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TOPEKA – Every day in America, millions of parents and caregivers take to the road with children in their vehicles. While many children are buckled up in the right car seat for their ages and sizes – nearly half (46 percent) are not, and some aren’t buckled up at all.

Child Passenger Safety Week is September 15-21, 2019, and Safe Kids Kansas, the Kansas Department of Transportation and Kansas Highway Patrol want to ensure children ride as safely as possible—every trip, every time.

“Every 32 seconds in 2017, a child under 13 was involved in a motor vehicle crash,” said Colonel Herman T. Jones, Kansas Highway Patrol. “Using a car seat that fits your child and your vehicle is the best way to keep your children safe.”

According to NHTSA, motor vehicle crashes are a leading killer of children. While fatalities and injuries declined from 2016 to 2017, there is still work to be done to completely eliminate these preventable tragedies. Car seats, booster seats, and seat belts can make all the difference. “In 2017, there were 312 children under the age of 5 saved because they were using restraints,” said Col. Jones. “Car seats matter.”

Too often, parents move their children to the front seat before they should, which increases the risk of injury and death, even if they are buckled up. The safest place for all kids under 13 is in the back seat.

“As parents and caregivers, we have a long list of things we do for our children to show our love. One of the simplest and most important things on the list should be to make sure they are in the right car seat for their age and size,” said Cherie Sage, Safe Kids Kansas. “Get your car seats checked. Make certain they’re installed correctly, and that your kids are in the right seats and are buckled in correctly. Even if you think your child’s car seat is installed correctly, get it checked with a certified Child Passenger Safety Technician, so you can be sure that your child is the safest he or she can be while traveling.”

To find a car seat inspection station near you, visit www.kansascarseatcheck.org.

According to a 2018-19 observational survey, if the driver is belted, about 97% of the observed children are belted too. If the driver is not belted, about 30% of the observed children are belted.

“Drivers play an important role in not only getting to a destination safely, but ensuring all passengers are buckled up,” said Julie Lorenz, Kansas Secretary of Transportation. “Seat belts are for everyone because your life and your passenger’s lives depend on it.”

For optimal safety, it is recommended to keep children rear-facing as long as possible, up to the top height or weight allowed by their particular seats. Once a child outgrows the rear-facing-only “infant” car seat, he/she should travel in a rear-facing “convertible,” or all-in-one car seat. Once your child outgrows the rear-facing size limits, the child is ready to travel in a forward-facing car seat with a harness (always use the tether). After outgrowing the forward-facing car seat with harness, children should be placed in booster seats until they’re the right size to use seat belts safely. And if children are under 13 years old, they should always sit in the back seat.

Remember to register your car seat or booster seat with the seat manufacturer so you can be notified in the event of a recall. Parents and caregivers can find more information on how to choose and use car seats safely at www.ultimatecarseatguide.org.

By BRIAN GRIMMETT
Kansas News Service

WICHITA — Large industrial operations — think electrical power plants, oil refineries, ethanol facilities —cough carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by the ton. That, in turn, warms the planet.

But now some researchers think Kansas could be a good place to pump the gas underground rather than up in the air.

Carbon dioxide is all around us. Plants use it for food. Humans exhale it. It’s used in dry ice and to make your soda fizzy.

But it’s produced in serious, problematic quantities when we burn fossil fuels — every time we jump in a car and to generate the majority of the electricity we use.

When we do that, we’re taking carbon that was once stored in the ground and putting it into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, or CO2.

CO2 is a greenhouse gas. Greenhouse gases help trap heat in the atmosphere. Climate scientists predict that if we keep producing them at current rates, annual average global temperatures will rise by nine degrees by the end of this century. Weather patterns will become ever more severe, the oceans will rise.

To prevent some of the catastrophes that would cause, researchers want to stash CO2 emissions back in the ground.

With funding from the U.S. Department of Energy’s CarbonSAFE program, researchers from the Kansas Geological Survey, environmental policy groups, lawyers and oil and gas companies spent the last three years investigating the feasibility of carbon capture and storage in Kansas.

“No matter how you slice it,” said Eugene Holubnyak, a petroleum engineer leading the project at the Kansas Geological Survey, “we’re centrally located and I think we have all the necessary components that need to be in place to be a hub for distributing CO2.”

The research first looked at the potential of capturing CO2 emissions from Westar’s Jeffrey Energy Center, a coal-fired power plant located northwest of Topeka. It’s one of the largest emitters of carbon dioxide in the country.

The project would work like this.

First, capture the CO2 straight from the exhaust stacks of the power plant. Then, compress the gas into a liquid. It would then be put it in a pipeline and sent to southwestern Kansas where it would be pumped deep into the ground.

In some cases, it would be put into what’s known as a saline aquifer — essentially a natural underground storage tank.

In other cases, it would be used for something called enhanced oil recovery. That means injecting CO2 into the ground on one side of a deposit to push hard-to-reach oil and gas toward a well on the other side.

The researchers discovered that, at this point, that plan would be too expensive. Even with recently approved tax incentives aimed at jumpstarting carbon capture projects, it would cost Jeffrey Energy Center far more to capture and compress than it could make selling the CO2.

A possibility that might be more economically tempting would capture CO2 from a network of ethanol plants across the Midwest.

That’s because unlike the byproduct of burning coal, which contains multiple chemicals — pollutants that would have to be separated before you pump anything into the ground — ethanol coughs up relatively untainted carbon dioxide.

“The challenge is that, relative to the size of a power plant, ethanol plants are pretty small,” said Brendan Jordan who worked on the project for the Great Plains Institute, a non-profit that wants to transform the country’s energy systems.

Under that scenario, size would matter. To make the same kind of impact that capturing CO2 from a power plant would have, ethanol plants from all over the Midwest would need to be connected through a regional pipeline.

Jordan said that kind of network would be a start until the cost of capturing power plant CO2 and other industrial sources drops dramatically.

And it might rally a range of people often at odds with each other.

Environmentalists support it because it could help curb climate change. Ethanol plants like it because it opens up a new revenue stream selling CO2 to oil and gas companies. The oil and gas industry is on board because it’s looking for a cheap, consistent source of CO2 to use in enhanced oil recovery.

That kind of broad support makes Jordan optimistic a commercial project could launch in the next five to ten years.

“The problem we have in the Midwest is a mismatch between where a lot of the ethanol plants are and where the appropriate geology is,” Jordan said.

Kansas is right in the middle of that equation. Any major pipeline project would have to run through the state — allowing both producers and consumers of CO2 to easily connect.

Andrew Duguid is a lead researcher with Batelle, one of the nation’s largest research and development companies. He’s working on the next phase of the Midwest CarbonSAFE project that is looking toward actual development. He said Kansas will play a key role.

“You’ve got the right geology to do saline projects and you’ve got a lot of oil and gas,” Duguid said. “Those fields are at the right depths and have the right properties to do enhanced oil recovery.”

But some environmentalists worry about the unintended consequences of the tax incentives that make any of this profitable enough for companies to try. Particularly since it might just enable more oil drilling.

“Is it a good thing to make it cheaper to produce a barrel of oil from those facilities?” said Natural Resources Defense Council climate policy director David Hawkins. “Not if we’re trying to reduce our dependence on oil.”

Hawkins argues carbon capture and storage isn’t a grand solution for eliminating all fossil fuel emissions, but rather one of many tools to reduce their impact.

Even if carbon capture makes it easier to drill for, and burn, oil, Hawkins said it could ultimately offset the fossil fuel use it would make easier.

For now, at least, it’s all still an idea. Researchers and industry professionals are working to make it a reality. But a future with large-scale carbon capture, pipelines and storage projects still largely depends on potential regulatory changes, tax incentives, and the economy as a whole.

So when will the first project get built in Kansas?

“Bold statement: five years,” Holubnyak said. “If not in this time it’s probably never going to happen.”

Brian Grimmett reports on the environment, energy and natural resources for KMUW in Wichita and the Kansas News Service. You can follow him on Twitter @briangrimmett or email him at grimmett (at) kmuw (dot) org. The Kansas News Service is a collaboration of KCUR, Kansas Public Radio, KMUW and High Plains Public Radio focused on the health and well-being of Kansans, their communities and civic life.