community
july18
2019
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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,
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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
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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:
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