If Portland did not already exist, we would have to invent it, so as to demonstrate how crazy things can get when liberals are offered no resistance. The moonbats running the city are destroying a recycling plant in the name of climate piousness.

From the Wall Street Journal:

Portland declared a climate emergency last year, and the City Council voted to achieve net zero CO2 emissions by 2050. To meet this goal that would have no effect on the climate, Portland’s Bureau of Planning and Sustainability wants to impose some $11 million in annual fees on city businesses. Facilities deemed “major stationary sources of air pollution” would pay an annual surcharge of up to $40,000, and Portland would also impose a per-ton fee on any facility that emits more than 2,500 metric tons of C02 a year.

Chuck Schumer has called for the White House to declare a climate emergency too, so that similar measures can be inflicted at the national level, scaled up to gargantuan size.

The carbon taxes would fall especially hard on Portland’s Owens-Brockway Glass Container plant, which handles all of the state’s glass-bottle recycling and processes the equivalent of 440,000 beer bottles a day on average. If the City Council adopts the proposal, the plant would have to pay an estimated $1.1 million a year, more than any Portland facility except the Evraz steel mill, according to the newspaper Willamette Week. The recycling plant pays $1.6 million in income, real-estate and property taxes.

When it goes under, that $1.6 million will have been lost because greedy bureaucrats demanded $1.1 million more.

The plant has 115 employees. Their tax contributions will be lost too when they join the swelling ranks of the eco-unemployed, putting Big Government even farther behind. Enviropolitics isn’t about numbers that add up. It is about striking poses while inflicting tyranny for its own sake.

Jules Bailey of the Oregon Beverage Recycling Cooperative said that if the plant went bust, the state’s glass bottles would end up in landfills or be shipped out of state.

Leftist pols are not concerned with improving the environment, or they would back nuclear energy. Better the garbage should end up floating in the sea than they should miss out on a chance to loot and persecute in the name of the planet.

The contradictions of progressive climate policy are multiplying, but one constant prevails: The costs fall on workers and consumers in return for no benefit for the climate.

However, the benefit of climate ideology to our rulers is immense. It may even allow them to impose the Great Reset.

On a tip from Varla.

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