Chris White Tech Reporter
March 11, 2020 1:47 PM ET
Oregon Gov. Kate Brown took a page out of Sen. Bernie Sanders’s playbook Tuesday as she signed a climate executive order after GOP lawmakers fled the state to avoid taking action on a climate bill.
Brown’s order intends to reduce carbon emissions by 45% below 1990 levels within 15 years and an 80% cut by 2050. The order also directs regulators to issue rules placing caps on emissions for the state’s fossil fuel industry, a move conservatives say would decimate rural parts of the state.
“I’ve heard it loud and clear from our young people in Oregon: climate action is crucial and urgent,” Brown said in a statement announcing the move. “If we adults don’t take action right away, it is the next generation that will pay the price.
“This executive order is extensive and thorough, taking the boldest actions available to lower greenhouse gas emissions under current state laws,” Brown said, adding that she made the decision to help set “Oregon on a path we can be proud to leave behind for our children.”
The Democrat’s maneuver also requires 20% of her state’s transportation fuels to come from electricity, natural gas, and propane within a decade, and 25% by 2035. (RELATED: Republican Lawmakers Flee Oregon Again To Avoid A Climate Bill Capping Greenhouse Gasses)
Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) (L) (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Brown’s EO comes less than a month after 11 Republican lawmakers walked out of the state capitol, preventing the majority party from reaching a quorum on a cap-and-trade bill. They say making tracks for another state was one of their only options after Democrats won the majority in 2018.
Her decision was a long-time in the making. Republicans employed a similar tactic in 2019, when they walked out in June to prevent a quorum in protest against HB 2020, a cap-and-trade climate bill. They stayed away even after Brown authorized Oregon State Police to return the lawmakers to Salem.
Republicans railed against the bill at the time.
“Pay attention Oregon — this is a true example of partisan politics,” Oregon Senate Republican Leader Herman Baertschiger Jr. said in a statement in February. Others were similarly apoplectic.
“Denying quorum is one of the only tools that the minority party has right now,” Senate Republican spokeswoman Kate Gillem told WaPo, noting that the bill is too divisive to move forward during the legislature’s 35-day “short session.”
Brown’s decision is similar to one Sen. Bernie Sanders proposed on the campaign trail.
Sanders, a self-avowed democratic socialist, revealed his own Green New Deal in August 2019, promising everything from “virtually free” electricity and a “hunger-free” transition to green energy from fossil fuels. His nearly 14,000-page memo also lays out that he would call a national emergency on climate change.
Sanders did say his plan to makeover the American economy will create “up to 20 million” jobs. He introduced a $16.3-trillion plan similar to the GND in August, which aims to make 100% of energy for U.S. electricity and transportation renewable by 2030 and have “complete decarbonization” by 2050.
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We are a country loaded with heavily propagandized minds. They are incapable of recognizing basic common sense facts and it will cost us big.
I blame the public education system where everything starts with the premise of global warming doom and extends from there.
Politicians easily set unrealistic deadlines for impossible goals, and those deadlines are always for when the politicians expect to be out of office.
A subsistence existence does tend to create high employment. Everyone else dies.
“I’ve heard it loud and clear from our young people in Oregon”
I wasn’t aware that young people were the only ones that matter in the state of Oregon.
Every time this issue is put to a referendum of the actual voters, it loses.
MarkW
To paraphrase the gov’, “I’ve heard it loud and clear from those too young to vote in Oregon.” She apparently doesn’t realize why there is a minimum age requirement for voting.
Portland is where young people go to retire.
https://youtu.be/TZt-pOc3moc?t=62
I had to retire last year. I’m hoping the new set will last 50,000 miles.
Traffic in Portland has become insane. If I have to travel through there headed west or east, then I try to time my entry into the Portland freeway system for between 10 AM and 2 PM. Same for Seattle. The only other place I’ve seen personally that’s worse for nightmare traffic is the Washington DC beltway.
Oregon is a communist state. Visit there to see your future. No votes count, nor do opinions from the little people. You have filth on the streets, violence everywhere and they call it Nirvana. These people deserve whatever they get.
I’ve seen violence on Portland streets. Not going back.
Kate Brown hates allowing Oregonians to vote, as Secretary of State she made it harder to get any referendum on the ballot. She upped all sorts of requirements to getting a bill on the ballot, when that didn’t work she started whole sale tossing out signatures. At first she started tossing out entire sheets if just one invalid signature was identified then she brought in supposed statistical analysis to toss out even more valid signatures. In the end those trying to gather signatures internally upped the number they needed to gather to ensure they made the state required minimum.
Now that she’s Governor she wants to totally bypass voters all together and that’s why we are seeing all these “Emergency” bills coming out of Salem. If it’s tagged as an emergency it gets to go into effect immediately and it’s up to the voters to try and stop it after the fact.
FYI, for non Oregonians. Voters passed the ability to tag bills as an emergency for actual emergencies like funding flood relief, making money available to fight fires, etc., anything time sensitive where there wasn’t going to be time to go out and ask the voters first. It’s only recently that the democrats started abusing the bill by tagging everything as an emergency so they could bypass public voting. Make no mistake, this is all about bypassing the voters because they know they’ll be told no if they ask first. The gambit is to pass a bill, get it in place then cry we are throwing grandma out into the snow if voters repeal it.
Hello, the following article demonstrates that a carbon dioxide tax would cost us a lot of money and have no effect on the climate. Using the authors data an additional view is as follows; Manmade emissions of greenhouse gases in 2019 were 55.3 billion tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent; From Sciencing.com there are approximately 3 trillion tons of dioxide in the atmosphere; that means that 55.3 billion tons divided by 3000 billion tons times 100% is man’s contribution. The answer is approximately 1.84%. This is another reason man’s reduction of carbon dioxide would result in no measurable change in climate.
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Many of America’s corporate and academic elites have united to advocate for a carbon tax.
With all the money and brains behind the self-anointed “Climate Leadership Council” (CLC) you would think it would be able to figure out the math is simple that a carbon tax will have no effect on climate. There are reasons they haven’t.
The CLC is undertaking a media and lobbying blitz to push for a $40-per-ton national carbon tax, escalating by 5% per year. The CLC calls this “the most cost-effective, environmentally ambitious and politically viable climate solution.”
A $40 carbon tax would immediately raise the price of oil by $17, or to about 133% of today’s prices. We’re told not to fret the price increase because the government will remit the tax back to taxpayers as a “carbon dividend.” Most consumers will get back more money via the dividend than they paid in the tax, says the CLC.
Let’s breakdown this hucksterism.
First, a carbon tax is no sort of ‘climate solution.’ Manmade emissions of greenhouse gases in 2019 were 55.3 billion tons of carbon dioxide-equivalents and increasing with no end in sight, according to the United Nations. The U.S. share was 7.2 billion tons 13% and shrinking as the rest of the world increases emissions.
Imagine the U.S. magically went dark and emitted no more carbon dioxide (CO2) or other greenhouse gases evermore. The rest of the world, which shows no signs of emitting less, would still emit at least 48 BILLION tons annually, which is 13 billion tons greater than the Kyoto Protocol’s goal of stabilizing emissions at 35 billion tons.
Even if the U.S. never emitted again, the difference in atmospheric CO2 concentration would be about two percent (2%) by the year 2100. No matter your view of climate science, that slight difference in CO2 would make no discernible difference to global temperature.
So simple math shows a CO2 tax would accomplish nothing. Even if a CO2 tax only cost you a nickel, you’d still be ripped off.
Next, although taxes tend to reduce use of the thing being taxed, this isn’t meaningfully true with oil. During the mid-2000s when oil rose to $140 per barrel, US oil consumption dipped a mere five percent (i.e., 20 million vs. 19 million barrels per day). Under the CLC’s plan, it would take 35 years to get the current price of oil up to that $140 level which barely reduced oil consumption in the first place. Absent sensible alternatives, Americans would likely cling to gasoline even as they were ripped off by the carbon tax.
Now for the really cynical part of the CLC’s carbon tax the ‘dividend.’
The CLC’s plan calls for a family of four to receive a $2,000 annual dividend check from the government in the first year, an amount that would grow as the tax increases. But is anyone paying attention to the math?
In 2019, US energy-related emissions were 5.1 billion tons. At $40 per ton, those emissions would raise $204 billion in taxes. Divide that $204 billion by 330 million Americans and you get a carbon tax costing each American $618 or $2,472 per family of four. But the carbon dividend is only worth $2,000 for a family of four, leaving them to pointlessly pay $472 more in energy costs every year.
The CLC’s device around this is to limit the dividend so that 70 percent of households would receive more in dividends than paid in carbon tax. So the CLC’s tax just amounts to a vote-buying, Marxist income redistribution scheme via climate.
Who exactly is the CLC anyway? It’s comprised of multinational corporate rentseekers and greenwashers, ivory tower economists, has-been politicians and left-wing environment groups.
The carbon tax is not about the climate so much as it is about CLC members’ various economic, political and personal agendas. Here are some of them.
Big Oil members (ExxonMobil, Shell, and BP) want to regain control over the price of oil lost due to the fracking revolution. Nuclear utility Exelon and First Solar hope to advance their interests by making fossil fuels more expensive. Goldman Sachs has investments in all sorts of green technologies. Two members are former Energy secretaries from the Obama ‘war on coal’ years. Former UN climate chief Christina Figueres is a leftist looking to end capitalism, as are the green groups like the World Wildlife Fund and the World Resources Institute.
The last time a such a diverse cabal of powerbrokers united on climate was to push cap-and-trade a different kind of carbon tax during the late 2000s. Cap-and-tax failed. Now the CLC has resurrected it. Meet the new fraud. Same as the old fraud.
Steve Milloy publishes JunkScience.com, served on the Trump EPA transition team and is the author of “Scare Pollution: Why and How to Fix the EPA” (Bench Press, 2016).
Arranging chairs on the titanic comes to mind.
Suggestion to OR Gov.: Shut down high tech companies one week every two.
According to the human induced CO2 mapping by Finnish scientists using data from the CO2 measuring satellite, Oregon does not make a significant contribution to atmospheric CO2 levels.