Could the Infrastructure Bill Make Wildfires Worse?
11 August 2021
Published by https://www.scientificamerican.com/
USA – The West is burning, and Congress is responding with a fire hose of money.
The bipartisan infrastructure deal that advanced yesterday through the Senate would spend billions of dollars on wildfire policy, with much of it earmarked for cutting trees and planting new ones.
Some experts warn that approach could backfire.
“The infrastructure package, as written, is wrongheaded on so many levels. It’s a climate change nightmare,” said Chad Hanson, a forest ecologist and co-founder of the John Muir Project.
The legislation has inflamed a long-running debate about how fire should coexist with forests—and humans.
Many state and federal officials blame recent wildfires on forests that are overloaded with dead vegetation. California alone saw some 130 million trees die in the last decade. Their solution, backed by the wood industry, is to remove that fuel from the forest before it burns.
That principle guides the infrastructure package. It provides more than $1.9 billion for fuel reduction, with at least $1.2 billion of that set aside for cutting down trees and clearing vegetation.
It also creates a new federal system for subsidizing sawmills and other wood processing facilities, along with $400 million in new financial assistance. “Close proximity” to a sawmill would become a factor for agencies to consider when funding federal land restoration.
Critics say such logging is counterproductive to wildfire management. Timber companies make the best money by harvesting big trees, but those are the ones most resilient to fire. The act of cutting trees leaves behind highly flammable waste vegetation. Logging equipment is a potential ignition source itself, as well as a notorious vector for combustible invasive grasses.
And the final destination for some of the wood—pellets for burning in biomass generators—is worse for the climate than coal, critics say, meaning the policy could inadvertently worsen climate change, which exacerbates wildfires in the first place. (The carbon sequestration value of other wood products depends on several factors and is a matter of scientific debate.)
“We cannot overcome the climate crisis if we increase logging in our forests. All that’s going to do is increase emissions, and it’s not going to curb fires,” said Hanson.
