Biden’s New Forest Plan Will Backfire
The Biden Administration gave its friends in the climate lobby an early Christmas gift on Tuesday by restricting logging on tens of millions of acres of national forests. The U.S. Forest Service is proposing, for the first time, to amend simultaneously all of its forest management plans to effectively ban logging on nearly 25 million acres of “old growth" forests.
This is a land grab if there ever was one. The agency claims that conserving older trees will fight climate change since they suck up and store CO2. Not if they go up in smoke.
For years the feds have struggled to manage overgrown forests to prevent wildfires, and the Biden proposal will add to the challenge. The deputy chief of the National Forest System told regional leaders that management work in old-growth areas will henceforth need approval from Washington, D.C., to proceed, which will slow vital work on the ground. The Administration’s proposal will also invariably be used by green groups to stop fire mitigation projects and will take staff time away from implementing them, as Montana Sen.
Steve Daines notes in a letter to the Administration. Timber companies also manage forests better than the government since they have an economic incentive to prevent uncontrolled fires. The Forest Service says wildfires are the top threat to old-growth forests, so its plan will undermine its stated goal of preserving trees and might increase CO2 emissions and harmful pollutants.
Canadian wildfires this year released an estimated 0.5 to 0.8 gigatons of CO2—about as much as 109 million to 174 million gas-powered cars. The plan also won’t stop logging. More will occur elsewhere, resulting in greater lumber imports.
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