OPINION
4A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • THURSDAY, JUNE 23, 2016
GUEST COLUMN
Founded in 1873
Time to ix broken federal coal system
By BOB REES
For The Daily Astorian
STEPHEN A. FORRESTER, Editor & Publisher
LAURA SELLERS, Managing Editor
BETTY SMITH, Advertising Manager
CARL EARL, Systems Manager
JOHN D. BRUIJN, Production Manager
DEBRA BLOOM, Business Manager
HEATHER RAMSDELL, Circulation Manager
What is Kate Brown
afraid of?
Herself
B
arely a week passes when Kate Brown refuses to be
a leader. The governor’s latest proile in timidity is
her backing out of the longstanding tradition of debat-
ing her challenger in front of the audience of the Oregon
Newspaper Publishers Association during its July conven-
tion. That quadrennial encounter between the Democratic
and Republican candidates has sparked the beginning of
the campaign season.
Paris Achen of our state- sive on an array of issues.
Brown can afford this
house bureau reported
in Monday’s edition that game of “ind the governor”
Brown’s aides were anxious because Oregon has become
about what questions would a one-party state. When the
be asked during the debate. Republican Party became the
Who would do the asking, captive of religious conser-
vatives more than a decade
they wondered.
Those questions beit a ago, it ceased to develop a
irst-time candidate, not bench of younger, strong
someone who’s been to mainstream candidates.
the polls as many times as
Dr. Bud Pierce, the
Brown.
GOP’s nominee for gov-
And what is Brown afraid ernor, is a irst-time candi-
of?
date. That Gov. Brown is so
Herself. Following an afraid of Pierce (and appar-
impressive beginning in ently of the news media)
the wake of Gov. John that she won’t appear at
Kitzhaber’s sudden resigna- the ONPA convention tells
tion, Brown has receded from us more about her frailties
view and become nonrespon- than Pierce.
Just say ‘no’ to
gun ownership
mong the many sad
ironies
surrounding
the U.S. cultural wars about
irearms is the vast growth
in gun numbers during the
Obama
administration,
whose detractors routinely
accuse of conspiring to end
private gun ownership. Fear
of this nonexistent threat
has resulted in enough ire-
arm sales to ight off an out-
er-space invasion.
Data on federal crim-
inal background checks
show a continuing surge in
gun buying in Oregon and
around the nation.
In the irst ive months of
2016, Oregonians bought
at least 126,738 irearms,
based on statistics from the
National Instant Criminal
Background Check System
(NICS), nearly double the
66,665 sold in the same
months in 2006. The NICS
does not include sales
between private individuals
and certain other exceptions
that may add tens of thou-
sands of additional sales to
the actual total.
Since Obama’s inau-
guration in January 2009,
A
Oregonians have purchased
nearly 1.8 million irearms
covered by the NICS sys-
tem. In 2016, there were
only 1.5 million occupied
homes in Oregon.
Do all these weapons
make us safer? Far more
Americans use our weap-
ons to commit suicide than
to commit murder. “In the
U.S., more than 10,000
Americans will likely be
killed in gun murders this
year. Another 20,000 will
likely be lost to gun suicide.
The total number of gun
deaths and violent injuries
will be close to 100,000,”
The Guardian newspa-
per reported this week.
“In absolute terms, around
33,500 lives are lost each
year. That’s roughly one
every 15 minutes — about
the same number of people
as are killed on America’s
roads.”
Leaving all the politics
aside, the facts tell us we are
safer not having irearms at
home. If you are contem-
plating buying one, take
Nancy Reagan’s famous
advice to heart: Just say no.
Editorials that appear on this page are written by
Publisher Steve Forrester and Matt Winters, editor of the
Chinook Observer and Coast River Business Journal, or staff
members from the EO Media Group’s sister newspapers.
his week in Seattle, the
Department of the Interior
is providing the public with the
opportunity to provide input on
the federal coal program.
T
Most people don’t know that
publicly owned coal makes up 40
percent of all coal burned in the
U.S. each year — but the rules
governing the federal coal pro-
gram haven’t been updated in
three decades.
Because of this, the current law
is outdated and environmentally
irresponsible, and contains gaping
loopholes that have allowed coal
companies to cheat taxpayers out
of revenue and avoid government
accountability. Studies have esti-
mated at least $1 billion in lost rev-
enue per year for the last 30 years;
funds that could have been put to
good use in our communities, rather
than lining the pockets of coal com-
pany CEOs.
Science is clear that coal pollu-
tion is driving the increasingly hot
ocean and river temperatures and
their acidiication to lethal levels for
our salmon and countless other spe-
cies. We’ve already seen our Paciic
shellish industry take a hit: in 2007
we began to see the irst large-scale
die-offs that have been proven to
be caused by ocean acid-
an examination. Just one
iication driven by coal
example: coal companies
pollution.
only pay 12.5 percent roy-
More recently, the
alty rate on product mined
Whiskey Creek Shellish
from federal lands, while
hatchery on the shores of
offshore oil and gas leases
Oregon’s cleanest estu-
generate 18.75 percent.
ary was losing up to 80
And unlike coal, revenues
percent of their juveniles
from offshore gas and oil
due to ocean acidiication
leases are reinvested into
caused by the uptake of
the Land and Water Con-
Bob
carbon dioxide from the
servation Fund, which
Rees
atmosphere, threaten-
increases public access
ing a multi-million dol-
and improves to city and
We can state facilities associated
lar industry.
Strip mines and
with outdoor recreation.
failed mine reclamation no longer
For too long, coal
sites cause irreparable
companies
have been
afford to taking advantage
damage to our pristine,
of a
ishable waterways, not
play the broken and outdated
to mention the contribu-
program full of loop-
tion to climate change ignorance holes and giveaways at
that’s affecting our
the expense of taxpay-
card.
oceans and snowpack.
ers and our land, air,
And let’s not forget:
water, ish and wildlife.
our salmon are the heart and soul
We can no longer afford to play
of the northwest. As a healthy food the ignorance card when it comes
source, and as an icon, they connect to fossil fuels here in Oregon, or
us personally to our rivers and our on our public lands. There are bet-
oceans, and their sustainable har- ter ways to meet our needs socially,
vest supports our economy, from environmentally and economically.
our biggest cities to our smallest Let it be our nation’s citizens that
towns, with hundreds of millions of continue to drive this conversation.
recreational dollars every year.
It may be our best investment for
A comprehensive review of the the future of our children.
federal coal program is the com-
Bob Rees is a sixth genera-
mon-sense next step in mitigating this tion Oregonian, professional ish-
damage. The program has not been ing guide and executive director
overhauled since the Reagan admin- for the Association of Northwest
istration, and is greatly overdue for Steelheaders.
Photo Illustration from AdobeStock Images
We are in another age of discovery
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
New York Times News Service
H
ave we been here before?
I know — it feels as if the
internet, virtual reality, Donald
Trump, Facebook, sequenc-
ing of the human genome and
machines that can reason better
than people constitute a change
in the pace of change without
precedent.
But we’ve
actually been
through
an
extraordinarily
rapid transition
like this before
in history — a
transition we
can learn a lot
Thomas L.
from.
Friedman
Ian
Gol-
din, director of
the Oxford Martin School at Oxford
University, and Chris Kutarna, also
of Oxford Martin, have just pub-
lished a book — Age of Discovery:
Navigating the Risks and Rewards of
Our New Renaissance — about les-
sons we can draw from the period
1450 to 1550, known as the Age of
Discovery. It was when the world
made a series of great leaps for-
ward, propelled by da Vinci, Michel-
angelo, Copernicus and Columbus,
that produced the Renaissance and
reshaped science, education, manu-
facturing, communications, politics
and geopolitics.
“Gutenberg’s printing press pro-
vided the trigger,” Goldin told me
by email, “by lipping knowledge
production and exchange from tight
scarcity to radical abundance. Before
that, the Catholic churches monopo-
lized knowledge, with their hand-
written Latin manuscripts locked
up in monasteries. The Gutenberg
press democratized information,
and provided the incentive to be lit-
erate. Within 50 years, not only had
scribes lost their jobs, but the Catho-
lic Church’s millennia-old monopoly
of power had been torn apart as the
printing of Martin Luther’s sermons
ignited a century of religious wars.”
Meanwhile, Goldin added,
Copernicus upended the prevailing
God-given notions of heaven and
earth “by inding that far from the
sun revolving around the Earth, the
Earth rotated around the sun,” and
“voyages of discovery by Colum-
Was there a
Donald Trump
back then?
bus, da Gama and Magellan tore up
millennia-old maps of the ‘known’
world.”
Those were the mother of all dis-
ruptions and led to the parallels with
today.
“Now, like then, new media have
democratized information exchange,
amplifying the voices of those who
feel they have been injured in the
upheaval,” said Goldin. “Now, like
then, public leaders and public insti-
tutions have failed to keep up with
rapid change, and popular trust has
been deeply eroded.” Now, like then,
“this is the best moment in history to
be alive” — human health, literacy,
aggregate wealth and education are
lourishing — and “there are more
scientists alive today than in all pre-
vious generations.”
And, yet many people feel worse
off.
Because, as in the Renaissance,
key anchors in people’s lives — like
the workplace and community — are
being fundamentally dislocated. The
pace of technological change is out-
stripping the average person’s ability
to adapt. Now, like then, said Gol-
din, “sizable parts of the popula-
tion found their skills were no longer
needed, or they lived in places left
behind, so inequality grew.” At the
same time, “new planetary scale sys-
tems of commerce and information
exchange led to immense improve-
ments in choices and accelerating
innovations which made some peo-
ple fabulously rich.”
Was there a Donald Trump back
then?
“Michelangelo and Machiavelli’s
Florence suffered a shocking pop-
ular power-taking when Girolamo
Savonarola, a midlevel friar from
Ferrara, who lived from 1452 to
1498, exploded from obscurity in the
1490s to enthrall Florentines, who
felt left behind economically or cul-
turally, with sermons that laid blame
upon the misguided policies and
moral corruption of their leaders,”
said Goldin. “He and his zealous
supporters, though a small minority,
swept away the Medici establish-
ment and seized control of the city’s
councils.
“From
there,
Savonarola
launched an ugly campaign of pub-
lic puriication, introducing radical
laws including against homosexual-
ity, and attacked public intellectuals
in an act of intimidation that history
still remembers as the Bonire of the
Vanities. Savonarola was amongst
the irst to tap into the information
revolution of the time, and while
others produced long sermons and
treatises, Savonarola disseminated
short pamphlets, in what may be
thought of as the equivalent of polit-
ical tweets.”
The establishment politicians
of the day, who were low energy,
“underestimated the power of that
new information revolution to move
beyond scientiic and cultural ideas”
to amplify populist voices challeng-
ing authority.
Yikes! How do we blunt that?
“More risk-taking is required
when things change more rap-
idly, both for workers who have to
change jobs and for businesses who
have to constantly innovate to stay
ahead,” Goldin argued. Govern-
ment’s job is to strengthen the safety
nets and infrastructure so individu-
als and companies can be as daring
— in terms of learning, adapting and
investing in themselves — as they
need to be. At the same time, when
the world gets this tightly woven,
America “needs to be more, not less,
engaged, with the rest of the world,”
because “the threats posed by cli-
mate change, pandemics, cyberat-
tacks or terror will not be reduced by
America withdrawing.”
Then, as now, walls stopped
working. “Cannons and gunpowder
came to Europe that could penetrate
or go over walls and books could
bring ideas around them,” he said.
Then, like now, walls only made you
poorer, dumber and more insecure.