OK, Measure 37 rewrite is going to the voters. It stinks, but it stinks far, far less than Measure 37, so we need to do everything we can to pass it.

Meanwhile, what do we concentrate on for the balance of the session?

If you like big-picture, long-term thinking, probably SB 838 (renewable portfolio standard for electricity producers) is the top priority–it would require Oregon electricity providers to procure 25% of their electricity from non-hydro, renewable sources by 2025. A very attainable, albeit aggressive (relative to other states) goal. There is nothing on offer in Salem that would do as much long term good as this.

What I previously suggested as the #2 priority appears to be on its way to success! Good job folks.
Although HB 2626 is a close second: It requires setting up an E-waste recycling system to direct some of the tsunami of “E-waste” (Electronics being discarded, like televisions, computer CPUs, monitors, printers, etc.) into a reclamation program. This is crucial for protecting surface waters and groundwater and, thus, our own health and the health of all the other non-human residents of our special place. There is no good business case for letting huge plastic “bottles” of toxic materials and lead reach landfills, where rain and acids of decomposing materials around them leach the toxins out and prepare them for transport into our aquifers and streams. The materials are valuable and must be reclaimed. Any state that has a bottle bill to capture inert glass and plastic soda bottles has GOT to have an E-waste bill or be considered ludicrous.

Third most important from the perspective of doing the most long-term good: OPPOSING the biofuels bills currently on offer, because they threaten to bring to Oregon precisely the subsidy-seeking, wasteful and consumptive biofuels religion that is destroying huge tracts of the midwest and INCREASING the consumption of fossil fuels. It’s reasonable to want to subsidize truly renewable energy–so with biofuels, these bills have to be rewritten so that the subsidy only pays off on the NET renewable energy that the processes produce. Most of the processes currently being proposed are either net negative (i.e. they use more fossil energy than they produce renewable) or marginal (close to a wash, depending on local conditions) that we need to do everything we can to avoid setting up a subsidy gravy train for particular technologies. A true renewable biofuels subsidy would promote the best technologies, not whatever happens to be handy when the subsidy goes in.

In the elections arena, we need to stop SB 630, the so-called “open primary.” A terrible bill.

We should also express our disappointment with Secretary of State Bill Bradbury, who, for whatever reason, signed a letter full of outright fraudulent statements about the Oregon instant runoff voting (IRV) option bill (HB 2761), which would simply allow Oregon cities and local governments (like METRO in PDX) to save money and let voters rank the candidates in order of preference–a process that is SPECIFICALLY allowed by the Oregon Constitution. Like or hate IRV, you have to seriously consider what it means if a legislator won’t vote to pass the enabling legislation to allow Oregonians to choose for ourselves whether or not to use a better election method.

Lower down on the priority list:

In health care, we should have passed the cigarette tax to fund expansion of health insurance, although people criticizing this approach make some good arguments. They are absolutely correct that you don’t want to tie your health care funding to a lethal activity like smoking; on the other hand, if we tied health care funding to a LOT of actually or potentially lethal activities (like smoking, burning fossil fuels, emitting toxic wastes, etc.) and adopted a single-payer financing system, we’d be on the right road. So the cigarette tax, while incomplete and not enough, is in the right direction and a good first step in that direction.

The payday loan bills all deserve support, although cheering for 36% interest rate caps just shows how debased our politics have become since 1980.

A number of people have expressed concern about a bill to create a government registry to keep track of your prescription drugs–because apparently the drug war police have decided that losing across the front is not enough, we need to EXPAND the war by funding a database full of personal health information on people to provide a nice target for hackers and just the general idiocy that regularly results in stories about people having the government post their most personal information to the internet.

I don’t have the numbers for the lower priority bills at hand, I may amend this post to add them later.

I’d be happy if others suggested bills that I’ve overlooked that need to be supported/opposed, now that the big monster of the session is as resolved as it can be for now.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 5th, 2007 at 9:14 am and is filed under Economy, Elections, Energy Future, Environment, Gambling in Oregon, General, Health Care, Livability, Walmart & Big Boxes. 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.