Oregon Parents Demand Strong Climate Protection Program
Did you know that there is a small group of appointed officials currently accepting comments about Oregon’s draft Climate Protection Program? The Environmental Quality Commission (EQC) oversees the Department of Environmental Quality, which in 2020 was charged by Governor Brown to create a cap-and-reduce system that will cut Oregon’s emissions at least 45% below 1990 levels by 2035. Unfortunately, the draft CPP is weak with loopholes and exceptions for industrial polluters. So, the EQC really needs to hear from Oregonians like you, and the comment period was just extended from October 4th to October 25th!
The bad news is that Oregon Business & Industry, the lead lobbying group for fossil fuel polluters, formally requested the comment period be extended, as a ploy to delay and endanger adoption of this program. The good news is that if you haven’t submitted a comment yet, you still have time to do so—and to recruit a friend or five to also raise their voice for our climate!
More than 5,000 pieces of written testimony have been submitted so far. We don’t yet know the ratio of support versus opposition, but let’s keep working to drown out the deniers and delayers with lots of letters demanding climate action! Enter the Parent Climate Advocacy Network. Here’s how to share your experience and make a big impact:
We’ve made it easy for you to submit a written comment with our template letter here! The most important part is for you to personalize the letter as much as possible. Tell DEQ about yourself, your family, and why it’s so important for you that Oregon show leadership, and take urgent action to ramp down our climate pollution as the laws of physics demand.
Send your email anytime through 4 p.m. on October 25th to: GHGCR2021@deq.state.or.us.
There are two public comment writing guides are available to help: one from Renew Oregon here and another from the Power Past Fracked Gas Collaborative here.
Families for Climate has set a goal of sending at least 25 individual comments to DEQ from parents & families. If you can help us achieve that goal, please sign up here!
So far, four parents have provided oral testimony and a dozen have emailed written testimony so far. Here are some excerpts:
Nataliya Pirumova said, “This is not just about greenhouse gas emissions for me, this is about my daughter, and her future and the future of other people in our state, and in our world.”
Leonard Barrett said, “I’m here primarily because I’m a parent to a five year old and a thirteen year old, who will have to contend with the successes or failures of carbon regulation long after I’m gone…. I appreciate the spirit of the Climate Protection Program and the tremendous work has gone into the rulemaking process thus far, but it does not yet pull out all of the stops, and we owe it to today’s youth and future generations to make this the most robust Climate Protection Program possible.”
Noelle Studer-Spevak said, “The CCP cannot be a half-hearted program; regulating almost half of Oregon's climate pollution. If science tells us we need 7% emissions reduction per year, we should be aiming for 8% -- not 3 or 4%. A whole-hearted plan to reduce Oregon’s emissions would include every single large industry, cement plant, and especially fracked gas power plants. In a whole-hearted program, Community Climate Investments would have verifiable emissions reductions so EJ communities of color experience real improvements.”
Nora Lehmann said, “ I’m speaking today on behalf of my two children, who are three and five, because we know that aggressively reducing emissions this decade is absolutely critical. In 10 years, when [they] are 13 and 15, I pray we’ll look at this moment as the turning point, when we wrestled back the possibility of a livable future, against all the odds. If [the above mentioned] problems are fixed, the Climate Protection Program will be truly worthy of its name, and I’ll be proud to tell my kids that we live in a state that is leading the way towards a cleaner, cooler, fairer future.”
Finally, some food for thought: check out this article analyzing which countries are historically responsible for the climate crisis. It explains that the United States has the dubious honor of coming in first place on the rankings, having released:
“more than 509Gt CO2 since 1850 and is responsible for the largest share of historical emissions . . . 20% of the global total. China is a relatively distant second, with 11%, followed by Russia (7%), Brazil (5%) and Indonesia (4%). “
Some people say that Oregon is too small in the world for its emissions reductions to make any real difference to climate change, so why bother? But when you understand the global and historical context of the United States’ out-sized climate pollution, you understand why it’s so important for every state in the U.S. to do its part right now!