Anti-coal ballot initiative makes sense for Oregon (OPINION)

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Coal trains idle in 2010 near Dry Fork Station, a coal-fired power plant being built by the Basin Electric Power Cooperative near Gillette, Wyoming.

(AP Photo/Matthew Brown)

By Nik Blosser

Earlier this month, fellow Oregonian Margaret Ngai and I filed a ballot measure that transitions our state's power supply off of highly polluting coal and doubles our use of clean, renewable energy. It's a simple measure with a big impact.

Why would a business person like myself and Ngai, a nurse, come together to support this measure? In short, coal is bad for the environment, bad for public health and bad for Oregon's economy.

From an economic perspective, coal is almost universally bad for Oregon's economy. Over the past several years the cost of coal power has increased substantially, while the cost of wind and solar power have dropped significantly. Today we send hundreds of millions of dollars a year out of state to pay for coal when we could be spending that money in-state on clean renewable energy sources. Since the first wind farm was built in the state, nearly $10 billion has been invested here on wind, solar and other renewable sources. This represents thousands of jobs in both urban and rural parts of the state, and there's a lot more opportunity.

In addition, coal power is one of our state's biggest contributors to climate change, and climate change is bad for many Oregon businesses across a wide spectrum of the economy. For many farmers, climate change represents a clear and present danger: specialty crops from wine grapes to hazelnuts generally grow well only in a narrow climate band. As that band changes, farmers' crops are threatened. My family owns vineyards in Yamhill County, and we harvested our grapes a full month early each of the past two years.

Many people don't realize that over a third of our electricity in the state still comes from coal. And in some parts of the state, coal-generated power provides two-thirds of our electricity. This is crazy. In this day and age, in our region of the world with our abundance of wind, rain and sun, there's simply no reason to continue to burn dirty, polluting coal for our electricity.

The Oregonian/OregonLive editorial board has pointed out that electricity can be a complex topic. We understand that, which is why we focused on making our proposal extremely simple. How simple? In 2007, Oregon adopted a goal of having 25 percent renewable energy by 2025. To achieve that goal, the state created a widely used regulatory structure called the renewable portfolio standard. Utilities affected by our measure have universally supported this structure and have followed it successfully for the past eight years. All our ballot measure does is ask Oregonians a simple policy question: Using the existing regulatory structure, do you want to transition off coal and increase the renewable energy goal to 50 percent by 2040?

Or in plain English, do you want to create jobs and improve public health and the environment, or do you want to keep burning coal for another generation? The broad coalition behind this measure thinks the answer is clear.

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Nik Blosser is CEO of Celilo Group Media, chairman of Sokol Blosser Winery and co-chief petitioner for the Clean Energy, Clean Air ballot measure.

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