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About East Oregonian : E.O. (Pendleton, OR) 1888-current | View Entire Issue (Feb. 13, 2018)
Page 4A East Oregonian Tuesday, February 13, 2018 KATHRYN B. BROWN Publisher DANIEL WATTENBURGER Managing Editor TIM TRAINOR Opinion Page Editor Founded October 16, 1875 OTHER VIEWS Scrap the hail Mary Medford Mail Tribune Oregon House Speaker Tina Kotek pulled out a Super Bowl analogy in calling for lawmakers to push ahead with an ambitious carbon tax proposal despite the brief 35-day legislative session. The Legislature, she said, is like the New England Patriots, famous for quickly scoring points when time is short. “We’re going to work hard on the field, and we’re going to get that ball across the goal line,” Kotek said. The analogy falls apart, however, when you realize that the House and the Senate, while both under Democratic control, are operating with different playbooks. Senate President Peter Courtney and Majority Leader Ginny Burdick suggested holding off on passing the cap-and-invest legislation known as the Clean Energy Jobs Bill until the full-length 2019 session. They have a point. The bill would set a cap on greenhouse gas pollution statewide that would decrease every year, and establish a price for every ton of emissions. The state’s biggest polluters — energy utilities, fossil-fuel corporations — would be required to hold allowances for each ton they emit, by reducing their emissions below the cap, purchasing or trading for allowances or arranging for offsets. The proceeds, estimated at $700 million a year, would be spent to promote clean energy projects, train workers and provide utility bill relief. That’s not necessarily a bad idea, but it’s complex legislation to push through in 35 days, and it’s not the only major initiative on the table. Lawmakers also have vowed to tackle health care reform, gun control, state employee retirement changes, bond funding for Oregon State University’s Cascades campus in Bend. All in a short session originally designed to make budget adjustments and other tweaks that couldn’t wait for the next long session. Supporters of the Clean Energy Jobs Bill worked throughout the 2017 session putting it together, and have worked since to drum up support. But without a buy-in from Senate Democratic leaders on a push to pass it this session, it could stall. It also would go back on a deal made with voters when short sessions were added in 2010. For years, Oregon did its legislative business only in odd-numbered years, passing a two-year budget and wrangling EO Media Group photo Steam rises from KapStone Kraft Paper Corporation in Longview. over everything else in marathon sessions that sometimes stretched for more than six months. Courtney was among those lawmakers who urged voters to allow annual sessions to help the Legislature be more efficient. The measure that passed capped short sessions at 35 calendar days and long sessions at 160 days. This year, it’s possible the Legislature could face a budget shortfall of $200 million to $300 million because of the federal tax reform bill passed by Congress, but state economists have yet to predict precise figures. If that’s the case, that should be lawmakers’ top priority, and balancing the budget could get in the way of many items on the wish list. Courtney has said Clean Energy Jobs should pass in 2019, and vowed not to wait any longer than that, but he fears a divisive battle this year could “tear us up.” A last-minute touchdown drive may be exciting on the football field, but it leaves the losing team bruised and angry. Rather than throwing up a hail Mary on cap-and-invest, lawmakers might be better off listening to Coach Courtney, taking a knee and going to overtime in 2019. OTHER VIEWS Let’s ban pornography I OTHER VIEWS First rivers, then oceans I n 2013, I stood in the barren landscape south of Mexicali, Mexico. Everywhere I looked, for almost as far as the eye could see, there was nothing but dirt and sand. But it wasn’t always that way. The lunar landscape south of Mexicali once made up the Colorado River Delta, where 5 trillion gallons of water poured into the Sea of Cortez every year. The massive dams built on the Colorado River in the 20th century ended that flow; now, not one drop reaches the sea. The 2 million-acre delta and wetlands have become a barren sea of sand and dirt. Without a regular infusion of freshwater, the Sea of Cortez has suffered greatly. Fish and crab species are on the brink of extinction. Without nutrients provided by the freshwater, the millions of birds that used to frequent the massive wetland have vanished, and the human fishing culture has dwindled. The interrupted linkage between the Colorado River and the Sea of Cortez is not an anomaly, however. Rather, it is becoming the norm. On the Snake and Columbia rivers in Oregon and Washington, massive dams have stopped the migration of nearly a million salmon a year — the sole source of food for the southern resident killer whales, or orcas, that live along the Washington coast and in Puget Sound. Without salmon for food, the population of this species of orca has dwindled to fewer than 100 and is teetering on extinction. Along the East Coast of the United States, Atlantic salmon, American shad, river herring, eels and other species can no longer migrate to spawn, overcoming the gantlet of dams on the Susquehanna, Connecticut and Merrimack rivers. Both the rivers and oceans suffer as fish populations dwindle to a fraction of their former numbers. It’s not just dams on rivers that are killing the oceans; pollution in rivers gets carried out to sea, where it remains a threat. In the United States, the most notorious example of this is the massive “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico. It expanded to its largest size yet in 2017, and as measured by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Unsigned editorials are the opinion of the East Oregonian editorial board. Other columns, letters and cartoons on this page express the opinions of the authors and not necessarily that of the East Oregonian. Administration covered almost 9,000 square miles, an area the size of New Jersey. The dead zone is mostly caused by nitrate-based fertilizer that washes off hundreds of thousands of square miles of farms in the Midwest and South, flows into the Mississippi River Basin, and then into the Gulf of Mexico. The nitrates feed massive algae blooms that suck the oxygen out of the water and make parts of the Gulf of Mexico unable to support life. Increasingly, dams and pollution co-mingle to harm both rivers and ocean. Where I live — in Fort Collins, Colorado — is a perfect example. There’s a proposal to build a huge dam on the Cache la Poudre River, which would suck a massive amount of water out of the river every year and send that water to small towns on the plains. One of those towns is Fort Morgan, in eastern Colorado. Fort Morgan is surrounded by farms and cattle feedlots, and it has always had access to groundwater. In fact, the town used to use that groundwater for its drinking water. But over the years the groundwater became so polluted with nitrates from farm fertilizer that the town says it can no longer afford to purify it to drinking-water standards. So the town is now included in the massive dam project, thanks to a proposed 70-mile pipeline from the dam to the town. Meanwhile, the groundwater around Fort Morgan is just getting more polluted with nitrates. These poisons continue to flow into the highly polluted South Platte River, which flows into the Platte River, which flows into the Missouri River, which flows into the Mississippi River, which flows into the Gulf of Mexico, which is now home to that huge, nitrate-caused dead zone. Most of us learned this stuff about rivers flowing to the sea in grade school. We learned about the water cycle that replenishes and repeats itself. That is, unless we dam and pollute the rivers, truncating the water cycle and interrupting the cycle of life. To save the oceans, we must save the rivers that feed them. ■ Gary Wockner is a contributor to Writers on the Range, the opinion service of High Country News. n this weekend’s New York account of being not-raped by Aziz Times Magazine there is a Ansari (jointly described by one long profile of a new kind of Twitter jester as an “ethnography of pedagogy unique to our particular the degree to which millennial sex stage of civilization. It’s called is a joyless mimetic spamming of “porn literacy,” and it involves half-remembered porn tropes”), as explaining to young people whose well as more sociological accounts sexual coming-of-age is being of the ubiquity of female sexual mediated by watching online unhappiness and pain (especially Ross gangbangs that actually hard-core that porn standby, anal sex). Douthat from pornography is not an appropriate In many of them, you see a kind Comment guide to how the sexes should of female revulsion, not against relate. Harvey Weinstein-style apex For anyone who grew up with the ideals predators, but against the very different sort of male personality that a pornographic of post-sexual revolution liberalism, there education seems to produce: a breed at is a striking pathos to these educators’ once entitled and resentful, angry and efforts. The sex education programs in undermotivated, “woke” and caddish, my mostly liberal schools featured a shaped by unprecedented possibilities for touching faith from the adults in charge sexual gratification and frustrated that real that they were engaged in a great work women are less available of enlightenment, that and more complicated with the right curricula than the version on their they could roll back the screen. forces of repression and Such men would make sexuality a place of exist without industrial- egalitarian pleasure and scale porn, but porn safety for us all. selects for them, as it Compared to those selects for a romantic idealists, the people landscape like our own: teaching “porn literacy” ever-more-liberated and have accepted a sweeping ever-less-erotic, trending pedagogical defeat. They Japan-ward in its gulf take for granted that between the sexes, with the most important sex marriage and children education may take place and sex itself in shared decline. on Pornhub, that the purpose of their work So if you want better men by any is essentially remedial, and that there is no standard, there is every reason to regard escape from the world that porn has made. ubiquitous pornography as an obstacle — Which at the moment there is not. But and to suspect that between virtual reality we are supposed to be in the midst of a and creepy forms of customization, its great sexual reassessment, a clearing-out influence is only likely to get worse. of assumptions that serve misogyny But unlike many structural forces and impose bad sex on semi-willing with which moralists of the left and right women. And such a reassessment will contend, porn is also just a product — be incomplete if it never reconsiders our something made and distributed and sold, surrender to the idea that many teenagers, and therefore subject to regulation and most young men especially, will get their restriction if we so desire. sex education from online smut. The belief that it should not be This surrender was not inevitable. It was only a generation ago that the unlikely restricted is a mistake; the belief that it cannot be censored is a superstition. Law (or was it?) alliance of feminists and religious conservatives made the regulation and jurisprudence changed once and can change again, and while you can find of pornography a live political debate. anything somewhere on the internet, But between the individualistic drift of making hard-core porn something to society, the invention of the internet, be quested after in dark corners would and the failure of the Dworkin-Falwell dramatically reduce its pedagogical role, alliance’s predictions that porn would its cultural normalcy, its power over libidos lead to rising rates of rape, the anti-porn everywhere. case was marginalized — with religious That we cannot imagine such censorship conservatism’s surrender to Donald is part of our larger inability to imagine any Trump’s playboy candidacy a seeming escape from the online world’s immersive coup de grace. power, even as we harbor growing doubts Except it doesn’t have to be. Trump’s about its influence upon our psyches. grotesqueries have stirred up a feminist But in this sense porn also presents an reaction that’s more moralistic and less opportunity to reconsider the tendency gamely sex-positive than the Clinton- to just drift along with technological justifying variety, and there’s no necessary reason why its moralistic gaze can’t extend immersion, a chance where the moral stakes are sharpened to prove we don’t to our porn addiction. And indeed, I think have to accept enslavement to our screens. the part of the #MeToo movement that’s Feminists should take it. We should all interested in discussing sexual unhappiness take it. It is not only decency but eros itself and not just sexual harassment clearly that waits to be regained. wants to talk about pornography, even if it ■ doesn’t quite realize that yet. Ross Douthat joined The New York Consider the narratives that are Times as an Op-Ed columnist in April touchstones for this part of the discussion — the New Yorker bad-sex short story “Cat 2009. Previously, he was a senior editor at The Atlantic. Person” and the controversial first-person Porn presents an opportunity to reconsider the tendency to just drift along with technological immersion. The East Oregonian welcomes original letters of 400 words or less on public issues and public policies for publication in the newspaper and on our website. The newspaper reserves the right to withhold letters that address concerns about individual services and products or letters that infringe on the rights of private citizens. Letters must be signed by the author and include the city of residence and a daytime phone number. The phone number will not be published. Unsigned letters will not be published. Send letters to managing editor Daniel Wattenburger, 211 S.E. Byers Ave. Pendleton, OR 97801 or email editor@eastoregonian.com.
