The Biden administration has issued a ten-year plan to manage the national forests to prevent future wildfires. It will include “the use of prescribed fire and thinning to reduce hazardous fuels,” says PERC’s Shawn Regan, writing in City Journal. “It’s a step in the right direction,” says Regan. However, the billions of dollars proposed by the…
Tag: wildfire
The West Is a Fire Plain. Get Over It.
Guest author Randal O’Toole has a degree in forestry from Oregon State University and has spent several decades studying forest policy. He is the author of six books, including Reforming the Forest Service, and author of The Perfect Firestorm: Bringing Forest Service Wildfire Costs under Control, a Cato Institute Policy Analysis. Every summer, smoke from…
Don’t Believe the Hype Over IPCC Climate Predictions
Are we headed for disaster? The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change seems to say so in its latest report. Or does it? “As usual, the media and politicians are exaggerating and distorting the evidence in the report,” writes Steven Koonin in the Wall Street Journal. He is a former energy official in the Obama…
Monday’s Links
‘Fight fires with facts—not fake science.’ Did British broadcaster David Attenborough scare Greta Thunberg with inaccurate stories of starving polar bears? NOAA revises American climate history (video).
Fighting Fires with Finance
Wildfire is causing needless loss of life and resources. Last year, the Camp Fire that burned in northern California took 85 lives, destroyed nearly 19,000 structures, and burned 153,000 acres. Efforts to prevent a similar tragedy this year led to intentional blackouts that left millions without electricity. Yet the fires rage again, consuming 75,000 acres this year. Wildfires across the west burn on average 7 million acres annually.
Fire-fighting now takes up more than half of the Forest Service’s annual budget, leaving few dollars for restoring forests and preventing future fires. A century of fire suppression and decades of reduced commercial harvest have increased forest density and left an accumulation of fuels on the forest floor. Add that to a drier climate and residential development expanding on the forest edge, and the mix is a design for disaster.