Whitcomb: Closeups in the City; R.I. as Mass. Satellite; Energizing Energy News; Guns for Tots

Sunday, January 22, 2023

Robert Whitcomb, Columnist

 

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Robert Whitcomb, columnist

“Winter. Time to eat fat

and watch hockey. In the pewter mornings, the cat,

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a black fur sausage with yellow

Houdini eyes, jumps up on the bed and tries

to get onto my head. It’s his

way of telling whether or not I’m dead.’’

From “February, ‘’ by Margaret Atwood (born 1939), Canadian poet, novelist, critic and essayist

 

 

“More and more lately, as, not even minding the slippages yet, the aches
          and sad softenings,
I settle into my other years, I notice how many of what I once thought
          were evidences of repression….’’

--- From “Repression,’’ by C.K. Williams (1936-2015), American poet

 

 

“Whole nations have melted away like balls of snow before the sun.’’

-- Dragging Canoe (1738-1792), a Cherokee war chief who led a band of Cherokee warriors who resisted white settlers in the Upper South

 

 

The many cloudy days we’ve had in the past few weeks are depressing, though they have generally been mild. It reminds me of living in Paris in the ’80s.  From late October to March,  it was mostly gray day after day, but with a few hours of sunshine glowing on the cream-colored limestone walls of the old apartment buildings every week or so, briefly raising our spirits.

 

When I lived in New Hampshire, in the late ‘60s, my favorite weather was those almost blindingly bright days of mid-winter with pristine snow covering the ground and the trees making cracking noises in the deep and dry cold. Exhilarating! But these days, in the tropical parts of New England where I now live, even temps in the 40s lead me to plug in my coat warmers (nifty devices).

 

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Deflated Christmas decorations PHOTO: Whitcomb

Every year it seems that more and more homeowners, and renters, leave Christmas lights and other holiday decorations displayed later into the winter, as if trying to bridge the gap to the brief silly cheer of St. Valentine’s Day or even to spring. But as the corpses in the picture attest, this can often be depressing, too.

 

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We set out bird feeders in the winter not so much to feed the birds out of our sympathy for them as to bring them close for our entertainment. But so far in this “open winter,’’ we’ve had few takers, as these dinosaur descendants have apparently found enough food on the bare ground  (as of this writing) to subsist on. I suppose that a snowstorm would swiftly bring them to the feeders.

 

I haven’t heard the chickadees’ calls recently, though we associate their cheery noise with winter. Indeed, it’s been eerily quiet all around, with few signs of wildlife except those remarkably opportunistic diners --  skunks. If only they would hibernate!

 

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PHOTO: file

The mild walking weather reminded me of the pleasures of Michael Kimmelman’s book The Intimate City: Walking New York. In this very engaging volume, Mr. Kimmelman, The New York Times’s architecture critic, invited architects, historians and just plain friends to stroll around what Pope John Paul II called “The Capital of the World’’ and ruminate on the manmade and natural scenes they came across and the histories behind them, going back to Native American days. Buildings old and new, beautiful and ugly, residential, commercial and industrial.  Vest-pocket parks and those big enough to make you think that you’re in the country as you hike through them. The complex waterfront of a place whose initial wealth sprang from its development as a great international port. Neighborhoods rich or poor, gentrifying or physically decayed but still lively, or close to dead.

 

Other old, multi-layered culturally rich cities such as Providence and Newport would be very fortunate to have someone like Mr. Kimmelman leading experts and pals around to create a similar book.

 

 

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For the first time in quite a while, I encountered a nun, in a traditional habit, the other day, at the main Providence Post Office. She had a beatific smile.

 

When I was growing up in the Boston area, or even when I lived and worked in New York City, it seemed that nuns in habits were everywhere, connected to parishes, teaching school, acting as nurses and so on. Whether or not you agreed with their theology, they had edifying roles in society. A few, especially in some parochial schools, were battle-axes but most were kindly. I miss them. Of course, we used to call them penguins.

 

There are far fewer nuns these days but more than you might think because many have stopped wearing habits.

 

 

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PHOTO: File

Living With Massachusetts

Rhode Island Gov. Dan McKee’s state-of-the-state address cited his aim of bringing the quality of Rhode Island’s public schools up to Massachusetts’s, widely considered America’s best, by 2030. Rhode Island is ranked 11th.

 

That, of course, is an admirable goal of someone associated with school reform for many years, but is almost certainly unattainable. That’s because for historical and demographic/sociological reasons Massachusetts is a much richer state than Rhode Island, and so has much more of the wherewithal to improve education. And as the first state to enact compulsory public education, in 1852, it has a very long tradition of excellence in education. Indeed, the Boston Latin School, established in 1635, is by far the oldest public school in America.

 

Massachusetts is ranked second in mean household income, after New Jersey and above Connecticut, with Rhode Island at 16th. Generally, the better the public education the richer the state. Education creates wealth.

 

Hit this link:

 

But there’s no doubt that Rhode Island can do better.

 

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Governor Dan McKee PHOTO: GoLocal

The governor also presented a plan to cut the sales tax, a perennial goal, starting with a cut to 6.85 percent. The Ocean State’s current rate, at 7 percent, is higher than Massachusetts’s 6.25 percent, but make sure that you study the exemptions in the taxes before making final comparisons.

 

Look at this for comparisons of sales taxes across America. Some may surprise you:

 

https://taxfoundation.org/2022-sales-taxes/

 

All in all, over time, Rhode Island has little alternative but to try to ensure that its overall tax structure is roughly commensurate with that of the much more populous, and economic  and innovation powerhouse, next door. After all, Greater Providence is to a large extent part of Greater Boston.

 

And given Americans’ over-reliance on their cars, it’s not surprising that Mr. McKee wants to block a 3-cent-a-gallon increase in the gasoline tax scheduled to go into effect July 1. His position is presumably popular but it’s bad policy.  The gasoline tax funds construction/maintenance for bridges and roads, with a tiny 3.5  cents of the current 34 cents going to the Rhode Island Public Transit Authority. The state’s roads and bridges remain embarrassingly bad, though President Biden’s infrastructure bill will help. And the more that people use RIPTA, rather than driving, the less wear and tear on roads and bridges and the less air pollution. Given Rhode Island’s dense population and tiny size it should have long ago become a model for public transit.

 

One relatively minor  (to some) part of the governor’s address was very pleasing: dropping the state litter tax on businesses, the revenue from which just goes into the general fund, and it adds irritating red tape for firms to deal with.

 

Far better to do what Mr. McKee wants to do: create a dedicated line item to fund anti-litter efforts. See LitterFree.RI.Gov.

 

And please go after the perpetrators of graffiti, another visual cancer that tells out-of-staters to avoid Rhode Island. The failure to address such quality-of-life problems tends to encourage other offenses by evoking an atmosphere of lawlessness.

 

Why oh why are so many Rhode Islanders such slobs, including in places of great natural and manmade beauty?

 

 

Cape Cod Crises

“Yet each man kills the thing he loves….”

 

-- Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), Anglo-Irish playwright and poet

 

Poor old Cape Cod, once rural and now exurban and suburban.

 

There’s not enough money at the moment to replace the old (from the 1930s) and too narrow Sagamore and Bourne bridges. And pollution from septic systems, fertilizers and pesticides (lawns and golf courses are major sources) kills life in many freshwater ponds. There are 42 golf courses on the skinny glorified sand bar we call Cape Cod!

 

What to do? Year-round passenger-train service to reduce car traffic to and fro and on the peninsula? (This would be via the charming railroad bridge over the Cape Cod Canal.)  A Barnstable County-wide bond issue to pay to extend sewerage? Close some golf courses?

 

 

Housing and Jobs

Addressing housing costs is one of the keys to long-term improvements in a state’s or locality’s economic health and population stability.

 

Think about New York State’s challenge: Gov. Kathy Hochul’s administration says that during the last decade 800,000 more jobs were created than housing units.  The associated high housing costs in The Empire State send people and businesses that the state wants to keep to neighboring states. And many can telework from anywhere.

 

 

Energy Updates

One of the world’s largest lithium deposits may be in Newry, Maine!

 

Lithium, which is very lightweight,  can be used to store lots of energy. So it’s in batteries for electric vehicles, and it’s used to store excess energy generated by wind turbines and solar panels. Demand for lithium-ion batteries is expected to continue to surge as the world tries to move away from Earth-heating-and-polluting, and kleptocratic-dictator-enriching, oil, natural gas and coal.
 

But Maine must apparently rewrite some regulations limiting mining if the deposit is to be mined.  The Feds should encourage this, in part for national-security reasons. The broader environment would benefit greatly from that happening, though there would have to be tradeoffs at the local level, what with the open-pit mining needed to extract the lithium. Let’s hope that Pine Tree State politicians and other policymakers move fast on authorizing the mining of lithium in Newry, which of course would be an economic bonanza for the state. Maine has a strong environmental-protection tradition, and we can expect that any lithium mining would be closely monitored.

 

A Maine Public Radio/Maine Monitor article by Kate Cough noted:

 

“There are also environmental justice concerns at stake {in any plans to develop a mine in Newry and elsewhere in the U.S.}.  With production of many minerals dominated by a handful of countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America — many with long track records of human rights and environmental abuses — some are pushing for the U.S. to shoulder more of the burden for the minerals it consumes.

“’We are altering the environment,’ said Ian Lange, associate professor of economics and business at the Colorado School of Mines. ‘If we just don’t let the U.S. mine any of these things, then we’re going to buy them from these places that don’t have the same labor and environmental safeguards the U.S. does.”’

Meanwhile, large deposits of various minerals needed for batteries and other parts of green technology have been discovered in northern Norway and Sweden, both strong Western allies.

 

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The Los Angeles Times reports that some local governments  in California’s Kern County have signed “a 25-year, $775-million contract to buy power from what would be the world’s largest compressed-air energy storage project….”

“The developer, Hydrostor, will drill three shafts thousands of feet underground and send miners to dig out a series of rows and columns….

“When electricity is cheap — such as on sunny afternoons, when California has more solar power than it needs — Hydrostor will use that low-cost energy to push air down into the caverns. Think of it like storing sunlight in a bottle.

“When Hydrostor’s customer, Central Coast Community Energy, needs to draw on the stored power — for example, on a cloudy January day — the company will open a valve and funnel the high-pressure air through a turbine, generating electricity.’’

This is the sort of creative engineering we need in what must be a highly diversified campaign to get off fossil fuel.

Hit this link for the whole article:

 

Less Is More

The decline in the size of, and aging of, China’s gigantic population is expected to continue indefinitely. It officially fell 850,000 last year and now stands at a little over 1.4 billion, but given that China is a dictatorship that tightly controls information, who knows for sure? China has about 3.7 million square miles and the U.S., with about 334 million people, about 3.8 million square miles.

 

The decline is being presented as a slow-motion disaster for the country because it may mean less economic growth. But China can address some of that by among other things, raising the retirement age and changing its tax and regulatory systems and reducing its dependence on cheap labor while boosting labor-saving technological innovation. Remember that Japan has remained one of the richest nations despite a long declining population, and done it as a vibrant democracy and not as a police state like China.

 

Fewer people to share the same or only slowly growing gross domestic product sounds good to me.

 

For the planet, the Chinese decline is very good news! The world has far too many people (over 8 billion now) to provide for the basics of many of them, and the swelling population has placed perilous demands on the planet’s ecosystems and climate – the latter primarily through fossil-fuel burning, in which China is the biggest participant.

 

Ever-growing populations and economies don’t necessarily translate into a higher quality of life for most individuals in those countries.

 

 

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The gangster state known as Russia may be behind some sabotage of critical infrastructure in Western Europe, which supports Ukrainian efforts to defend itself from Putin’s invasion. We must step up efforts to protect ourselves from such sabotage by Russia in the United States.

Hit this link:

 

 

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Surprise! Surprise! Exxon lied about what it knew about global warming caused by burning fossil fuel, just as the tobacco companies lied (as most people knew, at least intuitively, at the time) about what they knew about smoking causing cancer.

 

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House Speaker Kevin McCarthy PHOTO: Facebook

A look at the careers of the craven House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (born in 1965) and the late Red-hunting and ultimately self-destructive demagogue Sen. Joseph McCarthy (1908-1957) shows that, despite their considerably different presentation styles, they’re alike in some ways, especially in being moral vacuums with no discernible deeply held principles. Certainly, neither can honestly be called a “conservative” in the classical, Edmund Burke sense.

 

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More happy news for the NRA and its GOP/QAnon servant in Congress: There’s money to be made from marketing guns to young children!

 

Hit the link:

 

New sales opportunities for toy companies? MAGA!

 

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Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is pitching to his “anti-woke”  base but he’s still right in barring a course in African-American history from the list of Advanced Placement courses in his state’s high-school curriculum. It’s too narrow a topic for high school history.  College is something else.

Back in the mid-'60s, I took the AP course called “American History’’. Period. High school is a time for broad, foundational learning.

 

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Ana Walshe PHOTO: Cohasset Police

The news media love stories about murders and alleged murders in rich towns, such as that involving the presumed death of Ana Walshe, the attractive 39-year-old woman who lived in Cohasset, Mass., noted for its scenic coast and impressive houses along it. Her scammer husband, Brian Walshe, is charged with murdering her and then dismembering her body. I noticed that the national media did big stories on this case; that Ana had been missing for days raised the drama level. And, as the reporting proceeded, there were signs that the social-climbing Ana Walshe herself may have been a crook.

Would the media have jumped into the story so swiftly if the couple hadn’t been living in Cohasset? I doubt it.

The case was unlikely to have gotten all the attention if it had involved people in, say, a poor part of Hartford, Conn.

Robert Whitcomb is a veteran editor and writer. Among his jobs, he has served as the finance editor of the International Herald Tribune, in Paris; as a vice president and the editorial-page editor of The Providence Journal; as an editor and writer in New York for The Wall Street Journal,  and as a writer for the Boston Herald Traveler (RIP). He has written newspaper and magazine essays and news stories for many years on a very wide range of topics for numerous publications, has edited several books and movie scripts and is the co-author of among other things, Cape Wind.


 

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