OLCV Lobby Day just happened. It's great to see the NGOs becoming more adamant activists for Oregon Climate.

Oregon is getting late and weak in it's climate action because a plan was firmed up years ago, and it still isn't passed.

OLCV is in a new consortium that is responding to the failure to get Clean Energy Jobs passed. There are four initiative petitions with their 1000 qualifying signatures getting ready – in case the legislature can't pull it off this year, either. The initiative petitions are the hammer to encourage the Legislature to do it's job – or else actually do their job for them by petition.

I see Clean Energy Jobs as the state-wide equivalent of Portland Clean Energy Fund. It is largely intended to facilitate home-dwellers, both owners and renters, to be able to live in a green-energy home, even it it takes financing or subsidizing to make it happen. Money comes from a price on carbon for some companies for certain circumstances.

Clean Energy Jobs will also put some upwards price pressure on fossil fuels. That's what gets people that listen to the Koch Brothers upset, because they are told it will kill the economy. But that is a lie.

Green Energy is much cheaper than fossil fuel energy at this point, and that trend will get even stronger. What that means to people is that they should use electricity as their energy source, not fossil fuel. The UN IPCC told us in their SR15 (Special Report on 1.5 degree C limit) that we must approximately halve our emissions BEFORE 2030.

Oregon's strategy for this should be that we must:

1. Green the Electric Grid so that we are no longer polluting when we use electricity, and our electricity is taking advantage of the low cost of green energy.

2. We then must move as much as possible of our fossil fuel uses to electricity.

  A.  If the grid is green, you don't have to worry about it.  If it's not, individuals can buy up to green plans.  But the right answer is to have the **PUC help move the grid to green well before 2030**.  People think that's terribly aggressive, but it is not so aggressive. 
   
  i.  One very available source is offshore wind, which could easily provide our grid with twice the energy it supplies, now.   
  
  ii. Other sources are nearer to our neighborhoods, and we should use them as much as possible because we want service resilience in the case of disasters such as fires, storms, or earthquake/tsunamis.  Look at the problems of California and their fires and their need to shut their bad grid off in cases of windstorms.  Local microgrids allow neighborhoods to stay live, even if there is a problem in the next grid area down the road.
  
  B.  We need to encourage transportation to use EVs.  Personal EVs and mass transit EVs.  Trimet must commit to EV buses for all future purchases, and do whatever is necessary to allow them to charge for their intended use.  While it is still expensive to get EVs that will do cross country driving easily, it isn't so expensive to have vehicles that do not need gasoline for local commuting.
  

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I say all of that because Clean Energy Jobs won't make that happen. We need to enlist the PUC to force the utilities to do their part on a reasonable schedule. We need a new round of “DEQ” kinds of pollution regulations that encourage commuter vehicles to be almost emission free for the first 60 miles.

So, yes, we need Clean Energy Jobs. But we need more.

How much do we need this? Only if the whole world buys into a schedule like this will we be prepared to go forward with minimum crashing of economies and food supplies. If our “Eco” Oregon can't do it and serve as a good example, I don't know what to think.

There is a new documentary that isn't yet available in the US. It is an upbeat documentary that assumes we succeeded in addressing climate change well enough that there would be good things to talk about in 2040. It looks like the link to it on Vimeo is: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/2040doco

I know that short sessions are hectic messes. I know people think the plan is to do everything that is politically possible. But we are so close to the edge of the cliff, and it would be an awful shame if we didn't do our part.

Please think really hard about what it means to put off the action of saving the ecosystem.