Koch Brother's Militia Force Oregon to Abandon Climate Legislation

Over the last two weeks the Oregon state senate attempted to vote on a bill that would have established a statewide limit on carbon emissions and move Oregon into the Western Climate Initiative that creates a regional carbon credit market – a cap and trade system designed to reduce carbon emissions while allowing time for industries to implement emission improvements.  There is a great summary of the events and their links to industries and right wing militias in The Nation.  

Let’s start with the legislation, which shares a foundational principle with the Green New Deal: that corporate polluters should help pay for the transition to a clean economy. Referred to as a “cap and invest” policy, the measure would have put a statewide limit on carbon emissions, forcing Oregon’s largest polluters to pay for emissions allowances.

 

                                Tim Dickinson Rolling Stone

In the face of the imminent passage of this bill in the state senate where Democrats hold a majority, 11 Republican senators fled the state, thereby denying the senate the necessary quorum required to do business.  The Republican senators were immediately embraced by members of the state’s far right militia movement, who vowed to defend the senators from any attempt to force them to return to the state capital to restore a quorum and allow a vote on the bill.

The 11 missing GOP senators have particularly strong ties to industry players fighting the cap-and-trade bill. More than 65 percent of their campaign funding has come from corporations, including Koch Industries, whose subsidiary Georgia-Pacific operates mills that would be regulated under the cap-and-trade bill.

In the end, it wasn’t just the missing Republicans who sunk the bill.  A single Democrat stated her opposition to the bill forcing the senate leadership to pull the plug and abandon the effort.  

Laurie Monnes Anderson, who represents a suburban district just east of Portland and was expected to be the final critical vote in the bill’s favor. But this week she reportedly made it known she would not support the legislation, apparently out of deference to Boeing, which operates a factory in her district and lobbied against the bill.  Although Boeing wouldn’t be directly regulated by the measure, the company said in a statement that it was worried about higher energy costs. “I’m fighting for Boeing because they’re in my district,” Anderson had told a reporter a few weeks ago.

To recap, Koch funded Republicans aided and abetted by right wing militia members and paid stooges stood in the way of a modest attempt to mitigate the impact of climate change.  Hopefully, the survivors of the climate change apocalypse that the Koch and their fellow travellers are consciously bringing on the world will be able to hold these vile people accountable, since the current generation of political leaders don't seem to give a damn.