From The Hill:
Logging industry’s wildfire claims are misleading the public
by Chad Hanson, opinion contributor – 08/12/24 12:00 PM ET
The Park Fire in northern California has reached approximately 400,000 acres in size, and already logging industry advocates are pushing out misinformation about the fire in an attempt to promote their deceptively-named Fix Our Forests Act logging bill. The timber industry’s political apologists tell us that the Park Fire grew so big, so fast ostensibly because public forestlands are “overgrown” and in need of “thinning.”
They tell us that we can solve this problem by passing the Fix Our Forests Act, which would roll back bedrock environmental laws to give logging companies even greater access to mature and old trees on our national forests and other public lands.
As with other large wildfires in recent years, the self-serving claims made by logging interests while fires burn do not stand up to even casual scrutiny. In fact, about three-quarters of the Park Fire isn’t even in conifer forest. Mostly it has burned through open oak woodlands and grass savannas with widely scattered trees. Of the approximately one-quarter of the fire that is comprised of conifer forest, most of that is private industrial timberland where intensive logging, including “thinning,” has occurred for many years.
The truth is that this “overgrown forests” narrative, which is being spun by the logging industry and its political apologists, is a new and insidious type of climate change denialism. It not only downplays the role of extreme weather and climate change in big wildfires, it also promotes widespread removal of trees from our best carbon sinks—our forests. Scientific research tells us that logging conducted under the rubric of thinning emits about three times more carbon into the atmosphere, per acre, than wildfire alone.
Read the rest of this OpEd here.
