It’s Worse Than We Thought — What Oregon’s Own Rules Say About the Climate Protection Program

MARK: I think one of the themes for this election is that Democrats, who are allegedly all about democracy, simply don’t want to listen to people. That is their track record.

Remember that ODOT gas tax that every Democrat — plus one Republican who is now a Democrat — voted for? That 83% of Oregonians said no to and voted down when they finally did have a voice? That was a paltry 6 cents per gallon tax. What’s happening now — that is currently in effect — makes that pale in comparison to what’s coming if it’s allowed to continue. The Climate Protection Program. And unlike that gas tax, it was never allowed to even be sent to the voters.

In 2019, Democrats in the House passed HB 2020. To stop it, 11 Senate Republicans walked out. Some even left the state. Then-Governor Kate Brown sent the state police after them, but after public pressure, she relented, and the bill died.

But she and the Democrats tried to force it again. In February 2020, SB 1530 — the rewrite. And Republicans walked out again. During that fight, Republicans and industry demanded the question go to the voters. But Democrats voted down a proposal to refer the climate plan to voters. OPB reported that Democrats didn’t want that because they were worried it would fail. And there it is. They don’t listen. Democrats don’t like democracy when democracy tells Democrats no.

So two weeks after that walkout, Governor Kate Brown signed Executive Order 20-04, directing state agencies — unelected state agencies — to design and build the program that the Democrat-controlled legislature had just failed twice to pass. But then the Court of Appeals threw it out on procedural grounds in December 2023, without ever ruling on the merits of the rules themselves. Kotek, newly elected in 2022, declined to appeal and had DEQ redo it — and those new rules took effect January 2025.

But what is the Climate Protection Program? For those of you who didn’t listen to our previous shows, or those of you who did and would like a refresher — the Climate Protection Program is a hard, shrinking cap on carbon emissions. This is not a law. It is an executive order, written by DEQ staff and enforced by an unelected commission.

Here’s how that shrinking cap works. The DEQ, the Department of Environmental Quality, sets a cap on carbon emissions statewide. The DEQ hands out permission slips — one per ton. Like a tightening noose on industry, the allowable amount of CO2 shrinks every year. Last year they allowed 24.2 million tons. This year it’s 23.2 million.

Within that, which businesses are regulated by the CPP is determined by “thresholds.” The allowable per-company threshold is currently 100,000 tons. So that’s hitting the so-called “big polluters.”

But let me pause right there. Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant — it’s a nutrient. Plants need carbon dioxide. They need it to make oxygen, which is sort of important to people.

Those thresholds are what a company is allowed to emit. But go beyond that and you start paying penalties — $136 per ton. So if you’re over that 100,000-ton threshold by just 10% — 10,000 tons — that’s a $1.36 million fine per year.

Back to that threshold, because the CPP doesn’t just tighten — it widens, pulling in more businesses. That threshold of 100,000 is lowered in 2028 by half, to 50,000. You’re allowed to emit 100,000 now, but two years from now, only half of that. And by 2030 — just four years away — it shrinks again by another half, down to 25,000. A whopping 75% reduction in just four years.

So they’re tightening the noose, and what I mean by “it widens” is that they’ll put that noose around more necks. That lowering of the threshold means businesses not currently deemed “large enough emitters” will be deemed that in just a couple of years. And once you’re in, you can’t get out.

We’ve been talking about this for a few years now, and finally other people are starting to pay attention too. But — and this is the reason for this week’s show — it’s worse than we thought. Some related research led us down a rabbit trail back to the CPP, and it turns out that when you dig into the OARs, the Oregon Administrative Rules — the nitty-gritty that nobody likes to look into, but fortunately our guest did — that’s where this cautionary tale turns into a horror story.

To talk about all that, I’d like to welcome Jen Hamaker back to the show. She’s the one who first put us onto this. Jen, welcome back — am I correct in thinking this is worse than we thought? What were your overall impressions as you dug into those rules?

JEN: Yes, it is as bad, if not worse, than what we thought. And DEQ’s own rules are the teeth of the enforcement side of this. It’s bad.

MARK: Personally, I think they’re astronomically worse — especially the lowering of the thresholds, which is going to capture more and more businesses. Looking at this from a business standpoint, I think we’re going to have businesses flooding out of the state as this starts to fully kick in. And the really dangerous thing is that people just don’t know about this right now.

We started talking about this several years ago, and here’s what we thought we knew back then. Back on Show 14-34, Chuck Wiese, our guest on that show, spent an entire hour trying to get straight answers out of DEQ’s Nicole Singh about who’s actually getting hit by this program and how the allotments are apportioned. He called every big supplier by name — Northwest Natural, ExxonMobil, Chevron — because that’s who we assumed this was built for. He never got a straight answer. DEQ just wouldn’t respond.

So here’s what we know now. You went through and read the rules yourself, and it turns out the big suppliers were never the point. That threshold falls from 100,000 tons today to just 25,000 by 2030, which I mentioned in the opener. And by then, DEQ itself expects to cover 99% of Oregon’s liquid fuel and propane supply.

JEN: Correct. Which means the mom-and-pop — anybody that distributes gas or natural gas — it broadens the entire spectrum of who’s going to be under compliance. And it’s punitive.

MARK: On the natural gas front — that was one of the other things that put me onto revisiting this show. I was doing some research, and it turns out the figure that kept coming up was that the CPP was only going to cost $4.9 billion over eleven years. Except that’s not quite correct. That $4.9 billion comes from the natural gas industry’s own lawsuit filings, saying it’s going to cost Oregon ratepayers $4.9 billion over those eleven years — but that’s just the natural gas side. When you expand it into all of the industries, the projections are actually well north of $20 billion over eleven years.

It’s shocking, and I can’t believe nobody’s talking about this — I think simply because they didn’t do what you did, which is actually go and look at how this is going to impact people.

JEN: I didn’t realize it was going to be that much — $20 billion over eleven years. This is the largest climate plan in the world, and it’s punitive, and it’s happening in Oregon when we’re already green.

MARK: Allegedly. As far as the fuel-supplier threshold is concerned, just to give people a sense of scale — when you drop down to 25,000 tons in 2030, a typical U.S. gas station moves 1.2 to 1.8 million gallons a year. So by 2030, a distributor supplying roughly two busy gas stations’ worth of fuel is a regulated, covered entity. Just two stations. This is going to hit all of these mom-and-pop distributors that are out there trying to get the fuel we need to keep the economy going. It’s not just the big regional names — those are the ones getting hit now.

But there’s another issue you uncovered, called an “aggregation trap.” A business owner will often own multiple related — or not even completely related — industries. If one of those business entities falls under this threshold, all of the businesses he owns are also hit.

JEN: Yes. And in a short time, that compliance threshold broadens — it ends up including a lot of different companies. That aggregation trap is horrible, because it regulates people who aren’t even polluting, or bringing in gas, or producing emissions themselves.

MARK: It’s shocking, and we’re definitely going to need a second show on this — I can guarantee we’re only scratching the surface. All right, everyone, stay with us. Lots more to come on the Climate Protection Program with Jen Hamaker.

— Segment 2 —

MARK: And welcome back. This is the I Spy Radio Show, talking today to Jen Hamaker, president of ONRI — Oregon Natural Resource Industries. A sixth-generation Oregonian, her family has been involved in natural resources for literally generations.

Jen, in the last segment we introduced the CPP, the Climate Protection Program — and I want to start digging into some of this. Here’s again what we thought we knew. When we talked to you on a previous show, back on Show 15-23, I said on air — and I quote myself — “they’ve created a market that you can’t even get out of.” That was a gut read at the time. I didn’t have a rule number to point to. It was just an educated guess, knowing how Salem operates and how Democrats work.

So here’s what we know now. It turns out I was right — there’s an actual rule that makes this true. And you found it. Talk to us about the market and how this plays out.

JEN: The CCI is Community Climate Investments. DEQ has picked a nonprofit, CalStart, located down in California. You can pay CalStart for allowances — so if you go over the cap as a company, you can pay into the CCI program, which goes to the nonprofit CalStart, and buy allowable credits from them to offset your emissions. You’re giving money to a nonprofit. And you can also bank your allowances, transfer them, or surrender them. It creates an artificial market where those allowances become very expensive if you need them to continue to operate. This is cap and trade, in black and white. There’s no doubt about it.

MARK: It’s the same effect as the cap-and-trade program the legislature tried to pass. In that same earlier show, we talked about how some Republicans were willing to sign “a deal with the devil” — going along with a legislative cap-and-trade program because it would be slightly better than the Climate Protection Program mistake.

JEN: Yes.

MARK: Unfortunately they didn’t, because when it comes to choosing between two poison pills, you don’t swallow the least poisonous one — you let your opponents do that. Fortunately, they didn’t. So people understand — the reason you’d need those allowances is because you can’t quite get under the threshold set for your business or industry. That’s the 100,000, dropping to 50,000 in 2028, and down to 25,000 by 2030. That allows you to keep polluting beyond the cap if you just can’t quite hit the target. Do we have any sense of what those credits currently sell for?

JEN: You can buy up to 20% of your emissions and give that money to the CCI, the nonprofit, to offset your emissions — and they cost $136 per ton through the government. But once you have those allowances, you can bank them, transfer them, sell them, whatever — and that’s where this artificial market gets created. How much is one of those credits worth when a company needs it to stay in business? The sky’s the limit. It’s a private negotiation between companies.

MARK: And you mentioned it’s a $136-per-ton charge from the government right now.

JEN: Right.

MARK: But we’ll come back to that, because that’s not quite the whole story. The other thing I mentioned is that you can’t get out of this — once you fall in, those rules apply to you for the next six years, at least.

So just to reiterate: if your target is 25,000 tons and you get under to 24,000, that doesn’t mean you’re excluded. You still have to follow those same regulatory requirements for the next six years, just to maybe get out at the end of it — and of course, the rules can change between now and then.

JEN: And it also covers any other companies you might own, even if those are in compliance on their own.

MARK: Exactly right. That’s what’s so frightening about the reach of this — it’s going to start impacting other companies even if they don’t directly fall under it. And you’ve got $20 billion over eleven years being removed from Oregon’s economy on this.

So getting back to CalStart, the nonprofit handling this — this is so typical for the left. They love to operate this way. We’ve seen it with climate change since our first year covering this. What we’ve found is they hide this money behind the shield of a nonprofit, because if it were a government agency, you could file a public records request and say, “Show us how you’re spending this money. Who’s getting it? How much are you taking in, how much are you spending, and with whom?” You can’t do that with a nonprofit — it’s behind that veil of secrecy. They have to show you the top five recipients or so, but beyond that, they could be funding literally hundreds of far-left organizations. That’s where a lot of this will go — to organizations that support climate causes under the banner of “environmental justice.”

How many conservative organizations are involved in environmental justice funding? None that I’m aware of. If this were a funding mechanism the right was using — bleeding off taxpayer dollars for pro-life initiatives, the National Rifle Association, or funding a religion, which is essentially what climate change has become — there would be hell to pay. But for some reason, Republicans tolerate this.

JEN: I agree.

MARK: Okay, everyone, stay with us. We’ll continue this with Jen Hamaker, talking about the Climate Protection Program. There’s still a lot more to unpack here — none of it good.

— Segment 3 —

MARK: And welcome back. We’re talking today to Jen Hamaker, president of ONRI, Oregon Natural Resource Industries — find out more about their work at onri.us. We’re talking about the Climate Protection Program, something you need to know about, because it isn’t getting enough attention. Republicans especially ought to be talking about this, because it’s exponentially larger than the gas tax that was defeated by 83% of voters statewide — including in deep-blue Multnomah County, where it was defeated by 73%. That includes a lot of Democrats.

Jen, one of the things we talked about last segment was this target-emissions line you get fined for on every ton over your allotted amount. Right now that’s 100,000, dropping to 50,000 in two years, down to 25,000 in four years, in 2030. But that’s not the full story, because according to the OARs — and you can find these on today’s show page, 16-35 — one rule states that each metric ton of CO2 of a compliance obligation for which a covered entity does not demonstrate compliance is a separate violation. What that means: a Class I major violation is $12,000 per ton — not per day, per ton. If you exceed that, that’s your fine, and I had no idea it was anywhere near that high.

JEN: So if you exceed that by, say, a thousand tons…

MARK: That’s $12 million. Boom.

JEN: Where does that money go?

MARK: That’s a good question — I don’t have that in front of me right now. We’ll find that out and get it up on the show page. I’d assume some of that has to be offset somehow, but I don’t know off the top of my head.

JEN: Does the CCI get it?

MARK: Possibly — wouldn’t surprise me. We’ll have to figure that one out. But again — $12,000 per ton. If you’re already at 25,000 tons and you go 1,000 tons over that, that’s $12 million. How many businesses do you think can absorb a $12 million fine?

JEN: The DEQ is going to get rich.

MARK: It’s absolutely stunning how punitive this fine is. And even the $136 figure can add up quickly — if you’re over by just a thousand tons, for a small company, that’s a $136,000 fine. That’s two paychecks worth of employees you could have been paying, and instead you’re paying the state.

So one of the things out there is what this “environmental justice” nonprofit funding actually goes toward. Do we even know what qualifies as an environmental-justice expenditure?

JEN: From my experience, pretty much anybody who can justify themselves as environmental justice gets included. And as far as DEQ’s oversight of the CCI, the nonprofit CalStart — DEQ charges 4.5% off the top to oversee them. But within the DEQ statutes, there are no regulations on who the nonprofit can give their money to, as long as it has something to do with environmental justice. To me, it’s a racket.

MARK: It does sound like a racket. One thing I found interesting — a minimum of 15% of those CCI project funds has to go to tribes, specifically federally recognized tribes within Oregon. Fifteen percent — is that fifteen percent of Oregon’s population? I don’t think so. Do we have any idea why they’re getting that guaranteed share?

JEN: I think it’s a feel-good thing. Honestly, the more I understand these regulations and statutes within DEQ, the sicker I get. I don’t have a good answer for you on that one.

MARK: While we were talking, I quickly looked up where that $12,000 goes — that’s a civil penalty, so the state gets that. The CCI credits, though, those still go to CalStart. But the $12,000 is a civil penalty. And it’s even worse than that, because according to my research, the director can escalate that to $25,000 per violation per day.

JEN: All of this is so arbitrary — it’s just a way for government to collect more money, more money, more money. Bigger government, more regulations, more restrictions. Who would ever think you could punish your way out of climate change?

MARK: Punish your way out of it — exactly. It’s kind of like the COVID lockdowns, how onerous those got, where they’d punish you regardless. How many businesses went under because they couldn’t — or wouldn’t — follow the rules, and people weren’t coming through their doors like before? This is going to destroy Oregon’s businesses. We are already bleeding businesses.

JEN: That’s right. And it’s going to take us out of competition too, because anybody inside Oregon’s borders has to comply with this program.

MARK: Imagine trying to attract businesses: “Come to Oregon — and if you pollute more, we’ll let you pollute, for $12,000 a ton.” It’s pretty shocking. All right, everyone, stay with us — we’re going to continue this with Jen Hamaker, talking about the Climate Protection Program and what you need to know.

— Segment 4 —

MARK: And welcome back, talking about the Climate Protection Program. This is coming at you fast — in fact, it’s already in effect, and it’s going to get progressively worse very quickly, within the next two years — conveniently, after the governor’s election. And it’s the governor who could undo this, because it’s not a law, it’s an executive order. Switch who’s governor, and you can undo this. Christine Drazan has said repealing it is a priority for her.

Jen, let’s talk about what we thought we knew about which industries would be hit by this. We had a sense of some of them, but after you dug into the OARs, it turns out to be much broader. Which parts of Oregon’s natural-resource industries are going to be hit by this?

JEN: Every single one of them. There’s something in the CPP rules that specifically identifies what they call EITEs — Emissions-Intensive, Trade-Exposed industries. Those include sawmills, semiconductor manufacturing, plywood mills, veneer mills, and pulp and paper. Our natural-resource industries will be hit by this, and they’re subject to the full emissions regulations under DEQ through the CPP.

MARK: The other ones on that list include concrete and cement companies, iron and steel, glass, chemicals, fertilizer and agricultural chemicals, plastics, mining and quarrying, aerospace, and semiconductor manufacturing, which you mentioned. When you look at all of that — one of the governor’s stated goals is lower-cost, more affordable housing. She’s been saying that since she ran in 2022. Well, guess what she’s targeting: lumber. That’s going to go up. And concrete — you need that to pour foundations. Iron and steel are used in buildings. Glass, for windows. So the very things she says she wants to lower costs on, the CPP and all of these rules are not going to lower anything.

JEN: Correct. And it’s layered on with everything else she’s done — shutting down our forests, regulating all of that too. The crazy thing about the EITEs having to be subject to the full emission-reduction requirements is that DEQ is still developing the specific emissions-intensity benchmarks and reduction schedules, so we don’t even know what the fallout is going to be yet. But what we’ve researched so far tells us it’s going to be extreme. This is the brainchild that started with Kate Brown and moved to Tina Kotek, and she’s ratcheting it up.

MARK: Something else important — the threshold for these EITEs is lower than for fuel suppliers. Their threshold is only 15,000 tons of emissions. That’s hitting a mid-size mill or food processor — not some giant mega-corporation. Smaller, though not quite mom-and-pop, and certainly much smaller than the fuel suppliers at 25,000 tons. Do we have any idea why they’ve lowered it for those industries specifically?

JEN: No — well, it’s the transportation sector that produces the most emissions overall, so the CPP really targets that. And the cap decreases over time while the cost increases over time. With the 15,000-ton threshold for the EITEs, that’s how they’re going to make their bread and butter — semiconductor manufacturing, sawmills, all of it. This is just so punitive, and again, this is the largest, most expensive, most punitive climate plan in the world.

MARK: Even just the $136 per ton is three times what Washington and California charge.

JEN: Yeah, and that’s the base rate.

MARK: Getting back to the CCI payments — the reserve, which was in your notes as item five: DEQ has the ability to retire those compliance instruments. So it’s not just lowering the threshold from 100,000 tons down to 25,000 and even lower by 2050 — it can also lower the amount of credits you’re allowed to buy. Talk to us about how that works.

JEN: A compliance instrument, in layman’s terms, is one ton of CO2, or emissions. The obligation is the volume of emissions each supplier is responsible for. When DEQ retires an allowance — one metric ton — it ratchets the cap down further, and it moves down fast. Under specified circumstances, DEQ can retire those compliance instruments, and that matters because scarcity isn’t an accidental side effect of this program. The declining number of available instruments is central to making the emissions cap work — and to the money it generates for government.

MARK: Right. Just to go through some of the numbers: the reserve currently allows 800,000 instruments from 2025 through 2028–2029. That shrinks to 500,000, and from 2035 onward, to 250,000. So they’re lowering the threshold at which this kicks in, and also lowering what I think of as those “donation” payments — kind of like the old medieval practice of indulgences, effectively letting you keep sinning. They’re shrinking the supply of those indulgences, so the price is going to explode.

JEN: Exactly — that’s exactly my fear. That’s exactly what a program like this supports.

MARK: Horrendous. Okay, coming up, we’re going to talk about the largest polluter in Oregon. Stay with us.

— Segment 5 —

MARK: And welcome back. This week’s show is one of those where the more you look, the worse it gets — and that tends to happen with government programs. We’re talking about the Climate Protection Program, an executive order originally put in place by Kate Brown after Republicans walked out to stop it in the legislature. It was thrown out by the Court of Appeals on disclosure grounds, then reinstated under Governor Kotek, and it’s currently in effect.

Jen, our guest today, is president of ONRI, Oregon Natural Resource Industries — their website is onri.us. Jen, the reason I got onto this angle was thinking about the stated goal of reducing carbon emissions. That’s weird, I thought, because right now we are burning up — this is the largest forest-fire season we’ve ever had. So I started digging: roughly how many acres have already burned? Jen, can you give us a sense of the scale?

JEN: Right now in Oregon we’ve burned 2.5 million acres this year. It’s the biggest fire season in Oregon history.

MARK: And just two years ago we had that really big one, and we thought that was astronomical. This one’s even bigger. It’s like we’ve learned nothing. So again, looking at this through the lens of “we want to reduce carbon emissions” — how much carbon did those 2.5 million acres put into the air, which we’ve said we don’t want to do? Doing the research, that’s roughly 30 million tons of CO2. Our cap this year, per DEQ, is 23,280,253 tons. So that’s roughly 6.72 million tons over the state’s own limit.

If you wanted to fine that — and I’d call this willful negligence, because we know forests burn when you don’t manage them — to me, that’s a willful violation of what we say we want to do. At the $12,000-per-ton civil penalty, that’s $80 billion the state would owe itself. And if you use the full 30 million tons over the cap, remember, this is on top of what industry pays — that’s $360 billion.

But the state isn’t liable for any of that, because apparently that’s not “man-caused” emissions — they call it natural. I’m sorry, but if you have the opportunity to not let these fires burn and don’t take it, to me that’s man-caused.

JEN: That’s correct. And just to put this in perspective — remember the Labor Day fires? The initial blaze emitted enough to equal every single car in Portland running 365 days a year, 24 hours a day. Just to give you an idea of scale.

MARK: How many tons of carbon dioxide do trees take out of the atmosphere once they’ve already burned and are no longer there? You need those plants to take carbon dioxide out of the air. You just let 2.5 million acres go up in flames, putting all of that carbon into the air. You’d think maybe we ought to do something about that.

JEN: It’s a double whammy — we’re destroying the lungs of Oregon.

MARK: Jen, there’s something else from your notes I want to get to. The CPP isn’t Oregon’s only carbon-compliance system, and I think that’s the really dangerous part, because we don’t have a true sense of exactly how much this is all going to cost Oregonians. Separate from the CPP, Oregon’s Clean Fuels Program already operates its own credit-and-deficit system affecting transportation fuels. Walk us through some of these other carbon-compliance systems.

JEN: This is layered carbon compliance on top of carbon compliance. Right now, the fuel tax in Oregon is 40 cents. The Clean Fuels compliance cost is about ten, almost eleven cents. The CPP compliance cost is going to be about 39 cents starting in 2028, and it’ll ratchet up from there. And DEQ’s own calculated average compliance cost rose about 25% in one year. Add all of that up — what’s the aggregate cost to consumers buying fuel? To me, this is one of the scariest parts of the whole thing, because fuel cost touches everything — not just transportation, not just industry, but the mom taking her kid to school in the morning. All of this is going to start costing us, and then heating your home on top of that, with natural gas ratcheting up too. We genuinely don’t know what the end result is going to be for the consumer.

MARK: Just to run through the other pieces you’ve mentioned — on top of the CPP, you’ve got HB 2021’s electricity requirements, Advanced Clean Cars II, Advanced Clean Trucks, the CCI system — that’s the $136-per-ton additional cost if you exceed the cap — plus the 4.5% DEQ fee, and future EITE industrial compliance on top of that. You nailed it when you asked: where is the cumulative economic analysis when you lump all of this together? It’s astronomical.

I don’t understand how they can even consider this, going back to your notes — a logger doesn’t buy Clean Fuels diesel on Monday and CPP diesel on Tuesday. Oregon evaluates these regulations one at a time, but businesses don’t pay them one at a time. Eventually all of this ends up in the hands of the customer, because the upstream fines and regulations impacting the cost of doing business don’t just get absorbed — businesses have to pass that on.

JEN: That’s right. That’s why I think this is a racket — the consumer pays more, and the government gets more. And to add to it: right now DEQ has 21 companies, covered fuel suppliers, receiving compliance instruments under the CPP, and DEQ gets to decide how much each one of those companies gets against the cap — about 24 million tons in 2026. To me, that’s exactly why people don’t trust government — these backroom deals. DEQ says they have an equation, but that equation is only known to DEQ, deciding which company gets how many of these allowances. It’s “you scratch my back, I scratch yours.” Is there something more happening there? I don’t know.

MARK: It’s selective punishment, for sure. All right, everyone, stay with us for our final segment, where we’re going to talk about Oregon doing the opposite of what it says it wants.

— Segment 6 —

MARK: And welcome back for our final segment, talking to Jen Hamaker, president of ONRI, Oregon Natural Resource Industries — onri.us. Jen, we’ve been talking about the CPP, and as we discussed last segment, the stated goal is reducing carbon emissions — and yet the state is by far the biggest polluter of anyone out there.

This ties right in, because with all of these forest fires destroying habitat — did you happen to see that Oregon State researchers recently found the northern spotted owl is functionally extinct in significant parts of its range? We started this effort back in the seventies and eighties to save the spotted owl, and now it’s effectively lost. How many acres have we allowed to burn while claiming we want to protect the spotted owl? How many spotted owls are living in areas that used to be forest and no longer are? I’m guessing zero. Does this affect the habitat conservation plan?

JEN: Actually, yes, it absolutely does — they’ve set aside hundreds of acres per pair of spotted owls, and if the owls are gone, there will be real questions about those set-asides. But I want to bring up something I think your listeners need to understand: none of these rules, regulations, allowances, and compliances have really been looked at in the aggregate — as a whole.

MARK: Yes.

JEN: It’s the same with our forests, which keep burning while government shuts down the Elliott, shuts down millions of acres under the Private Forest Accord, shuts down millions more under the HCP on state lands. They look at each of those individually — they don’t add it all up, so they never see the full picture. That’s exactly what’s happening with the CPP and all of these other rules and regulations, like Clean Fuels, all contributing to what consumers are going to have to pay. Nobody has looked at the full picture. That’s what government keeps doing — they focus on one thing at a time, and pretty soon all of it gets passed on to us.

MARK: Well, and again, they say the goal is a decline in carbon emissions. Okay — we’ve got some carbon vacuum cleaners out there, they’re called trees. Oregon’s own 2025 Land-Based Net Carbon Inventory shows that since 1990, the forest’s ability to remove carbon has declined 44% because of these fires — from 104.5 million tons down to 58.62 million in 2024. Again, if the goal is to reduce carbon, instead we’re letting those trees burn up, which means they can’t be out there pulling carbon out of the air.

JEN: Not only are they no longer able to sequester CO2 once they’ve burned — they’re also contributing to the CO2 total, because roughly half of dried wood, by weight, is carbon. You burn it, and it’s released. It’s a double whammy, again.

MARK: It absolutely is. Jen, unfortunately we’re up against the clock. This has been very informative — as I said at the top of the show, we’re definitely going to have you back, because a lot of what we’ve done here is really just first-blush research, and it’s astronomical just trying to get your head wrapped around it.

JEN: There’s so much to this.

MARK: It absolutely is astonishing. Thank you so much for your time today.

JEN: Thank you so much.

MARK: It probably won’t surprise you that there is a tremendous amount of information we still haven’t covered, including the fact that this isn’t just an Oregon story — there’s an international organization behind all of it. I want to encourage you to go to our website, ispyradio.com/16-35, to find out more — there’s a tremendous amount of information up there already. And I’d especially encourage you to contact your candidates and make this an issue in this campaign, because this is an executive order — the fastest way to undo it is to change who holds that office, the governor. But if you keep — or let expand — those Democrat supermajorities, this becomes law. That’s why you can’t just focus on the governor’s race. You’ve got to support those down-ballot races too, the representatives and the senators. Because as we say every week — the best information does you no good if you don’t use it.