Our best chance to promote Oregon Climate Action
What can we do?
The comment period for the DEQ Climate Protection Program draft rules closed on October 25th at 4:00 pm. We now wait for the final rules to appear and be delivered to the Environmental Quality Commission for a decision. This will likely occur mid/late November to Early December. There may be further opportunities to offer comment to EQC on the rules. Watch this space!
As a reminder, the focus for our comments was as follows:
- Support approval of a strong Climate Protection Program,
- Strengthen the interim target and goal for GHG emissions in the rules so they better match best available science which demands net zero emissions by 2050 at the latest,
- Adjust the program to include all polluters (including stationary sources, i.e., industry – and natural gas power plants) under the cap and reduce program rather than carve out exceptions for industrial sources through the Best Available Emissions Reduction rules that could easily result in increased emissions from that sector and omit the generation facilities entirely.
- Strengthen the commitment to addressing social injustice,
To these, we offer the following additions – not in ranked order (use ‘em all or take your pick)
- Better serve rural Oregon by including biological carbon sequestration in the Community Climate Investment options.
- Eliminate from the program elements that offer perverse incentives such as for biofuels and Renewable Natural Gas that will undermine the reduction goals,
- Include non-combustion climate pollution in the assessment and eliminate methane gas and its inadequate substitutes from the state’s energy economy as rapidly as feasible.
