SOS Forests

Oregon Governor Flips Wig

The Salem Lookout reports that Oregon Governor Ted Kulongoski is having religious visions regarding global warming. They quote Strange Ted:

[Al] Gore is like John the Baptist in the Christian gospels, Kulongoski says. “He’s the prophet that tells you what’s coming.”

Teddy the Torch has never been all that mentally stable. While the largest fire in Oregon history was burning (the 2002 Biscuit Fire - 500,000 acres) Ted proclaimed, “Healthy forests stink… they just stink.”

The Outlook story [here] hints that Ted has finally gone over the edge. Some excerpts:

Salem climate change: Kulongoski earning green stripes

Global warming agenda pushed for 2009 session

By Steve Law, Pamplin Media Group, Jan 15, 2009

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.

Note: the sun has pierced the clouds over the Willamette Valley all of twice, for an hour or two, in the last three months. Oregon is famous for rain, not sunshine. Ted Screwloose wants to tear down the hydroelectric dams (renewable energy produced by our abundant runoff) and install solar panels where the sun don’t shine.

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.”

On the other hand, Ted has promoted the incineration of Oregon’s natural resources in catastrophic megafires. More than half of all carbon emissions in Oregon come from forest fires [here]. Trees fix carbon dioxide and produce renewable carbon storage building products. Crazy Ted has done all in his power to cripple Oregon’s wood products industry. Go figure…

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.

Note: Oregon’s 2009 budget deficit is $2 billion. The debt is close to $10 billion. State law requires balanced budgets, but Ted is not hampered by such minutia (see Draining Oregon’s Economy by the Rogue Pundit here). Ted’s global warming initiative will hammer a state economy already among the worst in the nation in terms of unemployment, business bankruptcy, home foreclosures, and declining gross product.

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.

Despite Ted’s “focus” he has failed to create job number one (see Oregon jobless rate spikes to 8.1% here).

Global warming wasn’t always a top-of-mind concern for people of his generation, Kulongoski says. “Most of us my age thought this was going to occur long after we left this earth,” maybe in 40 to 50 years, he says. …

Kulongoski reads scientific journal articles, and says he’s been influenced by Oregon Secretary of State Bill Bradbury and former Vice President Al Gore.

Bradbury and Gore are two notable non-scientists with zero creds in any technology but huge lefties and political wheeler-dealers. Bradbury was an early Gore adherent, attended a “global warming training session” at Gore’s Tennessee home, and took time off from his Sec State job to flounce around the state showing Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth” movie to Dem party faithful.

Gore is like John the Baptist in the Christian gospels, Kulongoski says. “He’s the prophet that tells you what’s coming.”

Around Mahonia Hall, the historic Salem home that serves as the governor’s mansion, the governor’s wife, Mary Oberst, is always lowering the thermostat, and telling him to wear sweaters more, Kulongoski says.

The governor has taken to driving a hybrid Chevy Tahoe when practical. …

A hybrid SUV! What a sacrifice!

What a joke!

Conservative groups like Portland’s Cascade Policy Institute pan the cap-and-trade plan as a jobs-killer. Some industry-funded groups, and leading Republicans such as former Senate President Gene Derfler, insist global warming isn’t occurring or isn’t a problem.

Well, duh. The planet has been cooling since 1998, there is no correlation between CO2 and the non-warming, all forecasters including the IPCC are predicting a colder planet for at least the next 12 years, and warmer is better anyhow. Record cold has gripped the state and nation this winter and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation has shifted to negative (colder waters off Oregon), a phenomenon that is predicted to remain for the next 30 years.

The governor also faces critics on the left. Chuck Sheketoff, executive director of the Oregon Center for Public Policy, says giving affluent people $5,000 tax credits to buy electric cars that they’d purchase anyway is foolhardy, at a time when frail seniors may get tossed from nursing homes. Sheketoff questions subsidies for SolarWorld’s new Hillsboro plant, noting the German company is prosperous enough to make a bid to buy General Motors’ Opal car division.

He likens the state’s wooing of solar plants to the much-ballyhooed subsidies for biotech jobs at Oregon Health and Science University that never delivered as promised. …

A flash in the pan. A pig in the poke. Symbolism over substance. Smoke and mirrors. Ted waves his hands and his mouth makes crazy talk, but for some reason he hasn’t been carted off to the loony bin yet.

Kulongoski says Gore is playing an instrumental role in pushing the envelope, but Gore’s new goal is not grounded in the real-world possibilities of the American political system.

“He is not in the process right now, and those of us who are in it know that we have to bring the public with us,” Kulongoski says.

Ted is in something, or on something, but it is not akin to reality. His over-inflated self-image as a standard-bearer and leader is laughable and tragic at the same time. Nobody wants to join Ted “Jim Jones” Kooky’s new religious cult. He is wandering in the lost desert of his mind, bereft of sanity, and is an embarrassment to all Oregonians.