Should Climate Change be making its way into the Oregon Water Law Statutes?

As evidenced in the recent amendments to proposed HB 3369 concerning revisions to loan and grant funding for Oregon water projects, climate change issues are finding their way into Oregon statutes. One might ask if this is proper given the lack of science surrounding climate change issues.

The Environmental Protection Agency realizes that the science is not fully developed. Specifically, the EPA states: “Important scientific questions remain about how much warming will occur, how fast it will occur, and how the warming will affect the rest of the climate system including precipitation patterns and storms.” http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/science/stateofknowledge.html. To answer these questions with any degree of certainty will thus require advancements in scientific knowledge in many areas including “determining the relative contribution to climate change of human activities and natural causes.” Id.

With so many unknowns as to climate change analyses, it is likely an exercise in futility to put any climate change analysis into the requirement mix for a water project loan application. Oregon House Bill 3369 currently provides that anyone making a loan application include project impacts such as the “expected environmental public benefits including a plan describing possibilities for adaptation of the project in response to long term climate change.” Other proposals in this Bill require analyses as to “global” climate change. Can one even begin to outline possibilities to adapt a project to “long term” climate change when “questions remain” as to the affects of warming on the climate systems? Adding such provisions to a loan and grant application would be futile to the success of any water project funding program. Perhaps more importantly, Oregon and the west have a long history of considering water shortage implications to water projects and infusing climate change with a unique status is unnecessary.

If the State of Oregon is going to have a successful funding program for water projects, having mandatory provisions to consider “the likely impact of global climate change in regard to the project,” is simply unnecessary, bad law.