Starting out in Indianapolis on the third day of the tour, the sun — that had kept us warm and allowed our Fort Wayne event to be outside — failed us.  Ominous clouds and the threat of rain seemed to be the order of the day this Wednesday. Yet, as both Glenn Kunkel and Chuck Tyler reminded us on our way to board the bus:  “If it ain’t rainin’, we ain’t trainin’.”

Clearly, these Soldiers and Marines (and one Coastie) were not about to let a little rain stop our efforts on behalf of clean American energy.  So off we headed to the campus of Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) — one of four college campuses that we will be visiting on this swing through Indiana.

As we pulled up to the IUPUI campus center, we met up with Russell Silver, our host for the event.  Russell is an Army veteran who served in Iraq and has continued to serve as President of the IUPUI chapter of Student Veterans of America — an organization devoted to providing support and assistance to the thousands of recent military veterans who are heading to college under the new GI Bill.

Once inside the Campus Center, we held a spirited roundtable discussion about how much America’s security would be strengthened if we reduced our dependence on foreign energy sources and cut the carbon pollution that causes climate change.

During the discussion, Dan Martin, a Navy veteran and IUPUI graduate student, recalled his service as a young sailor in the late 80s, where he and his shipmates were tasked to protect the flow of oil tankers through the Straits of Hormuz. When I heard Dan’s story, it reminded me of the fact that today, over 20 years later, we still have sailors, Marines and Coasties over there protecting the oil infrastructure at Umm Qasr and other spots in the Gulf — huge additions to the real cost of our dependence on foreign energy.

And as Glenn Kunkel reminded us at the forum, right at this moment we have a U.S.-bound oil tanker held hostage by pirates off the coast of Somalia — fully laden with 275,000 metric tons of the Saudi Arabian crude that our nation runs on.

These kind of things underscore how vulnerable we are to disruptions in our foreign energy supply.  And that’s why we’re out here — to secure our nation through the development of clean, domestic energy that can’t ever get hijacked.

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