It can happen to the best of us, when, as the essayist Lance Morrow once observed, “Language temporarily loses its self control; it veers around the room making drunken passes at reality, biting its ear, whispering hyperbole, even drooling a little.”
It recently happened to Rep. Ed Orcutt, the ranking minority member of the House Transportation Committee.
The Kalama Republican briefly earned his 15 minutes of, well, infamy, when, while defending the plan to tax bicycle owners $25 on bikes worth more than $500, postulated that cyclists contribute to climate change with their “increased heart rate and respiration.”
One supposes, then, that any heavy breather is by nature a polluter. Long-distance runners, political windbags, couples in the throes of sexual ecstacy, must also be considered environmental hazards.
To be fair, Orcutt did admit he might be exaggerating a wee bit (sort of like when the Apollo 11 astronauts returned from the moon and Richard Nixon declared, “This is the greatest week in the history of the world since the Creation.”), and yesterday he did apologize, but yet he did not retract his claim that cyclists, with all their hugging and puffing, do create a carbon footprint.
“What I was trying to say is bicyclists do have a lower footprint but not a zero footprint in relation to automobiles,” Orcutt said. “I didn’t close that thought out very well. It was poorly worded.”
The Daily Weekly was unable to reach Orcutt. House GOP Caucus spokesman John Handy said the lawmaker had been on TV, radio and issued his statement — “and that’s all he’s going to say on the matter.”
The fracas began when Dale Carlson, the owner of three South Sound-area bike shops sent an e-mail to 30 state lawmakers (Orcutt included) complaining about the $25 fee as part of the transportation revenue package.
Orcutt, your garden-variety conservative who thinks the solution to all world problems begins with tax cuts, told Carlson by e-mail that cyclists should help pay the road maintenance and construction.
He wrote in part that “the act of riding a bike results in greater emissions of carbon dioxide from the rider. Since CO2 is deemed to be a greenhouse gas and a pollutant, bicyclists are actually polluting when they ride.”
As regards the $25 tax, which is going to raise a mere $1 million as part of the $10 billion package, the Cascade Bicycle Club’s chief lobbyist Matthew Green said, “We’re not exciting about, but we can live with it.”
Green, however, stressed that Orcutt, in demanding that bike riders pay their fair share, is perpetuating the myth that bikers don’t already pay for roads — and that only a third of money allocated toward highway construction and the like are generated from the gas tax.
Now, if we can simply impose a tax on heavy breathers, why just think of the money we could raise!
