 Mark Nelson blocked a cigarette tax increase; now he’s tackling global warming.
IMAGE: lukas ketner |
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.”
FACT: Oregon measures emissions based on consumption rather than production. Thus, coal burned in Idaho to produce electricity for Oregon counts as an Oregon emission.
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I have read, recently, that no cars or trucks in the US would remove 6% of the CO2 fossil fuel emissions. Power plants (making electricity for the electric car?) and jet planes are the majority of CO2 into the atmosphere.
So I sit here, my gas driving my pickup fewer miles due to E10, the price of milk, eggs, food in general, inflating daily due to corn going into fuel, and higher transportation cost, my farm supplier showing me the fertilizer bill up 60% from last year, and I think we are going into the economic trash can of our own eco-scare volition....a tragedy...
Our supposed "consensus" science doesn't really have proof. I could go into facts but the MMGW Alarmist Society already dismisses arguments about things like climate models that can't predict anything about weather except the dreaded warming.
What's interesting is that the supposed "consensus" includes scientists that regularly say they don't agree but they are included in the IPCC listing because they were invited to participate. When their comments were contrary to the right answer they were dis-invited but not dropped from the list of consensus scientists.
Anyone who wants to look up these facts and find contrary information based on good science can do so. Most points in favor of MMGW can be rebutted with sound scientific information. They run the risk of being ridiculed as Mr. Jaquiss does in his article.
I'll accept the risk.
In short, as in every other political issue, one need only follow the money. The people who are screaming the loudest about "global warming" (which has been going on for 18,000 years now, but that never seems to get mentioned), are the grant-whores. People like Oregon State Climatologist George Taylor, who have little to gain one way or another (or so we thought), don't seem too convinced by the junk-science that's fuelling the alarmism. Taylor has forgotten more about climatology that all of the state legislators combined will ever know... but we shouldn't let that get in the way of a good old fashioned politically-generated scam. Matter of fact, how about we just have Teddy The Spectator fire him... for doing his job (bearing in mind Teddy knows absolutely nothing about the sciences his special interests are trumpeting).
Want to do something about consumption of fossil fuels? If that's your cause, more power to you. Just stop using them. And quit whining to the government to do something on your behalf... just stop using fossil fuels... or do you think that's on everyone BUT you?
Wake the hell up, people. The IPCC "study" is an insult to every literate person on earth. It's junk-science "computer models," which are merely a data-processing program, and should work equally well in reverse as they do forward, don't come into the same universe as the observed data, concrete proof they don't work. Yet, people want to start converting the world's food supply into fuel on the basis of a known-faulty model and unproven "science"? The lunatics have truly taken over the asylum.
My point is, if you want science to provide an answer for whether a global warming trend is human-caused or not, you need a complete data picture.
I won't get into the limitations of models, they aren't perfect. A good scientist would try to discover those limitations and voice them as strongly as any result that might be produced.
If you ask me the issue is consumption in general. Although it seems like any reduction in consumption by any one person will only be offset by our rising world population. Hmmmm....