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.
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