Image provided by: University of Oregon Libraries; Eugene, OR
About East Oregonian : E.O. (Pendleton, OR) 1888-current | View Entire Issue (June 3, 2017)
Page 4A OPINION East Oregonian Saturday, June 3, 2017 OTHER VIEWS Founded October 16, 1875 KATHRYN B. BROWN Publisher DANIEL WATTENBURGER Managing Editor TIM TRAINOR Opinion Page Editor MARISSA WILLIAMS Regional Advertising Director MARCY ROSENBERG Circulation Manager JANNA HEIMGARTNER Business Office Manager MIKE JENSEN Production Manager EO MEDIA GROUP East Oregonian • The Daily Astorian • Capital Press • Hermiston Herald Blue Mountain Eagle • Wallowa County Chieftain • Chinook Observer • Coast River Business Journal Oregon Coast Today • Coast Weekend • Seaside Signal • Cannon Beach Gazette Eastern Oregon Real Estate Guide • Eastern Oregon Marketplace • Coast Marketplace OnlyAg.com • FarmSeller.com • Seaside-Sun.com • NorthwestOpinions.com • DiscoverOurCoast.com OUR VIEW It’s not Paris vs. Pittsburgh; we’re all in this South Florida and low-lying It is pure poppycock and chicanery to island nations will be the first to face suggest that we can somehow bully existential climate-change disasters, our way to a new agreement that will it’s often said. The Lower Columbia achieve meaningful goals at less cost River and adjacent coastlines also are to us. at risk in important ways. We already We can put off paying our are starting to pay a steep price for share of the bill for climate action, mankind’s thoughtless pollution of but the planet will keep counting our planet’s thin film of atmosphere. up the interest in the form of carbon dioxide, methane and their Saying he was “elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, byproducts in the atmosphere and not Paris,” President Trump on oceans. Our neglect of Paris goals Thursday spurned could add as the Paris climate much as another agreement. He Individual states in 3 billion tons of hitched his wagon carbon dioxide the U.S. Climate and ours to a per year into the nostalgic vision air. Alliance must of smokestack Seawater is continue forging a intruding far America, abandoning not Hawaiian sane path, investing up only the nation’s beaches. in the lucrative vulnerable Observers see coastlines and ominous cracks clean-energy fisheries, but also expanding across a host of U.S. industry and curbing Antarctica’s industries tied to vast coastal greenhouse gas clean energy. The shelves, which new, alternative keep fearsome emissions. energy sector ice sheets out is quite alive in of the ocean. In Oregon. the North Pacific, great reservoirs of warm seawater encourage toxic With this decision, it will be the algal blooms and make rivers too hot U.S., Syria and Nicaragua on one for fish. No single clue is definitive side, and the world’s 189 other proof that global warming is already nations on the other. This isn’t walloping us. Together they form a putting America first. It’s grouping disturbing pattern. us with a failed dictatorship and Our CIA, the Pentagon and a banana republic. Embarrassing. corporations from Weyerhauser to And Nicaragua doesn’t back the Coca-Cola have long studied the agreement because it views it as too implications of climate change. weak. On matters of environmental Political instability, disruptions science, no country is a discreet entity — we all share the atmosphere of supply chains, refugee crises and illegal immigration are all and its man-made problems. consequences of a whacked-out, These problems have a lot to do with our country’s voracious appetite whipped-up climate. The Paris accords are a small price to pay to for dirty energy in the past century stay ahead of these calamities. and a half. We built our industries Fully withdrawing from the and consumer economy with Paris agreement will take until the carbon-based fossil fuels that took next presidential election, when the the planet’s natural processes eons to lock away underground. Although American people will have another China now surpasses us as a polluter, chance to decide who best to lead us as we navigate the dangers ahead. our own behavior did much to get In the meantime, individual everyone into this mess. Instead states in the U.S. Climate Alliance of disadvantaging the U.S. “to the must continue forging a sane exclusive benefit of other countries” path, investing in the lucrative as Trump alleges, the climate clean-energy industry and curbing accord provides a pathway for us to greenhouse gas emissions. Gov. gradually throttle back greenhouse Kate Brown re-asserted Oregon’s emissions while giving us moral leverage to insist other nations do the commitment to working with our neighboring West Coast states and same. British Columbia in the Pacific Coast Symbolism counts. We’re the Collaborative to reduce greenhouse annoying neighbor with a stinky, gas emission and develop a cleaner long-smoldering burn barrel, telling energy mix going forward. others they should put theirs out Not only will we reap economic before we will. The president last benefits, we will demonstrate to the week dangled the possibility he might negotiate a more advantageous world that the U.S. is still about a lot more than Trump’s thoughtless brand climate deal. It took years of tough of hot air. talking to achieve the Paris accords. Unsigned editorials are the opinion of the East Oregonian editorial board of publisher Kathryn Brown, managing editor Daniel Wattenburger, and opinion page editor Tim Trainor. Other columns, letters and cartoons on this page express the opinions of the authors and not necessarily that of the East Oregonian. The axis of selfishness T his week, two of Donald Trump’s harmony between peoples. From their top advisers, H.R. McMaster first moments, children are wired to and Gary Cohn, wrote the feel each other’s pain. You don’t have following passage in The Wall Street to teach a child about what fairness is; Journal: “The president embarked on they already know. There’s no society his first foreign trip with a cleareyed on Earth where people are admired for outlook that the world is not a ‘global running away in battle or for lying to community’ but an arena where nations, their friends. nongovernmental actors and businesses People have moral emotions. They David engage and compete for advantage.” feel rage at injustice, disgust toward Brooks That sentence is the epitome of greed, reverence for excellence, awe Comment the Trump project. It asserts that before the sacred and elevation in the selfishness is the sole driver of human face of goodness. affairs. It grows out of a worldview that life is People yearn for righteousness. They want to a competitive struggle for gain. It implies that feel meaning and purpose in their lives, that their cooperative communities are hypocritical covers lives are oriented toward the good. People are attracted by goodness and repelled for the selfish jockeying underneath. by selfishness. NYU social psychologist The essay explains why the Trump Jonathan Haidt has studied people are suspicious of any the surges of elevation we cooperative global arrangement, feel when we see somebody like NATO and the various performing a selfless action. trade agreements. It helps Haidt describes the time a guy explain why Trump pulled out spontaneously leapt out of a of the Paris global-warming car to help an old lady shovel accord. This essay explains snow from her driveway. why Trump gravitates toward One of his friends, who leaders like Vladimir Putin, witnessed this small act, later the Saudi princes and various wrote: “I felt like jumping out global strongmen: They share of the car and hugging this guy. his core worldview that life is I felt like singing and running, nakedly a selfish struggle for or skipping and laughing. Just money and dominance. being active. I felt like saying It explains why people in nice things about people. Writing a beautiful the Trump White House are so savage to one another. Far from being a band of brothers, their poem or love song. Playing in the snow like a child. Telling everybody about his deed.” world is a vicious arena where staffers compete Good leaders like Lincoln, Churchill, for advantage. Roosevelt and Reagan understand the selfish In the essay, McMaster and Cohn make explicit the great act of moral decoupling woven elements that drive human behavior, but they have another foot in the realm of the moral through this presidency. In this worldview, motivations. They seek to inspire faithfulness by morality has nothing to do with anything. showing good character. They try to motivate Altruism, trust, cooperation and virtue are action by pointing toward great ideals. unaffordable luxuries in the struggle of all Realist leaders like Trump, McMaster and against all. Everything is about self-interest. We’ve seen this philosophy before, of course. Cohn seek to dismiss this whole moral realm. By behaving with naked selfishness toward Powerful, selfish people have always adopted others, they poison the common realm and they this dirty-minded realism to justify their own force others to behave with naked selfishness selfishness. toward them. The problem is that this philosophy is based By treating the world simply as an arena for on an error about human beings and it leads to competitive advantage, Trump, McMaster and self-destructive behavior in all cases. Cohn sever relationships, destroy reciprocity, The error is that it misunderstands what erode trust and eviscerate the sense of sympathy, drives human action. Of course people are friendship and loyalty that all nations need when driven by selfish motivations — for individual times get tough. status, wealth and power. But they are also By looking at nothing but immediate material motivated by another set of drives — for solidarity, love and moral fulfillment — that are interest, Trump, McMaster and Cohn turn America into a nation that affronts everybody equally and sometimes more powerful. else’s moral emotions. They make our country People are wired to cooperate. Far from seem disgusting in the eyes of the world. being a flimsy thing, the desire for cooperation ■ is the primary human evolutionary advantage David Brooks has been a senior editor at we have over the other animals. The Weekly Standard, a contributing editor at People have a moral sense. They have a Newsweek and the Atlantic Monthly. set of universal intuitions that help establish The Trump doctrine asserts that selfishness is the sole driver of human affairs. OTHER VIEWS Self-fuel bill recognizes reality of rural life The Albany Democrat-Herald I t could be another crack in the wall of Oregon’s longstanding refusal to pump its own gas. Or it could just be a recognition of the reality of life in Oregon’s rural counties. In either event, a bill allowing self-service gasoline in several rural counties has passed the Legislature and is en route to Gov. Kate Brown’s desk. The bill, House Bill 2482, allows people to pump their own gas at all hours in counties with less than 40,000 residents. It is a successor of sorts to House Bill 3011, which won approval in the 2015 Legis- lature. That bill authorized self-service gasoline at retail outlets in low-population counties between the hours of 6 p.m. and 6 a.m. in certain circumstances. One of the bill’s backers, Sen. Ted Ferrioli, insisted that it was not meant as an end run around the state’s ban on self-service, but it did represent the first crack in Oregon’s status as a full-service state. The Oregon law banning self-service gasoline has been on the books since 1951, and the law lists 17 separate justifications for the ban. Those justifications include some that likely have occurred to you: For example, the ban creates jobs. However, some of the other justifications seem to be — how to phrase this? — a little silly. For example, the law notes that there is a safety issue involved with gasoline in that it is flammable. Despite the recent advances in fuel-pump safety, lawmakers have not been eager to embrace a full-fledged effort to repeal the ban on self-service, even though some evidence from polls suggests that younger Oregon voters might embrace the opportunity to pump their own gas. And a study by an economist has estimated that the ban might add 3 to 5 cents per gallon to the cost of gasoline in Oregon. But the overall sense is that the ban remains popular among older residents — the type of residents who are more likely to vote. House Bill 2482 essentially just expands on the realities of rural life that helped to drive the 2015 bill. But don’t be completely surprised if it lays the groundwork for a move to allow self-service gas throughout Oregon. And then poor New Jersey would be left in the lurch. The bill could lay groundwork for a move to allow self-service gas throughout Oregon. LETTERS POLICY The East Oregonian welcomes original letters of 400 words or less on public issues and public policies for publication. Submitted letters must be signed by the author and include the city of residence and a phone number. Send letters to 211 S.E. Byers Ave. Pendleton, OR 97801 or email editor@eastoregonian.com.
