Oregon's got a new law going into effect in the next few days, and you're going to have to recycle your computers and televisions. Not to worry, though - it's free.
The state-run program, which will cost about $1.5 million this first year, collects money from manufacturers based on how many of their products are being recycled.
Retailers will be required to sell only those brands registered through the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality — manufacturers also pay a registration fee.
You don't imagine that this free program will raise the costs you pay to buy replacements, do you? Will it be illegal to buy a product in another state and transport it to Oregon?
Also in the news: Oregon's gearing up to start recharging aquifers in the Umatilla basin. Irrigation has depleted supplies in the ancient underground storage areas, and so the plan is to replenish that water with water from the Columbia River during the winter and spring months, when the river runs high. Basically, they'd divert the high water onto alluvial plains overlying the basalt aquifers and let the water percolate down into them. It seems like a reasonable plan.
But hold on; environmeddlists are bound to weigh in, and they have:
Oregon appears to be embarking on a strategy of storing high winter river flows without considering the implications, said John DeVoe, executive director of Portland-based WaterWatch. The flows scour gravel in the river bed, push back vegetation crowding the channel, flush migrating fish to the ocean and lure adult fish back to spawn in the spring, he said.
Never mind that most of the water would flow as it historically has - any change could be fraught with potentially disastrous implications. This is why we need groups like WaterWatch, because they're chock-full of folks who are much smarter than the rest of us.
Fortunately, they say that "if it can be done without interfering with the health of the Columbia, we're not going to stand in its way."
Who decides whether the health of the Columbia is being interfered with or not remains unclear.
And then there's Boardman - the coal-fired megaplant that powers 280,000 homes. That's a huge problem right there. In early December, the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality issued draft rules that would force PGE to spend $472 million over the next decade to reduce haze-causing emissions from the plant -- an investment that would raise rates by 3 percent.
Boardman's power is so cheap today that it can probably absorb those costs and remain financially viable. But the equipment would do nothing to reduce Boardman's enormous output of carbon dioxide, the main man-made culprit in global warming.
Obviously, the responsible thing to do is just to shut 'er down. The darn thing messes up the view, and then there's that whole durn Global Worming thing. Can't have none o'that. Nossir.
'Course, on the other hand, if it waren't fer Global Worming, this last couple of weeks might've been a whole lot worse than it was.
Someone should talk to AlGore, and get back to us with the skinny on that.
Oh, nevermind.
Portland's Mayor-elect and high-school graduate Sam Adams seems to have jumped ahead on that one. Adams told reporters that some climate-change forecasts predict that the region might experience these types of winter storms more often. If that happens, the city would have little choice except to buy more equipment.
“If these kinds of storms begin happening more often, we’ll have to act,” he said.
Global Worming, you see, will produce more harsh winter storms as a result of the enormous amounts of carbon dioxide that politicians and "science journalists" expel during the course of discussing the enormous "sacrifices" that must be made in order to shave the planet (of excess cash).