Mike Pihl
Pihl is owner of Mike Pihl Logging and president of the TimberUnity association.
I started out picking strawberries for our neighbors at 6 years old and graduated to picking black caps at 10. I moved on to hauling hay and working on a dairy.
By the time I graduated from high school, I had a tractor, attachments and a combine – all bought with cash!
After graduating, the logging bug got a hold of me. After working both locally and in Southeast Alaska, I saved my money and paid cash for my first logging machine at 22.
Today, 38 years later, I’m in the fight of my life.
Oregon legislators are taking another run at passing a cap-and-trade bill this year, after last year’s attempt failed. This time, it’s Senate Bill 1530, which is very similar to last year’s House Bill 2020 and has the same bottom line – Oregonians are going to pay a lot more.
How much more? It’s hard to say. The bill keeps changing. Whether and how soon you’ll pay depends on where you live. But even the supporters of the bill say that people who live and work in the Portland metro area will see their gas costs go up 20 cents per gallon starting in 2022. It will keep going up in the years afterward.
Imagine that – paying 20 cents more a gallon for gas in the first year alone. For companies like mine, the increased gas costs could bankrupt us. Plus, our utility rates would rise as well. The bill talks about tax credits that my company would likely be eligible for. But what good are tax credits that come a year or more after I’ve spent the money? How many documents will I need to show them?
You better believe it when I say we need to protect our home and planet. But taxing and regulating timber operators out of business is no way to accomplish that task. That’s why last year, when legislators were talking about HB 2020, a group of us in rural Oregon – many in the timber industry who were very concerned about the bill’s impact on their communities and their jobs – came together and formed “TimberUnity.”
We rallied twice in Salem during the 2019 legislative session to voice our concerns about the cap and trade bill. Fortunately, we were successful, and HB 2020 was defeated.
But here we are again, now that the Legislature brought back a brand-new cap-and-trade bill in 2020. And like last year’s bill, SB 1530 has an “emergency clause.” I found out that when the Oregon Legislature uses an “emergency clause” in a bill, it means that Oregonians can’t refer the bill to the voters for approval.
Most Oregonians don’t appreciate that we already have thousands of carbon eating machines in Oregon. They’re called fir trees, and they do their work all day, every day. I’ve harvested thousands of those trees in my career and replanted many more trees than I’ve harvested – it’s the law, and it works well.
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The goal of the legislators sponsoring the cap-and-trade bill is to force Oregonians away from gas powered engines and into electric vehicles. I have no problem with electric vehicles, but they don’t make electric machines for most jobs in my industry, and most Oregonians can’t afford an electric car for their day-to-day activities. In rural Oregon, electric cars are difficult to use, due to the long distances that people travel each day. We just aren’t the same as people in big cities with short commutes.
If you add the costs of a new cap-and-trade bill to the corporate activity tax that the Oregon Legislature approved last year, companies like mine won’t make it. I already missed paying myself many times last year after paying my employees and business expenses, because of the increased taxes and fees from the Oregon Legislature. I don’t want a handout – I just don’t want to be run out of business because of new taxes and fees crafted by the Legislature each year. Please, give small business a break.
The very best family-wage jobs in rural Oregon are once again on the line. On February 6, TimberUnity held another rally at the Capitol in Salem. This time, we had hundreds of trucks and thousands of rural Oregonians in attendance – all concerned stewards of the land, and all petrified of losing the last of our high paying rural jobs. And we’ll keep coming back as long as we have to.
We all care about the environment, but cap and trade is a bad idea. If the Oregon Legislature is going to pass SB 1530, the least it can do is send the bill to the Oregon voters and let us make our case to all Oregon voters. Once they understand what the bill does to their rural neighbors, they’ll join us and demand a better solution.
"Opinion" - Google News
February 23, 2020 at 09:00PM
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Opinion: Cap-and-trade bill puts family-wage jobs at risk - oregonlive.com
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