Hypocrisy on Global Warming

By Ronald A. Buel of Portland, Oregon. Ron is a longtime progressive activist in Portland. In November 2006, Ron contributed "Let's put the East Bank freeway in a tunnel".

It wasn't very long ago that Ted Kulongoski announced, “I want Oregon to lead the nation in fighting climate change.” Before this legislative session, Kulongoski appointed a Commission on Climate Change, which, with the Governor's encouragement, proposed that Oregon get out in front of the Western Climate Initiative and the Obama Administration with its own Oregon version of Cap and Trade. The Governor has lobbied and testified on behalf of this bill in the current session.

At the Portland City Club, in his recent State of the City Speech, Portland Mayor Sam Adams said:

This spring, the City of Portland and Multnomah County, together, with the co-leadership of Commissioner Jeff Cogan, will launch an ambitious new strategy to reduce the carbon emissions that cause climate change ... Together, we propose to reduce carbon emissions 80 percent by 2050. To accomplish this, I will bring a solid action-based plan to Council by June. It will focus on real steps we can take that will cut emissions while creating thousands of jobs.

This advocacy follows up bills passed and signed in the last session of the Oregon Legislature which set rigorous State goals for limiting greenhouse gas emissions. Goals for 2050 that reduce global warming pollution by 90% from 1990 by the year 2050. The legislation sets benchmarks for 2030 as well.

Even organized labor has joined in the climate change love-fest. At a meeting late last month at SEIU headquarters in Portland, Jerome Ringo, national leader of the Apollo Alliance, a group that seeks to pull together labor and environmentalists on green jobs, spoke about the need to “save the planet” by fighting climate change. Sitting at the table at the front of the room with Ringo was Tom Chamberlin, Executive Director of the Oregon AFL-CIO. Bob Shiprack of the Building Trades Council is also on the Oregon Apollo Alliance leadership council.

With the Labor Democrats in power in both houses of the legislature, and the Governor eager to charge ahead on global warming, we must be making huge strides in fighting climate change in Oregon, right?

Well, think again. All this talk about global warming pollution turns out to be more than a little hypocritical. Cap and Trade is clearly in trouble in this session of the legislature. Without similar action by California, Washington and other Western States, which isn't exactly zooming ahead, any effort we do make in Oregon on Cap and Trade will be virtually meaningless. It seems that, as in almost every other economic matter, the Oregon lobbyists control, whether they are the lobbyists of business special interests or labor special interests. And the lobby is fighting Cap and Trade hard.

More importantly, it turns out that Kulongoski, Adams, and labor leaders aren't really serious about global warming pollution after all. Otherwise, why would they be supporting a 12-lane, $4.2 billion bridge across the Columbia River that is opposed by every major environmental and land-use group in Oregon, in large part because these organizations know that the Columbia River Crossing (CRC) will significantly increase vehicle miles traveled, and therefore global warming pollution.

At a recent Portland City Council hearing on the CRC, there was a Kulongoski staffer testifying for the Governor on behalf of 12 lanes. Kulongoski has been the leading advocate for the big new replacement bridge. Also testifying with Kulongoski for the 12 lane bridge were Tom Chamberlin, Lynn Lehrbach of the Teamsters and a representative of Bob Shiprack's Columbia-Pacific Building Trades Council. This testimony was part of what was the most intense and pressure-laden lobbying effort this observer has seen in his 40 years of watching City Hall closely. In addition to labor, support for 12 lanes included every major business organization in the State, including OBA, AOI and the Portland Business Alliance. These folks were joined, of course, by the normal group of paving special interests – truckers, aggregate companies, highway contractors, developers, etc.

As for Sam Adams, he first said he wanted eight lanes. But in weakened condition from the Beau Breedlove affair, and under public pressure from his former buddy, labor darling Randy Leonard, Adams supported 12 lanes. Adams was joined in supporting 12 lanes at City Council by people you might think were good environmentalists, Nick Fish and Dan Saltzman (but not by Amanda Fritz, who stuck to her environmental guns). Adams tried to greenwash his support of 12 lanes by touting the fact, that, in relenting to 12 lanes, he has reached agreement with the other five local government bodies, including Metro and David Bragdon, in putting together “performance standards” for the 12-;lane bridge. Adams says he wants to create a “thermostat” for the bridge impact area. But a thermostat doesn't work if all of the windows and doors are open, and that's the situation with this bridge. People aren't going to spend billions making 12 lanes all the way across the bridge, and then not use them. That's not credible.

You might ask how all of these climate-change-fighting politicians can be so hypocritical. First, they've done plenty of greenwashing on this project. They tout light rail and tolls, but those are items that, if they can be done, can be done without a $4.2 billion, 12-lane bridge, as everybody knows.

In addition, supposed environmentalist Gail Achterman, the Chair of the Oregon Transportation Commission, and the paid leaders of the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT), have led the CRC staff and consultants in a transparently dishonest attempt to subvert the National Environmental Protection Act. The staff and consultants say that their modeling shows that the 12-lane bridge will actually reduce global warming pollution. In all their dishonesty, they have assumed that the land-use is the same with and without the big, new replacement bridge. That means there won't be any induced travel in 2030, despite the fact that there are 5,000 acres of land undeveloped, but zoned for housing, near I-5 in Clark County, many of those acres in distant Ridgefield, La Center and Battleground. When we built the Glenn Jackson Bridge on I-205 across the Columbia in 1982, we also assumed static land use, and the 20-and-30-year travel projections have turned out to be nearly 50% low in estimating travel across that bridge. The Glenn Jackson Bridge is congested at rush hour today.

Perhaps even more egregiously, the CRC staff and consultants have claimed that because cars will be traveling faster over the new, 12-lane bridge, they will emit less greenhouse gas emissions and less air pollution into our airshed. This turns the science of queuing theory on its head. Any beginning student of queuing knows that if you take a single bottleneck out of a process flow, the bottleneck simply moves to somewhere else in the process. In this case, the congestion will just move to the exits and entrances to I-5, the surface streets going to and from I-5, the places where I-5 itself narrows to three lanes or two lanes, and to the existing bottlenecks on I-5, such as at the Rose Garden where I-5 merges with I-84. Queuing theory means that there will NOT be a net reduction of congestion over-all in the system from the big, new replacement bridge, induced travel aside. The lesson is that you can't build your way out of congestion. Many American cities have learned this lesson, but particularly Houston, Atlanta and Los Angeles. Portland is the 23rd largest city in the nation. Surprise -- it has the 23rd greatest amount of congestion.

Almost no one at Metro or the City Council believed the claims of the staff and consultants on induced travel or greenhouse gas emissions from the project. In approving the replacement bridge as a Locally Preferred Alternative, both the City and Metro formally asked for new traffic modeling and an independent analysis of greenhouse gas emissions. Achterman and ODOT have stonewalled the City and Metro on these requests, and with the exception of dissidents Robert Liberty, Carl Hosticka and Amanda Fritz, that stonewalling tactic has worked so far. Both bodies leaders who serve on the joint local government council are going ahead with a 12-lane bridge, despite their earlier reservations, not waiting for the analysis to be done to make the sizing decision.

When the Environmental Impact Statement is issued on the CRC in 2010, there will undoubtedly be a lawsuit brought under the National Environmental Protection Act. Given the precedents in federal court on induced travel and traffic modeling, that suit just may stop the project dead in its tracks, and we'll all be back to square one. That means re-working $80 million of staff and consultant work on this project. We will all be looking for a low-cost alternative to a big replacement bridge -- one that can actually be funded would be nice.

There are two lessons to be learned from all the political hypocrisy.

First, just because the CRC can hire someone who understands the politics, like Tom Markgraf, former staffer to Congressman Earl Blumenauer, that doesn't mean Tom should turn the process over to the special interests, which is what has happened in this case. You shouldn't be knowingly dishonest to subvert and trick the National Environmental Protection Act, the fundamental basis of which is honesty in assessing the environmental impact. NEPA and the courts aren't susceptible to a grand lobbying strategy, even if our local and state politicians apparently will roll over under this kind of intense, organized pressure.

The second lesson is that if you're a politician, like Adams or Bragdon or Kulongoski, it's not enough to talk the talk on global warming. You have to be prepared to walk the talk.

On global warming, for example, if you are going to set standards while remaining credible and believable, you need to be ready to prepare a plan or scenario in which you actually comply with those standards.

There are things the State, City and Metro can do about global warming pollution in the transportation arena. In Oregon, the experts say, vehicles using fossil fuels emit from 33% to 38% of all of our greenhouse gas emissions or carbon.

Let's start with what government can't do. It can't dictate the rate of conversion to alternative fuels such as bio-fuels. And it can't dictate the rate of conversion to alternative vehicles, such as electric cars. It's possible for state and local governments to find ways to encourage bio-fuels and hybrid or electric cars. But the market still is likely to continue making those decisions in America. And, both in the case of oil and autos, market forces don't currently favor rapid conversion rates. Contrary to the reality of peak oil, oil prices have fallen sharply with the big recession, slowing the shift to alternatives. In the summer of 2008, we might have expected a 12-year conversion of our vehicle fleet. Now, at the rate which we in Oregon are buying autos, the conversion of our fleet will occur over 26 years, not 12. Here in Oregon, our existing fleet has a lot of gas-guzzling pick-ups and SUVs, one should add. That's what we bought last time we bought a vehicle.

There are a number of things Ted Kulongoski, David Bragdon and Sam Adams can do to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from transportation.

Let's start with Ted Kulongoski.

• He can begin the long-awaited reformation of the Oregon Department of Transportation, making sure that its leaders are fully conscious of global warming and the role they must play.
• He can put people in charge, both of the Transportation Commission and of ODOT, who understand that this isn't the 1950s, that we can't build our way out of congestion, that we must resist the paving lobby that wants capacity expansion. And, most importantly, that we need to build transportation systems in line with our land-use planning decisions, not let freeway expansion dictate growth patterns.
• He can make sure that the key goal of our State transportation planning is to reduce vehicle miles traveled, which in turn is our best method to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel vehicles.
• He can make sure that his “Big Look” task force, and therefore State law, errs on the side of density, not sprawl. Reducing average vehicle trip distances is critical to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
• He can lead the charge in determining that a carbon excise tax will not fall into the State Highway Trust Fund with the gas tax, but that it will be able to be used for funding high-speed rail, transit, bicycles and pedestrians. If this doesn't work legally, he needs to lead the fight for a state constitutional amendment that breaks open our gas tax trust fund for these purposes.
• He can develop a real plan for building high-speed rail that goes from Eugene to Seattle in five hours, with all of the current stops included. A few hundred million dollars, less than the cost of the Columbia River Crossing for sure, will eliminate the big bottlenecks to high speed rail, buy 18 trains a day to go each direction between Seattle and Eugene, and build the new high-speed rail tracks. In addition, he can take advantage of this system to put another set of commuter trains traveling on these rails from Vancouver and Oregon City to Portland City Center, and back again at the end of the day.

Moving on to David Bragdon:

• He is in a great position to get the Governor to appoint a new Tri-Met board that will join with Metro to develop a comprehensive, high-speed, grade-separated light-rail system that is truly competitive with the auto in the time that it takes to commute. This can't be the system we have today. The light-rail trains run in auto traffic, can only be two cars long because of the Downtown Portland blocks, and take 23 minutes to get through Downtown from the Lloyd Center to Jefferson Street. This situation will get even slower, and less -competitive with the auto, when the new Downtown Transit Mall opens early next year. The buses and trains must compete with a lane of autos on this new transit mall. When there is a single breakdown, things will come to a grinding halt. The key to this new system is to give light rail its own right-of-way, in subways or elevated.
• He is also in a position to lead the way for demand-actuated mini-buses and vans in the suburbs, focused around employment centers and shopping centers. These small vehicles, with part-time drivers working less than a full day, can keep cars at home and reduce vehicle miles traveled. Glorified taxis with fixed routes at rush hours, but which will pick you up at home or nearby and take you back at the end of the day, are what are needed.
• It's time again to revisit the 2040 plan, and make it work to identify the logical places to improve densities. Then to work with local governments to make that happen. Transit-oriented development can become a reality.

Moving on to Sam Adams:

• It may be a wise step to put Susan Anderson of the Sustainable Development Commission staff in charge of City Planning. New leadership is needed for a central city plan. It doesn't make sense to have wrong-headed transportation staff leading the way in planning the central city. Planning is about people, not about vehicles. Sustainability is a nice place to start. Replacing and doubling existing bridges that don't really need replacing is not an idea that reeks of sustainability.
• Just as with ODOT at the state level, Sam must lead the way in reforming the Portland Department of Transportation. It has the same problems as ODOT – it is filled with people who aren't conscious of their responsibility on global warming. They, too, are anxious to please the pavers and to build their way out of congestion, which doesn't work. Special interests shouldn't be running the department, as they do now.
• Sam says he is a big transit nut, but he allowed the transit mall to be screwed up by people who should have known better. He needs to work with Bragdon and the Governor on getting a new start for light-rail at Tri-Met, advocating for higher speeds, grade separation and greater capacity. Advocate for making a transit system that truly is competitive with the automobile on a travel-time basis.
• He needs to figure out where he wants the high-speed rail to run, and where the Portland station needs to be – preferably at the Coliseum on the East Side, not at the old Union Station.
• Portland has some neighborhoods that don't work for high density today – the South Waterfront, Goose Hollow and Northwest Portland's River District could all use a little planning around services that sustain density, especially transit connections to employment centers.
• Sam wants to build trolleys on the East Side of the city. This is fine, but the planning for the trolley system needs to be coordinated with route planning for the existing Tri-Met bus system, and this hasn't been done yet.
• Sam wants to make the pavers happy on the I-84 and I-5 interchange on the East Side, expanding it aboveground to add capacity. He needs to resist the incredible pressure he is getting on this huge and ugly transportation expenditure today. Instead, he should go back to an idea that resurfaced as recently as three years ago in Vera Katz' task force focused on the city's freeway loop, an idea that will also enable him to increase capacity in that intersection. Members of the loop group recommended putting the East Bank freeway underground, and the late Ernie Bonner, George Crandall and Jim Howell presented a full freeway loop and major light rail lines that were all placed underground, as well.