Counting Coup

[February 27th, 2008]

Proving the Flat Earth Society still has sway, Oregon’s powerful global-warming laggards ganged up for a surprising victory in the special legislative session completed last week.

Lobbyist Mark Nelson led a coalition of the pulp and paper industry, agriculture, the metals industry and his client Industrial Customers of Northwest Utilities to defeat a bill that would have established a data-collecting system for greenhouse gas emissions.

“This was about politics, not policy,” says state Rep. Jackie Dingfelder (D-Northeast Portland), chair of the House Energy and Environment Committee.

Dingfelder says Nelson and his allies “wanted to show people they still have clout” after losing last year on Senate Bill 838, a bill that mandated Oregon get 25 percent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2025.

At issue in the Democratic-controlled Legislature this year was how to build upon an ambitious global-warming bill law passed last year. That measure established a standing global-warming commission that includes heavyweights from the utility and transportation industries. (Oregon’s Department of Environmental Quality says those two sources produce about 84 percent of the state’s emission of greenhouse gases.)

More importantly, the new law included the goals of reducing Oregon’s greenhouse gas emissions 10 percent from 1990 levels by 2020 and 75 percent by 2050.

The next logical step would be establishing a standardized method for reporting emissions, so that DEQ could track progress toward compliance and begin to establish emission-reducing mechanisms. House Bill 3610, sponsored by Dingfelder, proposed such a data-collecting system.

And Dingfelder says key players such as Associated Oregon Industries; the state’s largest utilities, Portland General Electric and PacifiCorp; and various fossil-fuel wholesalers signaled before the February session that they wouldn’t oppose the bill even if they weren’t wild about more red tape. Utilities and transportation companies collectively produce the vast majority of Oregon’s greenhouse gases, and they already report that key data to regulators.

Utilities file reports with the Oregon Public Utility Commission. Gasoline and diesel fuel wholesalers report their sales to the Driver and Motor Vehicles Division for tax purposes, as well. So much of the data Dingfelder wants DEQ to gather already exists, just in a different form.

But the bill died in the Ways and Means Committee after passing Dingfelder’s committee. She says two or three Democratic colleagues indicated they would vote no if the bill came to the floor of the House, meaning sure defeat considering the Democrats’ narrow 31-29 majority.

Nelson says other pending global-warming efforts—such as the multi-state Western Climate Initiative and a separate cap-and-trade system proposal—would be complicated by any new reporting to DEQ.

“We’re not against reporting,” Nelson says. “It’s a timeliness issue.”

Environment Oregon lobbyist Jeremiah Baumann says the bill’s failure did more to illustrate a chasm within business groups and set up a battle royale in the 2009 Legislature than it did to slow progress on data gathering. Although Nelson’s coalition opposed the bill, the more progressive Oregon Business Association backed the bill, as did Nike.

“This was effectively a housekeeping bill, but what the result shows is that there are still companies that are still in complete denial about global warming,” Baumann says. “What they were doing here is drawing a line in the sand for next session.”