If you’ve been reading the opinion pages of the Oregonian lately you probably have noticed the back and forth going on between the O, Republican House Speaker Karen Minnis and Dem reps Jackie Dingfelder and Mike Shaufler on the failed biofuels bill (HB3481) from the ’05 session.

On Dec. 26 the O wrote an editorial critical of the House Republicans for spoiling the legislation by adding last minute language that would have prevented Governor Kulongoski from pursuing tougher auto emission standards. In response to the editorial Minnis wrote a letter denying the link between the biofuels legislation and the governor’s emissions proposal:

Your editorial… alleges a link between biofuels legislation and Gov. Ted Kulongoski’s call for more stringent vehicle emissions standards and blames House Republicans for the bill’s failure. No such link existed…

But then in the end of the letter she totally contradicts herself:

…after our negotiations were completed, the governor insisted that vehicle emissions be passed before session ended. His last-minute insistence on this issue threatened to unravel much hard, bipartisan work.

If tougher emission standards had nothing to do with the biofuels bill, as Minnis claims, then why does she admit that the issue “threatened to unravel” it all?

The other issue that both the O and Minnis leave out of their arguments (perhaps out of convenience for Minnis,) and one that Rep. Dingfelder points out in her letter in response to all of this is how the House Republicans began to muck up the bill with special interest legislation that had nothing to do with biofuels:

…certain legislators “stuffed” the bill with an unrelated, unnecessary expansion of the outdated, wasteful pollution control tax credit, which subsidizes large industries to comply with environmental laws that have been on the books for years.

Dingfelder would have done readers a favor by mentioning that the outdated tax credit is truly outdated, as in 1967 outdated.

To make matters worse for the bill, petroleum industry lobbyists, who for obvious reasons aren’t thrilled about biofuels, successfully pulled language from the House bill that would have required a 10% blend of ethanol in gasoline sold in the state by 2010 and that diesel include a 2% biodiesel blend by mid-2006. How convenient it was for Minnis to not include this little tidbit in her letter.

In a nutshell, despite the great economic and environmental benefits of biofuels, petroleum and auto industry lobbyists and their Republican allies in the House put the legislation on the skids by 1) opposing the governor’s stricter auto emission standards, 2) insisting on including an outdated pollution tax credit from 1967 for big business, and 3) taking out requirements for ethanol and biofuels blends in order to protect big oil’s profits.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 30th, 2005 at 1:17 pm and is filed under Economy, Energy Future, Environment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.