Salem climate change: Kulongoski earning green stripes

Global warming agenda pushed for 2009 session

By Steve Law

Pamplin Media Group, Jan 15, 2009, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (2 Reader comments)

JONATHAN HOUSE / PAMPLIN MEDIA GROUP

Oregon Gov. Ted Kulongoski, center, talks during a panel entitled "Keeping the Focus in Tough Times," during the recent Oregon Business Summit.

State crackdowns on polluters during Ted Kulongoski’s reign as governor have been timid or even toothless, according to many critics.

The governor’s early bid for a signature environmental achievement —— cleaning up the Willamette River —— ran aground.

But Kulongoski has found his green niche, and maybe his place in Oregon history, with an aggressive campaign to forestall global warming by reducing carbon emissions.

Under his stewardship, Oregon is swiftly becoming a world manufacturing center of solar energy materials, and a hotbed for wind and wave energy development.

As Kulongoski enters his final legislative session in a political career spanning four decades, he’s pushing an ambitious agenda to cap and reduce carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions, boost electric car usage and create a futuristic building code that makes homes and commercial buildings “carbon neutral.”

In a recent interview at his temporary quarters in Salem, the governor dismissed any notion that he’s trying to create a legacy issue for his spell at Oregon’s helm. Rather, Kulongoski says he came to realize that global warming is an imminent threat to Oregon —— to its farms, its forests, its economic vitality and its lifestyle.

“This country can no longer take a short-term view,” Kulongoski says. “You can’t be so consumption-based that you think you can consume 25 to 30 percent of the world’s natural resources and have it be sustainable,” he says. “You can’t do it.”

In the 2007 legislative session, when Democrats controlled both chambers for the first time since 1989, Kulongoski’s global-warming initiatives prevailed. At his urging, lawmakers tripled the Business Energy Tax Credit to lure windmill and solar developments. They required Oregon’s three largest electric utilities to supply one-fourth of their power from new renewable energy sources by 2025.They set a statewide goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to 10 percent below 1990 levels by 2020.

Though the state budget shortfall will limit the 2009 Legislature’s options, Kulongoski is stepping up the pressure for the next phase of his global warming initiative, proposing:

• a regional “cap and trade” system, which, by 2012, would cap carbon emissions and use market mechanisms to reduce them, in tandem with several Western states and Canadian provinces.

• a ban on new coal plants in Oregon, unless companies develop new technology to produce so-called “clean coal.”

• ending the tax break for hybrid vehicles and providing a $5,000 tax credit for electric cars.

• giving state environmental regulators explicit power to require cleaner-burning car engines.

• the nation’s first “energy performance certificate” for new homes and commercial buildings, so buyers know a structure’s energy efficiency, much as they do with cars or refrigerators.

• stricter building codes, so structures built after 2030 have zero net impact on global warming.

Kulongoski prides himself on being a “jobs Democrat,” and he focused on job creation and other traditional bread-and-butter policies earlier in his governorship. Rarely is he described as a visionary.

Yet that perception may be changing due to his efforts to counter global warming.

“It reminds me of other moments in Oregon environmental leadership – the beach bill and the bottle bill,” says new House Majority Leader Mary Nolan, D-Portland.

“I think on this issue, the governor really gets it,” says Ivan Maluski, conservation coordinator for the Sierra Club’s Oregon chapter.“The governor’s office had a huge role in really setting the table and putting those issues at the forefront.”

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