House panel focuses on ramping up forest management to curb wildfires
Picking up the pace of forest management as a front-line means of preventing wildfires received bipartisan support at a congressional hearing on Tuesday, although utility executives and forestry specialists testified that thinning-out trees and brush was neither as simple or as comprehensive a solution as it might sound.
Unprecedented fire seasons in recent years appear to have focused the attention of government agencies, lawmakers, and the public on the consequences of allowing forests to become overgrown as the climate becomes warmer and dryer while, at the same time, more people move into rural areas where the fire threat is real.
As a result, members of the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Energy and the Subcommittee on Environment and Climate Change on Jan. 28 pressed the witnesses for examples of bureaucratic obstacles or environmental overkill that might be hindering the process of clearing away hazardous materials from forest floors around powerlines or in increasingly populated areas. Recent statistics have pointed to homeless camps hidden in the brush that have become a noticeable source of fires that break out in urban areas.
But simply ramping up forestry practices that have been effective for decades might not be enough to sideline the goal of reducing climate-changing emissions. “I think putting a position between climate science and forest management is a false dichotomy,” said John MacWilliams, senior fellow at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy. “We obviously need both to solve these problems and forest management is the low-hanging fruit.”
The notion of clearing away unwanted small trees and brush from western forests in order to tamp down the severity of wildfires has been a popular strategy in political circles for the past few decades. With more people and powerlines moving into the urban-wildfire interface, the urgency for prescribed burns and other forms of vegetation management has increased. But like any other project taking place in a natural area, permits are required not only for prescribed burns, but for other fire-mitigation measures including the movement of utility poles and other energy infrastructure plans.
The permitting process can be time-consuming and brings in other environmental considerations, not the least of which are growing concerns about the health hazards of smoke, which can affect people who live around the prescribed burn.
The House witnesses, including William Johnson, president and CEO of PG&E Corp., were repeatedly asked if the government agencies that manage the vast federal lands in the West were showing a sense of urgency with regards to the permitting process or if they were still bogged down in time-consuming bureaucratic processes.
Johnson estimated that 30 percent of Pacific Gas & Electric Co.’s service territory is federal land with transmission lines in more than a dozen national forests. He told the committee that the federal government, including the U.S. Forest Service, had become “much more attuned to the process” of permitting for the utility’s fire prevention measures in recent years, particularly with the passage in 2018 of the Electricity Reliability and Forest Protection Act, which featured some needed adjustments to grease the skids for preventative tree removal.
“I am told that the situation is greatly improved from when I got there,” said Johnson, who urged Congress to also get behind federally funded research and development projects aimed at reducing fire risks and also increasing the resilience of the grid to withstand them. “We have to make sure these things continue to be funded and there are also pilot programs going on that need to be made permanent, but I think that the situation is in much better shape than it was.”
Plenty of sticky issues, however, still exist when it comes to forest management. President Donald Trump raised the ire of western officials and firefighters in 2018 by scolding California officials that they needed to do more “raking” of the forest floor to prevent conflagrations such as the deadly Camp Fire. Critics portrayed the comments as an attempt to dodge the need to seriously address climate change.
The House committee members and panelists, however, were past that debate and acknowledged that changing climate conditions would affect not only fires and fire behavior, but also how forests in different areas will bounce back after a fire, particularly in terms of types and quantities of vegetation that take root, forest density, effects on waterways, and air quality.
Anthony S. Davis, interim dean of the College of Forestry at Oregon State University, told the lawmakers, “We cannot look at the scale of the problem and cut our way out.”
