Will Oregon's low carbon fuel bill be horse-traded away?

This morning I went to the monthly meeting of the Woodburn Democrats group, getting both a free breakfast and the ability to take part in some interesting progressive talk. 

I'd been asked to say a few words about the Kitzhaber/Hayes scandal that led to our Governor's resignation, then lead a discussion. (Not that I, or hardly anybody else, is capable of leading Dems, well known for their like herding cats proclivity.)

Representative Betty Komp started off the meeting with some remarks about how the 2015 Oregon legislative session is going.

During the question and comment time, I told her that I was pleased with how the Democratic majority in both the House and Senate is pushing through important bills early on in the session, such as the low carbon fuel standard bill and the "Motor Voter" registration bill.

A bit naively, in retrospect, I said something like:

It'll be great to have the low carbon fuel bill passed before the legislature tackles the big transportation bill. I've heard that Republicans want to hold the low carbon bill hostage in order to get their votes on the transportation bill. But if the low carbon fuel bill is already passed, this will take away the potential of it being horse-traded away during the usual end-of-session negotiating.

If I'd read today's newspaper before going to the meeting, I might not have said what I did. Because when I got home, I saw this in a story about our new governor, Kate Brown.

Bills that come to her desk for signing will be treated the same way, Brown said. The only one she would commit Friday to signing is the "Motor Voter" bill that she championed early during the legislative session.

She said she supports the concept behind the low-carbon fuel standard bill that has generated controversy this year, but she did not say whether she would sign it into law.

l'm not sure what "treated the same way" refers to. It might be a reference earlier in the story to Brown deciding whether to keep Kitzhaber's staff members on a case-by-case basis.

Now, maybe it doesn't mean much -- Brown saying she hasn't decided whether to sign into law the low carbon fuel standard that's much beloved by Oregon environmentalists. But it might, as this would fit into the Horse Trading Hypothesis that I'd hoped was off the table.

Fitting into all this is an interesting post on Blue Oregon by Ronald Buel, "More highways! Fight climate change! (Wait a sec...)"

He points out the disconnect between Dems in the state legislature (1) backing an effort to fight global warming through the low carbon fuel standard, and (2) pushing a transportation bill that likely would include money for new roads, freeways, bridges, and other autocentric stuff.

It’s an article of Democratic Party faith in Oregon that climate change and global warming threatens our planet with devastation within this century.

This prevailing Democratic view follows the science that the human burning of fossil fuels is causing climate change and global warming, and that somewhere around one-third of this problem is coming from motor vehicles that burn fossil fuel in internal combustion engines on our highways. 

It’s also an article of Democratic Party faith in Oregon that our highway infrastructure needs to be built out at breakneck speed in order to deal with growing congestion on the state’s highways, so that our economy can thrive.

The annual Oregon Business Summit, held earlier this year, attended by thousands of businessmen, and capturing our leading politicians of both parties to speak there, recently proclaimed this congestion as the state’s number one issue.

The Democratic Party in Oregon seems led by the nose by unions who also love that argument, including particularly the building trades and the AFL-CIO, who are dying for these local union highway construction jobs that used to be so numerous but have virtually disappeared as people drive less and drive vehicles that use less gas per mile.

No one in the Democratic Party is trying to publicly reconcile these two inconveniently opposing points of view. 

In fact, politicians of all stripes in Oregon would prefer that there be no public reconciliation. If there were reconciliation, the politicians would all be negligent by not acting to prevent the devastation to the planet that will eventually be caused by man-made climate change.

That means rejecting the false arguments of the business and labor lobbies that we must somehow build our way out of job-stifling congestion with many large highway expansion projects.

Nicely said, Mr. Buel. 

At the Woodburn Democrats meeting I said that if the low carbon fuel standard bill is a fait accompli by the  time the transportation bill is voted on, Republicans will be faced with a choice:

Either sign on to the transportation bill (which almost certainly will require raising the state gas tax) or give up on getting some infrastructure projects for the rural parts of the state that they care about most.

I'm enough of a political realist to recognize that some new highway projects will need to be part of the transportation bill.

But these should be a lesser priority than maintaining the roads and bridges we already have, many of which are falling apart and/or are not earthquake-proof. Further, mass transit, bicycle lanes, and other forms of non-vehicular transportation should get a good share of the money in a 2015 transportation bill. 

So says 1000 Friends of Oregon, a group that knows what's best for this state.

1000 Friends is advocating for a transportation funding package that prioritizes safety, maintenance over new roads and highways, and adequately funds transit, pedestrian and bicycle improvements. These investments promote active transportation and decrease emissions, which in turn minimize the detrimental health impacts of single occupancy vehicle use and promote efficient land use patterns. Not budgeting for highway expansions would relieve future additional taxpayer maintenance burdens.

It'd be crazy for the state legislature to cancel out the environmental and economic benefit of a low carbon fuel standard bill by passing a transportation bill that fails to recognize the urgent necessity of moving away from outmoded "build more roads" thinking.

Comments

[Walker]

The faux low carbon fuels bill is a fraud and a terrible mistake. It's just greenwash nonsense. The bottom line is that all the "easy" oil and natural gas that can be reached and burned will be reached and burned. Period.
The only meaningful action on climate that we can take is to ensure that we do everything in our power to get off coal and the alt fuels -- the tar sands and shales and fracked fossil fuels.

Enviros should welcome defeat of the low carbon fuels bill, especially if it comes at the "cost" (actually benefit) of avoiding more insane highway spending and paving.

As the fracking bubble blows out and the game is revealed as nothing more than another real estate bubble, we are about to see the whipsaw effect, as prices first collapsed, bankrupting the frackers, and then sending prices skyrocketing again. The dumbest thing we could do is pretend to have a "green" victory by buying into another decade of denial on climate reality just as the day of reckoning dawns.

The way to cut transportation emissions is not with snake oil nostrums like biofuels. The way to cut emissions from transport is to stop moving around so damn much and put a fair price on emissions, so that we don't make polluting free and alternatives costly.

[Rain Trueax]

My problem with gas taxes in the form of a carbon fuel bill is who it hits. The well off have already gotten vehicles that will save them even if they drive a lot of miles on vacations or take airplanes to exotic locales. The ones who get hit by a carbon tax are the working poor, who can't afford a new, more efficient car, and those who live in rural areas like the ranchers and farmers who raise the food that then has to be trucked into those not bothering or able to grow their own.

I know it sounds good to tax fuel more to get it used less but some always get around it. I don't have an answer either but maybe it'll be back to horses someday if the above commenter is correct... oops too much methane?

[Brian Hines]

Rain, so far as I know there is no increase in the gas tax under the low carbon fuel bill. There likely would be a small increase in the price of gas, though so some people (like, Republicans) argue this is a "tax." See:
http://www.oregonlive.com/politics/index.ssf/2015/01/will_you_be_paying_more_at_the.html

But gas prices go up and down all of the time. We don't call these price changes a "tax" when some event causes a price drop or increase. To me it seems worthwhile to help save the planet by paying a few more cents at the pump (4 to 19 cents by 2025 is the estimate), when prices regularly fluctuate much more than that.

Yes, an actual carbon tax would be better. Or a larger gas tax increase, a dollar say, aimed at reducing Oregon's carbon footprint. But to me this bill seems like a worthy step in the right direction. Californian and British Columbia have similar standards, so oil companies already have to meet the standard there.

[Walker]

Oil companies LOVE this sort of thing -- because while they play Bre'r Rabbit, they are only too happy to see states lining up to lock in the liquid fuels/internal combustion paradigm even further. "Low carbon" standards might have been a meaningful step in 1988, when Hansen first testified to Congress; right now, they're worse than trying to shut the barn door after the horses escape -- a low carbon fuel standard gives preference to the immoral biofuels scam and delays action on the real issues, which come down to taking emergency action against coal, fracked fossil fuels, and all the horrors of the alt fuels that will drive CO2 through the roof.

The low-carbon fuels scam is wishful thinking turned into policy at its most destructive iteration. The more we pretend that we can supplement fossil fuels with disguised fossil fuels (which is all that biofuels are -- petroleum and nat gas energy converted to corn to be converted back to hydrocarbons, with subsidies and toxic pollution galore), the more we are preventing the transition away from fossil fuels.

An important graphic that everyone concerned about a livable planet needs to see:
http://home.comcast.net/~russ676/biodiesel/bob.html