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About Vernonia's voice. (Vernonia, OR) 2007-current | View Entire Issue (July 18, 2019)
community july18 2019 9 Digging Deeper into Cap-and-Trade continued from front page the Oregon voters,” said Johnson. “At the end of the day we had an enormously complicated bill that had process questions,” she said. When looking at the actual poli- cies the bill would implement, Johnson said she found plenty of things to fault. She had concerns that the bottom line costs to all Oregonians had not been ful- ly analyzed. She said, while Democrats who crafted the bill did make some con- cessions to some segments of Oregon’s economy that would be more heavily impacted by the bill, including public utilities Pacific Corp, Portland Gen- eral Electric, and eventually Northwest Natural Gas, the bill didn’t do enough to protect those at the bottom of the eco- nomic ladder. Johnson raised concerns that de- tails in the bill would hobble the state’s future ability to bond highway and road projects. She said she was worried about the state’s ability to go back and undo portions of policy in the bill if positive projections proved to be wrong. She also raised concerns about where financial resources, committed on an open-end- ed basis in the bill, would come from. “Who are we going to take those re- sources away from?” she asked. Johnson also found troubling the idea that the bill would act as a way to redistribute wealth by requiring sig- nificant spending by private business and households and diverting it into the public sector for programs that were, in many ways, unrelated to reducing the carbon footprint. “I don’t know whether this was based on true science or parsed science, Marie Krahn Massage Therapy but I was just not convinced that this overreaching bill with an uncalculated impact on our economy at large, and es- pecially on lower income and rural Or- egonians who don’t have the bountiful transit and economic choices our urban citizens have, had not been completely thought out,” she said. “The memory of the spotted owl burns bright for a lot of people who still make their living in a natural resource based economy. To have what was seen as ostensibly an ur- ban idea motivated by transit in urban places, motivated by perhaps a higher standard of living in urban places – an urban idea pushed on rural Oregon with its concomitant costs – was something that the folks I talked with who came down to the capital railed against.” I asked Johnson about Oregon’s history of being a leader in passing pro- gressive legislation, and whether the state’s lawmakers had a moral respon- sibility to help find a solution to carbon emission reduction and global climate change? “Oregon exceptionalism is not a rationale for us to throw ourselves off of a precipice,” she said in response. “Oregon exceptionalism has gotten us into trouble previously – I can walk you to an ethanol plant where the state made a $20 million investment before we re- ally had looked at all the pitfalls there, and it failed.” Johnson said it would have made more sense to move forward incremen- tally with the changes the bill proposed, and suggested as an example, continuing incentives to move people towards elec- tric vehicles. “By not passing HB 2020 I Heather Lewis New Day Massage Theraputic Massage Specializing in: Medical Massage Cupping doTerra Aroma Touch Trigger Point Therapy Reiki • Deep Tissue Myofacial Release Reflexology Medical Massage Cupping Manual Lymph Drainage Post Mastectomy Care Nutritional Counseling Oncology Support Sauna on-site 503-429-5180 503-429-4677 #5495 #10732 Collectively serving Vernonia for over 30 years Accepting HSA debit cards and insurance billing available Kelly Jarman Fitness starts from the Inside Out, and doesn’t need to be intimidating. Let me help you take care of yourself! N.A.S.M. Certified In: • Resistance Training • Body Weight Training • Weight Loss • Cardiovascular Strength • Kickboxing • Senior & Youths • Couples or Small Group Training • Working with Pre or Post Op, Muscle Strengthening • Flexibility Cell: (971) 203-8296 Training out of Terry’s Gym in Vernonia Free Consultation Get Started Today! Email: KellyJarmanTrainer1@gmail.com don’t believe that we missed a chance to help fix a, quote, ‘global climate crisis.’ What we have done is sent up a clarion call that this huge bill needs to be reas- sessed to figure out how to incentivize the businesses that are creating carbon emissions to switch to renewables. We need to look at other things like carbon sequestration in Oregon’s forests. This was just an attempt to measure Oregon’s carbon reduction instead of focusing on other methodology and ignores Oregon’s ability to create natural carbon storage, which are our forests.” Where is “rural” Oregon? When we try to examine the economic impacts of a policy as com- plicated as HB 2020, one of the main factors is the so-called rural/urban di- vide. Senator Johnson says she believes the bill’s main fault was that it ignored the economic impact on Oregon’s rural communities, businesses, and citizens, and even unduly punished rural Orego- nians. But understanding how cap-and- trade would impact rural economics by looking at statistics isn’t as cut and dried continued on page 11 Where Do You Read the Voice? Carol McIntyre celebrated her Grandma’s 90 th birthday in New York by reading the Voice together on her front porch. Show us where you have traveled. Submit your photo with a brief description by email to: Scott@VernoniasVoice.com