orphan care and adoption is about reversing those trends in three ways:

• Using adoption to bring children into permanence and love
• Caring for orphans waiting to be adopted or reunited with a birth family
• Preventing children from becoming orphans in the first place

Cacey and I have been on a journey of reading, living, praying, sleeping and breathing these things since our feet first touched African soil last December.

It’s not that visiting the beautiful country of Spencer’s birth wasn’t equally special – it was.

But touching the face of poverty…seeing the budding potential that is Africa and the “third world”…and discovering from personal experience how interconnected the 6 billion people on this planet truly are…well, let’s just say it was life-changing.

This is the first in a series of posts on this topic. I want to share a little bit about this journey with you, and the conclusions it has led me to.

And I hope that when I’m done, you’ll be interested in doing some fairly radical things.

Will you join me? Maybe we can be part of changing the world together. I hope you’ll keep reading.

Next Post: Achiro, Yusuf and Kalu

Photo Credit: Aaron and Cacey Klein in Ethiopia (top), Blue Castle Photography (bottom)

I was saddened and completely stunned when the news flashed on the screen: former Vice President Al Gore and his wife, Tipper, are separating after 40 years of marriage. Politico broke the news first and covered it here.

While I didn’t vote for Gore in 2000, his marriage always struck me as very real. Kiss or no kiss, the Gores’ relationship seemed like a solid and stable one – not a sham as some political marriages are eventually exposed to be.

Without casting aspersions on the Gores – because that’s not the point of this post – I hope this news serves as a wakeup call to those of us who have made “until death do us part” commitments.

Marriage is hard work. (Especially if, like me, you married up!) I am exceedingly blessed to be closing in on ten years with my wonderful wife. I’ve made innumerable mistakes along the way, but through our commitment to each other, our faith, and the support of our families, we have built a marriage that we are both working to make last a lifetime. And given that we got married at 22 and 20, we intend to celebrate 50 years together – and beyond!

That will only happen if we both invest in our marriage and work on it every day.

It was a sad day yesterday for the Gores, but don’t let that stop you from striving for 40 or 50 or 60 years with the person you’ve made a lifelong commitment to. I’m convinced it’s worth it.

Photo Credit: Jodi Cobb

There are two key and equally important pillars of the community college system. One is general education: topics like English, history, science and mathematics. The other is career and technical education: the vocational programs that teach specific job skills that, at least in theory, lead directly to gainful employment.

As you might imagine, the needs of the job market change like the speed of light. Jobs change, old industries fade away, and new ones bloom. One of the biggest challenges our career and technical education programs face is keeping the education relevant to the job markets they serve.

Sierra College has 24 career and technical programs. You can see most of the list here, although that site is missing the relatively new Solar Energy Technician, Virtual Office Professional and Mechatronics programs.

(By the way, the photo above is Dan Lee, one of the student leaders in our Automotive Technology program. I’ve enjoyed getting to know him and a number of our other students over the years.)

How do we judge the health of these programs? That’s a tough question to answer, but here are a few suggestions I’ve heard:

• How long it takes for a student to get a job after graduating
• Availability of jobs and/or need for new workers in the targeted industry
• Enrollment growth in the program
• Sufficiency of a program’s facilities or equipment
• Opinions of private sector employers in the industry the program serves

The only objective and easily available data we have is enrollment in these programs – the rest of the data is either impossible to collect, or somewhat subjective and/or anecdotal.

Suffice it to say, determining when programs need to be revitalized is a challenge, but falling enrollment is a key indicator. (As an aside, falling enrollment doesn’t necessarily mean classes aren’t “full” – click here for a more in-depth look at what declining enrollment means.)

That’s how it came to be that our automotive, construction technology and agriculture programs were recommended for reduction in the 2010-11 package of spending cuts that the college’s Strategic Council and executive team sent to the board.

The board didn’t feel able to approve that specific reduction, largely because the criteria for the recommendation wasn’t clear. That had a lot to do with the college’s Academic Senate and the fact that a policy for program revitalization and/or discontinuance had stalled in the approval process (state law requires the Academic Senate to play a key role in approving that policy).

The Academic Senate recently put forth a draft policy, and the Board asked for a much more specific policy. Suffice it to say, I think we’re looking for a set of criteria for a program to enter the revitalization process, a brief description of how the process should work, and a framework to generate a program recommendation at the end of the process. I’m hoping we’ll see that soon.

In the mean time, the three programs in question are continuing to operate in a scaled-down fashion for the 2010-11 school year, and have entered a revitalization process that will result in a recommendation to the Board in October or November. Vice President of Instruction Rachel Rosenthal updated the Board on that process in March, and I thought you’d be interested in seeing her slide deck:

(Mobile, feed and e-mail readers: embedded slide show above.)

As we wait to see the state budget take shape, we know that the likelihood is that we’ll have to return to developing new solutions for our budget by this fall. Our imperative is to continue to innovate our career and technical programs to keep up with the rebounding job market, while living within our means and acting in a fiscally sustainable manner with the resources we have.

It promises to stay interesting!

Photo Credit: Sac Bee