Biden’s plan to burn down your Christmas tree
Washington Examiner
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Enjoy your Christmas tree this year because thanks to a new regulation President Joe Biden is pushing on the Forest Service, next year’s tree may go up in smoke.
The acreage of forest consumed by wildfires has increased eightfold in the last 30 years, and climate change isn’t to blame. Starting in the 1990s, environmental activists became increasingly successful at shutting down logging in our nation’s forests. As a direct result, the board feet of timber harvested from national forests fell from an average of 10 billion a year between 1960 and 1990 to just 2 billion by 2000.
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That means 8 billion board feet of wildfire fuel were being added to our nation’s forests every year. The environmentalists thought this was great. “Pristine” forests were being saved from the evil capitalist chainsaw.
But the overgrown forests the environmentalists had created were not natural at all. By refusing to log the forests, and by putting out any fire that started, the environmentalists were creating an unnatural tinderbox. Without human interference, forests naturally thin themselves through wildfires. But environmentalists would never let the forests burn. They must be saved!
Fortunately, after the catastrophic wildfires of the past decade, the Forest Service wised up and began issuing forest management plans that made fire prevention their top priority. The Forest Service embraced the science, which shows that a combination of logging and prescribed burns is the best way to reduce wildfire severity.
Unfortunately, the Biden administration is now trying to make it harder for logging companies to thin forests and manage them for fire safety. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has proposed a rule that would require the Forest Service to redo all of its forest management plans, controlling 193 million acres of forest, making it illegal to cut down old-growth trees.
The reason for this new rule? Climate change. The environmentalists claim that old-growth trees are a particularly good way to keep carbon out of the atmosphere. “Protecting our old-growth trees from logging is an important first step to ensure these giants continue to store vast amounts of carbon,” Randi Spivak, Center for Biological Diversity policy director, said in support of Biden’s new logging ban. “The Forest Service also needs to protect our mature forests, which if allowed to grow will become the old growth of tomorrow.”
There the environmentalists go again, naively hoping that if we just leave the trees alone, nature will be preserved.
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The timber industry knows this new Biden rule is a recipe for disaster. “Congress has made it clear that job one is reducing the threat of catastrophic fires by thinning our national forests,” Bill Imbergamo, Federal Forest Resource Coalition executive director, said of the new Biden rule. “Instead, the same staff who should be planning fuels treatments are going to be engaged in a rushed, top-down effort to amend every forest plan to restrict management options on even more acres of National Forests.”
One would hope it wouldn’t be necessary to explain to the environmentalists that while old-growth trees can be a good way to store carbon, their storage capacity falls to zero once they go up in smoke. The sad reality is, however, that no matter how much environmentalists love to talk about following “the science,” when it comes to forest management, they just refuse to follow their own advice.