Can California’s Forests Survive Environmentalism?

/by

Earlier this month an environmentalist group that calls itself the John Muir Project, joined by a few other state and local like minded organizations, sued the U.S. Forest Service. The transgression? A proposal to thin 13,000 acres of forest near Big Bear Lake, in the heart of California’s San Bernardino Mountains.

You would think they’d learn. One of the most devastating fires in California history raged through the San Bernardino Mountains over 20 years ago. Named the Old Fire, over 90,000 acres were burned, nearly 1,000 homes and businesses were destroyed, and over 70,000 people were evacuated.

Time passes. Forests regenerate. And if you suppress natural fires, you either reduce forests through logging, grazing, controlled burns and mechanical thinning, or you wait until they’re overgrown tinderboxes and then watch them burn to the ground in catastrophic superfires. And that is the apparent preference of California’s environmentalist lobby.

Critics opposing the forest thinning project around Big Bear Lake contend the introduction of big machines to remove excess trees and understorage is harmful to the forest ecosystems and less effective than simply creating defensible 100 foot perimeters around homes in the forest. They even contend that removing trees makes wildfires burn and spread faster.

This assertion, which contradicts the experience of professional forest managers, ought to be debunked in court. Notwithstanding the problem of property owners in California’s forests themselves having difficulty obtaining permits to thin trees and understorage around their homes, sensible land management would be to do both. There is ample evidence that mechanical thinning is effective. There is also ample evidence that a superfire can hop a 100 foot “safety perimeter” as if it isn’t even there.

Southern California Edison owns 20,000 acres of forest around Shaver Lake, located in the southern Sierra Nevada Mountains. They practice what is known as total ecosystem management. It works. In the summer of 2021, when the Creek Fire burned an almost unthinkable 550 square miles in those mountains, the 30 square mile island of SCE managed forest around Shaver Lake was unscathed. This is because for decades, SCE has been engaged in timber operations they define as “uneven age management, single-tree selection,” whereby the trees to be harvested are individually designated in advance, in what remains a profitable logging enterprise. Controlled burns are also an essential part of SCE’s total ecosystem management, but these burns are only safe when the areas to be burned are well-managed with logging and thinning.

The practice of uneven age management could be used in riparian canyons, or in areas where valuable stands of old-growth trees merit preservation. The alternative, a policy of hands-off preservation, has been disastrous. Tree density in the Sierra Nevada is currently around 300 per acre, whereas historically, a healthy forest would only have had around 60 trees per acre. Clearly, this number varies depending on forest type, altitude, and other factors, but overall, California’s forests, especially on federal lands, contain about five times the normal tree density. The result is trees that cannot compete for adequate moisture and nutrients, far less rain percolating into springs and aquifers, disease and infestation of the weakened trees, and fire.

This alternative—manage the forest or suffer fires that destroy the forest entirely—cannot be emphasized enough. In the Feather River Canyon, along with many other canyons along the Sierra Nevada, the east-west topography turned them into wind tunnels that drove fires rapidly up and down the watershed. Yet these riparian areas have been among the most fiercely defended against any logging, which made those fires all the worse. The choice going forward should not be difficult. Logging and forest thinning cannot possibly harm a watershed as much as parched forests burning down to the soil, wiping out everything.

Even clear-cutting, because it is now done on a 60- to 100-year cycle, does more good than harm to forests. By converting one or two percent of forest back into meadow each year, areas are opened up where it is easier for owls to hunt prey. Also, during a clear cut, the needles and branches are stripped off the trees and left to rejuvenate the soil. The runoff is managed as well, via contour tilling which follows the topography of the hillsides. Rain percolates into the furrows, which is also where the replacement trees are planted. In forests managed by Sierra Pacific, owl counts are higher than in California’s federally managed forests.

Responsible, large scale logging operations, now more than ever, are a prerequisite to competent wildfire and wildlife management. Forests in California today are too overgrown to be safely returned to their historical tree densities merely by allowing natural fires to burn. In an overgrown forest, natural fires turn into superfires, decimating the ecosystem and the wildlife and taking much longer to recover.

California’s forests, 33 million acres, generate about 8 billion board feet of natural growth per year. Up until 100 years ago, natural fires started by lightning or natives would burn off an equivalent amount. Up until the 1980s, California’s timber industry removed 5 billion board feet per year (down from nearly 6 billion board feet up through the 1960s), but starting around that time increasing regulations overreacted and now have reduced the annual harvest to 1.5 billion board feet. At the same time, overregulation has made it almost impossible for property owners or even state and federal land managers to do any controlled burns or mechanical thinning. Grazing of cattle, goats and sheep also helped keep undergrowth down, but that, too, has been regulated out of existence.

Tree density in California’s forests is on average about five times what it was for the last 20 million years. The trees are stressed because there isn’t enough space, soil nutrients, light, or water for so many trees. This is why they are less healthy and in many cases prey to bark beetle infestations and other diseases. This is also why our forests are tinderboxes and why our wildfires are so intense.

Excessive tree density is an objective fact. But instead of rewriting all these counterproductive regulations, our politicians and the special interests who control them bloviate about “climate change” while doing little or nothing that might actually help the forests.

And abetting them at every turn are “environmentalists,” whose well intentioned but misguided lobbying and litigation have done more to decimate California’s forests than nature and the changing climate ever could.

An edited version of this article originally appeared in City Journal.

Are Cities Ready for Renewable Skyscrapers?

/by

Every so often a product comes along that presents itself as a “sustainable” innovation, yet has compelling appeal even if sustainability isn’t someone’s top priority. Of course, sustainability has become something of an overused buzzword, but it generally refers to a production process that doesn’t deplete natural resources or damage the environment.

So called “mass timber” is an example of such an innovation. Able to replace reinforced concrete as a building material, it is economically competitive and aesthetically superior. It is perhaps the most profound innovation in building materials since the invention of reinforced concrete over 150 years ago – and it has the power to transform urban development.

By every measure of sustainability, mass timber beats concrete. As a forest product, it is genuinely renewable. Since smaller trees can be used for mass timber than for conventional lumber, more comprehensive forest thinning and fire prevention operations are commercially viable and larger trees can remain untouched.

For those who prioritize these variables, it is also an excellent way to permanently sequester carbon. Manufacturing concrete, by contrast, is a far more energy intensive process, and each year utilizes millions of tons of sand which is – surprisingly – a dwindling and non-renewable resource.

Laminated veneer, commonly known as plywood, has been around for decades. Mass timber (also referred to by the more descriptive term “cross laminated timber”) is where strips of wood are pressed together into large beams and panels, with each layer of grain running perpendicular to the layer above and below it. It has only been around since the 1990s.

The products available today are amazing: structural pillars with cross sections 60 inches on a side; lateral beams; floor panels eight inches thick, 10 feet wide, and 40 feet long.

The specifications defining cross-laminated timber should silence the skeptics. They weigh about one-fifth as much as similar sized structural materials made of reinforced concrete, while offering the same strength. They are not combustible. In hot structure fires, only the outer skin of the beams are charred. They are aesthetically pleasing and, unlike concrete, do not require surface treatments to soften their appearance.

This characteristic allows, for example, the floor panel in a high-rise unit to constitute the ceiling panel for the unit underneath. They have better thermal characteristics than concrete, meaning less additional insulation is required. And they can be manufactured to precise sizes and delivered ready for assembly, a tremendous time saver.

The construction industry changes slowly, but after a slow start, the use of mass timber is taking off around the world. Last July, what is currently the tallest mass-timber tower in the world opened in Milwaukee, Wis. Technically speaking, this is a “hybrid” building, with reinforced concrete used for the first six floors, plus for the staircases and elevator shafts. But at 25 stories, most of the superstructure of this building makes exclusive use of wood.

Tim Gokhman, the managing director of New Land Enterprises, the development company behind the Milwaukee tower, explained the appeal of mass timber: “There’s a reason it’s taking off. It’s lighter and faster and more precise and takes a smaller labor force to install. It can be economically equivalent and in some areas better, and it is a way more beautiful product and it is sustainable. It is in many cases a superior technology which is why it’s going to be transformational.”

Milwaukee’s mass-timber tower will not hold the world record for long. Taking shape over the skyline in Sydney is a 40-story hybrid timber building that will become the new headquarters of the Australian software company Atlassian. The building is a designed to be a showcase of sustainable technologies, with natural ventilation, large planted terraces, a photovoltaic skin and a veritable forest of vegetation on the roof.

While expensive statements such as the development in Sydney may offer valuable visibility to the phenomenon, mass timber has experienced hockey stick growth because it offers an economic advantage to builders. The renewable nature of mass timber gives it additional appeal.

You can’t research the product without having to wade through endless computations of how much carbon mass timber will sequester, or horror stories about the amount of carbon emissions caused by the manufacture of concrete. But is mass timber renewable at scale? Could it replace reinforced concrete? The short answer is yes.

In the United States in 2020, about 370 million cubic yards of concrete were produced. About 40 percent of that went for commercial real estate construction. If we assume half of that can be replaced by mass timber, that would mean our forests would need to replace 74 million cubic yards of concrete, which equates to 24 billion board feet of timber. That sounds like a lot, but compared to the annual timber harvest in the United States, it’s not.

According to the U.S. Forest Service, there are 12 trillion board feet of timber volume in the United States and about 186 billion board feet were harvested in 2018. That is, the U.S. timber harvest each year represents about 2 percent of the U.S. timber by volume. In the United States, forest growth has outpaced harvesting for many decades. For mass timber to replace half the concrete used in commercial construction, the nation’s forest harvest would only have to increase by 13 percent.

Increasing the timber harvest would certainly make sense in California, where the timber industry has been reduced from annual harvests of up to 6 billion board feet as recently as the 1990s to only 1.5 billion board feet in recent years. The result has been overcrowding, with dense stands of unhealthy trees. In dry years, these trees drink up most of California’s precipitation before it can percolate or runoff, exacerbating the state’s water shortage.

And the main reason for catastrophic forest fires in California is the combination of fire suppression, unreasonable restrictions on controlled burns or mechanical thinning, combined with the near destruction of the timber industry. So mass timber offers a public safety advantage, too.

Despite some official resistance to increasing the harvest and manufacture of mass timber in state, these products are catching on as a building material. Last month, California building codes were updated to allow for construction of mass timber buildings up to 18 stories tall. Mid-rise buildings using mass timber are opening or under construction in Los Angeles, San Jose, San Francisco, Sacramento and elsewhere across California.

It’s not always easy to know which technologies will gain the imprimatur of today’s green clerisy, as even advanced hybrid vehicles that provide versatility and economy are on the outs as environmentalists promote purely electric vehicles. But advancements in mass timber should tick everyone’s boxes – and it might soon transform our cities’ skylines.

This article was originally published by the Pacific Research Institute.

California’s Prop. 30 Will Not Save the Forests

/by

The television ads are impossible to ignore. A stern man in a firefighter’s uniform stands beside the wasted ashes of an immolated forest. As a harrowing montage of towering flames, skies filled with smoke, and CO2 belching cars on freeways slide across the screen, exuding masculine authority, he explains “we are in a crisis.” His message is compelling. To save our forests, clean our air, and address the climate emergency, we must vote yes on Proposition 30.

Despite the vociferous opposition of the California Teachers Association, and their reliable surrogate, Governor Gavin Newsom, Prop. 30 looks headed for victory in November. This is proof, once again, that you can convince California’s electorate to approve anything so long as you claim it will address the climate crisis.

Prop. 30 is clever. Its popularity relies on the understandable frustration Californians have over worsening wildfires, which most Californians have been convinced is caused by climate change. Its solution? Slap a 1.75% tax on all personal income over $2.0 million per year, and use the money to fund “Zero-Emissions Vehicles and Wildfire Prevention.”

The devil is in the details. Of the estimated up to $4.5 billion annual proceeds, 80 percent will subsidize ZEV (Zero Emissions Vehicle) charging stations and ZEV rebates, and 20 percent will pay for “wildfire response and prevention.” But of that 20 percent, 75 percent will go to wildfire response, and 25 percent will go to wildfire prevention. Which is to say that out of $4.5 billion per year, five percent will be spent to thin forests, and the other 95 percent will be to either hire more firefighters, or to subsidize the EV industry.

To be clear: if every car in California were an EV, it would do nothing to prevent catastrophic wildfires. Even assuming that the planet is experiencing a permanent warming trend, and even assuming cars and other uses of fossil fuels are the reason for that warming, California, at roughly 350 million metric tons of CO2 emissions per year, only contributes one percent of the 35 billion metric tons of CO2 emitted globally each year.

As for using 20 percent of Prop. 30’s funds to pay for fire suppression and fire prevention, the priorities are flipped. Californians are already spending over a billion dollars per year to put out wildfires. Fire suppression is the primary reason forest fires have gotten so bad in California, and climate change, for all the hype it attracts, is a secondary cause. Cataclysmic wildfires will never be stopped merely by extinguishing them, at least not until every one of California’s 33 million acres of magnificent forests are burnt down to the dirt. To solve the problem of superfires, California’s forests need to be thinned back to historical norms.

For over 100 years, and with increasing effectiveness, California’s firefighters have suppressed forest fires that, for millennia, were sparked by lightening and would burn away smaller trees and brush. Up until about thirty years ago, despite suppression of natural fires, commercial logging, cattle grazing, mechanical thinning and controlled burns kept forest growth in check. As recently as the 1990s, over 6 billion board feet were being harvested every year out of California’s forests. Today that total is down to barely 1.25 billion board feet, and the regulatory process to graze, thin, or burn off undergrowth has become prohibitively expensive and protracted. As a result, California’s forests are tinderboxes.

If you care about such things, every year there’s a superfire in California, around 100 million tons of CO2 enter the atmosphere. Less abstract and of more universal relevance is the filthy smoke and soot that hangs in the air for weeks, and the ash laden silt that fouls the rivers after the first rain. Anyone concerned for the environment might also recognize that trees in California’s forests are stressed and dying not because we’re having heat waves and droughts, but because wherever the root systems of just one tree used to compete for water, now there are seven trees. This unnatural reality is also the reason less of our precious rain percolates into aquifers, replenishes springs, or runs off into streams. The desperately overcrowded tree roots suck up every drop.

A research paper published in March of 2022 by the California Fire Science Consortium concluded the following: “Overall, between 1911 and 2011, tree densities on average increased by six to seven fold while average tree size was reduced by 50%. This shift in contemporary forest conditions resulted from ingrowth with very high densities.” Got that? California’s forests are seven times as dense as they were 100 years ago.

This is the truth that firefighters ought to be proclaiming in front of television cameras, and this is the catastrophe that responsible politicians and public servants ought to be urgently trying to fix, instead of endlessly preening and bloviating about the “climate crisis.” Restoring the timber industry ought to be a top priority. It has been decimated thanks to relentless and misguided assaults by environmentalists. Private investment in logging and milling operations could then finance much of the necessary forest thinning. Encouraging the adoption of mass timber – cross laminated structural beams that are stronger and weigh less than reinforced concrete – could make harvesting the unwanted and overcrowded smaller trees profitable, since manufacturing this innovative new wood product does not require large diameter trees.

Reforming the environmentalist edicts and bureaucratic obstructions that prevent property owners to thin and do controlled burns, or ranchers from grazing their cattle, would attract additional private investment that would help restore California’s forests.

Without private investment as described, thinning California’s forests is impossible. As it is, Prop. 30 will allocate, at most, $225 million per year to forest thinning. Cost estimates to do thinning vary, but the best we may expect on average is around 1,000 per acre. That means these funds, even if most of them aren’t first skimmed to placate armies of ESG commissars, would restore 225,000 acres per year. That sounds like a lot, but it isn’t. With 33 million acres of forest in California, and with that budget, it would take 150 years to finish a job that has to be repeated every 20 years unless private logging, grazing, controlled burns, and mechanical thinning are once again permitted.

California’s firefighters should be using their substantial political clout in Sacramento to publicly confront an inconvenient truth: environmentalists and state bureaucrats have inspired and implemented policies that are destroying California’s forests. Until those policies are reversed, forests will continue to burn like hell.

Newsom, who has the advantage of being politically unassailable merely because he is less lunatic than every other major politician in California’s ruling party, has decided, just this once, to defy the will of the climate crisis industry. Instead he’s lining up with the CTA in opposition, preserving their apparent determination to make sure they remain first in line to pickpocket the deep pockets of California’s wealthiest taxpayers.

But Newsom, along with every other special interest that opposes Prop. 30 in order to make sure their own place at the public trough is undiminished, are lying in a bed of their own making. When the forests burned, Newsom didn’t call for meaningful reforms to forest management. He announced a plan to ban gasoline powered vehicles. Now he is going to get what he wanted. The results will be expensive and mostly symbolic, if not counterproductive.

This article originally appeared in the Epoch Times.

While California Dries out and Burns, Bureaucrats Hype Diversity

/by

A few months ago, a friend of mine in the water business participated in a lunchtime seminar in Sacramento on the topic of how to increase diversity in the water industry. Being a civil engineer, he thought the discussion would focus on how to develop diverse sources of water in a drought stricken state. Instead, as he later related to me with refreshing clarity, “the whole event was about how to get rid of white men.”

The man who hosted this event was Wade Crowfoot, who enjoyed media adulation in 2020 when he reportedly challenged President Trump on the science of climate change. Trump, who was being briefed by California state officials on the wildfires ravaging the state that summer, had said “It’ll just start getting cooler, you just watch.” Crowfoot responded, “I wish science agreed with you.”

When it comes to who’s running California, there’s nothing unique about Wade Crowfoot. In California, reducing the percentage of white men in any position of responsibility and hyping the “climate emergency” are behavioral prerequisites for any ambitious public servant. But to hear them endlessly parrot these themes can be quite frustrating, since it deflects attention away from their poor job performance.

Crowfoot’s portfolio includes management of California’s forests, which have suffered catastrophic fires in recent years. But the reason these fires have burned with such unprecedented ferocity is not primarily due to heat waves and drought, but due to appalling mismanagement, for which we have hostile bureaucrats and environmentalist extremists to thank

Over the past century, at a cumulative cost in today’s dollars that by now probably exceeds $100 billion, Californians have become very good at suppressing natural fires. Up until the 1990s, the resultant buildup of tinder was manageable, because property owners could still do controlled burns, graze cattle, and thin undergrowth, while the timber industry removed up to 6 billion board feet per year. Today, to burn, graze, or thin either requires preposterously complex, expensive and protracted permitting, or is simply impossible. And today, thanks to relentless harassment and overregulation, California’s timber industry harvest has been cut to less than 1.5 billion board feet a year.

That’s why the forests are burning like hell, Mr. Crowfoot. Once you’ve allowed them to get this overcrowded, they’ll burn like hell even if we weren’t having heat waves, or enduring another drought. The tree density in much of the state is more than five times what is historically normal. These desperately overcrowded trees absorb all the moisture from rain, reducing badly needed runoff into streams and reservoirs, but it still isn’t enough because there are too many of them. If California’s forests aren’t properly managed, soon, these fires will eventually destroy them all. As it is, every year California’s superfires foul the air with more CO2 and soot than millions of electric cars could ever offset, and the streams are choked with ash and eroded soil from every scorched and ruined mountainside.

And as this tragic destruction of the environment continues, California’s politicians and bureaucrats talk about banning electric cars, and purging their agencies of as many white men as they can. Crowfoot, by the way, and for all we care, looks to be about as white as Elizabeth Warren, despite his professionally advantageous surname. But we don’t care about Wade Crowfoot’s ethnic origins. We don’t care about anyone’s ethnic origins. We just want them to do their job.

They’re not. Crowfoot, along with Newsom and other public sector notables, recently announced a new Water Supply Strategy. It included completing the proposed Sites project, a badly needed off-stream reservoir that could store 1.5 million acre feet of storm runoff. Some environmentalist opponents of Sites even had the nerve to argue it isn’t economically feasible, after it was environmentalists who saw to it that 50 percent of the annual yield has to be used for “ecosystem improvements.” Hard to pay off an investment when you can only sell 50 percent of its output!

But more to the point, as soon as Crowfoot and Newsom announced a plan that included finally building the Sites Reservoir, the environmentalist bureaucrats and activists pounced, attacking the reservoir with the full complicity of a captive media. Because the plan also included expanding the Pacheco Reservoir, that, too, has attracted intensified opposition.

If environmentalists had always had the power they have now, California as we know it would not exist. Hardly anyone would be able to live here.

So why don’t Crowfoot and Newsom immediately and publicly stand up to these environmentalist zealots, who have done as much to harm California’s environment as they have done to help it, and who have stopped water infrastructure development in its tracks for nearly fifty years? Why don’t they call them out unequivocally, and tell them, flat out “you are destroying our civilization and you must back off.”

Instead, they go through the motions of their jobs, occasionally saying words that need to be said, but never seriously challenging a process that has become paralyzed by institutionalized green extremism. Get them started on diversity or the climate emergency, on the other hand, and they enter a safe comfort zone where they can drone from dawn till midnight, day after day, forever, and everyone that matters will nod approvingly.

To be clear: there is nothing wrong with seeing value in having a diverse assortment of ethnicities represented in leadership positions in the state bureaucracy. But if bureaucrats like Wade Crowfoot want to move closer to proportional representation by ethnicity in state agencies, they might start by renouncing the teachers union. This leftist political machine, exercising all but absolute control over public education in California, suffers from the same malady as Crowfoot’s natural resources agency. Instead of teaching math and English language fundamentals so graduates are qualified to compete for jobs based on their competence instead of their color, they focus on indoctrinating students to view themselves as victims of the white heteropatriarchy.

Similarly, if the bureaucrats controlling California’s regulatory agencies want to save the forests, instead of focusing on how many electric cars are sold, or working so hard to depopulate their agencies of white men, they might bring back responsible logging and streamline permits for mechanical thinning, controlled burns, and grazing to reduce tinder. If they want to save civilization, instead of bloviating endlessly about the climate emergency, they might do more than announce a new water supply strategy, they might actually finish new, major water supply infrastructure projects.

This article originally appeared in the Epoch Times.

Questioning the Political Priorities of the Firefighters Union

/by

As another summer of wildfires approaches, it is in the interest of every Californian to understand that California’s firefighters’ union, the California Professional Firefighters, is one of the most politically powerful unions in the state. This union has the power to help solve the growing problem of wildfires in California, but to more effectively do so they will have to make some tough and selfless political choices.

As it is, California’s firefighters’ union is a partisan political machine that is not standing up to environmental activists that, for decades, have undermined responsible forest management. At the same time, California’s firefighters receive union negotiated pay and benefits that have exempted them from – to use a term favored by the leftists their union aligns with – the “lived experience” of most Californians.

These problems are related. If firefighters received compensation based more on market rates instead of those rates their unions “negotiated” with politicians the unions helped elect, there would be more money to hire more firefighters. There would also be more money left over to spend on programs to prevent wildfires, instead the money running out every year after spending billions to extinguish wildfires.

Before going further, it is important to establish two things: First, to criticize the agenda of public sector unions does not constitute criticism of all unions, in all circumstances. Second, to question whether current pay scales for California’s firefighters are affordable or appropriate in no way diminishes the respect and appreciation we have for their service.

Today the most recent pay and benefits data provided by the State Controller show that the average pay and benefits for a full time firefighter working for a city in California in 2020 was $256,000. That’s a 24 percent increase in just two years. Note that this average includes administrative and other non first responders that work for these fire departments but make far less, which pulls down the numbers. Among cities that included the back payments to restore solvency to their pension plans as compensation, Santa Clara in 2020 was the city with the highest average pay and benefits for their full time fire department personnel, at $352,000.

These amounts are mind-boggling. The average base salary of a full-time fire department employee in a California city in 2020 was $115,000. To put this in perspective, according to Military.com, a staff sergeant with 10 years experience in the U.S. Army in 2020 earned base pay of $42,000. An Army captain with 10 years experience earned $79,000. Similar rates of pay apply across the U.S. Military. When it comes to including compensation apart from base pay, the disparity between California’s city firefighters and members of the military remains striking. According to a 2021 report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the total cost to the Department of Defense per service member averages $140,000 per year. This is only 55 percent of what it costs to taxpayers in California’s cities to pay their firefighters.

It’s easy enough to say cities with high tax bases like Manhattan Beach or Santa Clara have the financial wherewithal to pay their firefighters whatever they ask. But massive compensation packages for firefighters have financially strapped other cities, such as Placentia that had to completely restructure their fire department in order to get their budget under control. But either way, excessive and unaffordable pay and benefits for California’s unionized firefighters is only half the problem. 

The lesser known fact about California firefighters unions is that the union is not apolitical, but instead, like other public unions in the state, firmly entrenched in progressive politics. The firefighters union backed Prop. 15 in 2020, which would have caused business properties to be reassessed at market rates, eliminating one of the last advantages private businesses have in California. This is also the union that marched with the United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) in 2019 (pre-COVID), a teachers union that is aggressively pushing to serve up a hard-left program of indoctrination in the already failing public schools of Los Angeles. 

The California Professional Firefighters union engages in politics with an extraordinary degree of political and financial power. A few years ago when asked, off the record, why a Southern California businessman running for city council took campaign contributions from the firefighters union, his response was compelling. “They are either going to spend a million bucks to elect me, or they are going to spend it to elect my opponent.” The financial power of California’s public sector unions is well documented. 

A Tremendous Opportunity

Putting an end to cataclysmic wildfires, which are the result of decades of bad policies, ought to be the top political priority of the firefighters union. But if you visit the California Professional Firefighters website, you can easily find a press release from a few years ago, titled “CPF President Praises Newsom Commitment to Wildfire Response and Prevention.” Newsom does not deserve this praise. Almost all of Newsom’s significant actions are oriented to wildfire response, not wildfire prevention. Here’s what the firefighters union can do that might, within a few years, solve the problem of super fires, and earn the admiration and gratitude of millions of Californians:

(1) Take a public stand that policies and spending on wildfire prevention is as important as wildfire response.

(2) Demand legislative and legal action to streamline the process for property managers and property owners to engage in controlled burns.

(3) Partner with the logging industry to restore responsible logging with a goal of doubling or tripling the annual timber harvest in California. The state’s timber harvest has been reduced to 25 percent of what was being removed in the 1990s.

(4) Publicize and advocate for the successful “uneven-aged” forest management and total ecosystem management practices that saved Shaver Lake’s forests in 2020, and the forests around South Lake Tahoe in 2021.

(5) Aggressively challenge and help defend against the environmentalist litigators and lobbyists that have prevented responsible forest management and allowed California’s forests to turn into tinder boxes.

(6) Politely, but publicly and unequivocally challenge attention grabbing wildfire-inspired stunts, such as new Electric Vehicle mandates, as deflecting from the necessary solutions involving forestry management.

In addition to saving forests, homes and lives by preventing fires, reforming the state’s forest management policies would create new jobs in the timber industry, lower the cost of lumber for home construction, and save billions spent on the fire lines each summer.

One thing the firefighters union is very good at is winning. By using its political power to back critical fire prevention efforts, the firefighters union would score a huge win for all Californians.

This article originally appeared on the website of the California Globe.

 *   *   *

Solutions to Top Issues That California Needs to Fix

/by

AUDIO/VIDEO: We’re all aware by now of the problems facing California, but there isn’t enough discussion of practical solutions. This interview is a review of a nine-part series written for the California Policy Center that offers policy solutions to seven critical challenges: Energy, Water, Transportation, Housing, Homeless and Law Enforcement, Forestry, and Education. Edward Ring with Siyamak Khorrami on California Insider.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/top-issues-that-california-needs-to-fix-edwards-ring_3990334.html

Newsom’s True Opponents? Water and Fire

/by

Not quite one year ago, Gavin Newsom did something that took political courage. It was also the right thing to do. He removed from one of the state’s local water boards one of the most outspoken critics of a desalination plant proposed for Huntington Beach.

Unlike critics of desalination (once referred to as desalinization, and swiftly being rebranded yet again as desalting), Newsom understands a fundamental fact: When the Colorado Aqueduct reduces its annual contribution to the water supply of Southern California from over 1.0 million acre feet to zero, and the Delta pumps stop sending additional millions of acre feet of water down the California Aqueduct, in the midst of a drought that lasts not three years, but twenty years, all the water conservation in the world will not slake the thirst of Southern Californians.

Water conservation, when pushed to the limit, does more harm than good. It raises the price of water, since the entire operational infrastructure delivering water has a relatively fixed overhead that must be paid even when quantities delivered are reduced. It results in rationing, with consequences that are glibly dismissed. When lawns and trees die, more than “culture” is lost. Life is lost. Trees and lawns are life. They filter and cool the air, they nourish the human spirit. And every place you see a lawn, what you are really seeing is water resiliency. Surplus in the water system is healthy. Bend every fraction of surplus out of the equation, and when the prolonged drought comes, the system breaks.

Unfortunately, when it comes to water, Newsom hasn’t done nearly enough. California’s farmers and inland cities, especially in the San Joaquin Valley, are already experiencing extraordinary hardship. One more dry winter, and every Californian will endure similar trauma. Water politics are complicated, and every water engineering solution generates controversy, but the cause of this predicament is simple: California hasn’t invested in increasing the supply of water to cities and farms in over 30 years.

Water is running against Newsom in the upcoming recall election, and water is winning. When state regulators recently shut down access to water for every farmer that isn’t a mega corporation with mega wells and mega lobbyists, where was Newsom? When back in 2014 the California Water Commission was authorized via Prop. 1  to spend billions to increase California’s water supply, and then, eight years later, has built almost nothing, where was Newsom?

Why won’t Newsom call an emergency conference of legislators and stakeholders, put them in a room, and tell them: “Conservation is not enough. We’re not a communist dictatorship and we’re not a banana republic. Determine what investments in new infrastructure will produce another five million acre feet of water per year for our farmers and our cities, and don’t leave until you’ve agreed on the plan.”

If water is one of Newsom’s implacable opponents this year, imagine how much more formidable an opponent water will be next year. If Newsom survives the recall coming up next month, he’ll face another recall of sorts when he runs for reelection in November 2022. He’d better hope that it rains and it pours between now and then.

It’s fire, however, that is Newsom’s even bigger opponent this year, as he fights for his political survival. And on this, Newsom has nothing to show. After the devastating fires of 2020, Newsom’s reaction was to mandate more sales of electric cars. This is idiotic posturing, not because electric cars don’t have a place in our automotive future, but because they have nothing to do with the fires currently raging through California’s forests.

California’s fires are obviously worsened in their intensity by drought conditions. But the primary cause of these fires is a century of fire suppression, combined with a perfect storm of counterproductive policies: California’s timber industry is one quarter the size it was just 30 years ago, and a punitive, time consuming, bewildering, expensive permit process prevents effective efforts at forest thinning and controlled burns. California’s forests are dangerously overgrown. That’s why the trees are dying. That’s why we’re having superfires. Period. Fact. Any other explanation is denial and deflection.

Why hasn’t Newsom challenged the firefighters union, whose leadership had the audacity to drag their members into marching with the United Teachers of Los Angeles in January 2019, to instead use its political clout to reform forest management in California? Why didn’t Newsom expand the inmate firefighter programs, instead of cutting them back?

Newsom needs to do the right thing, regardless of whether or not any particular special interest benefits or is harmed by his actions. Here again, Newsom could call an emergency conference of legislators and stakeholders, put them in a room, and tell them: “We used to manage our forests, but over the past 30 years we’ve done everything wrong. So figure out how to reengage the timber and biomass industries to thin the forests, figure out how to get drug addicts and petty thieves off the streets and back onto the fire lines, make it easier for property owners to thin their land and do controlled burns, and don’t leave until you’ve agreed on the plan.”

That would be leadership. Get busy, Governor Newsom. You would not only save your political career. You’d save California. Water, and Fire, would be your allies instead of your enemies.

This article originally appeared on the website of the California Globe.

 *   *   *

 

Fixing California – Part Seven, Forest Management

/by

Nobody knew how the fire started. It took hold in the dry chaparral and grasslands and quickly spread up the sides of the canyon. Propelled by winds gusting over 40 miles per hour and extremely dry air (humidity below 25 percent), the fire spread over the ridge and into the town below. Overwhelmed firefighters could not contain the blaze as it swept through the streets, immolating homes by the hundreds. Even brick homes with slate roofs were not spared. Before it finally was brought under control, 640 structures including 584 homes had been reduced to ashes. Over 4,000 people were left homeless.

Does this sound like the “new normal?” Maybe so, but this description is of the Berkeley fire of 1923. In its time, with barely 4 million people living in California, the Berkeley fire was a catastrophe on par with the fires we see today.

When evaluating what has happened nearly a century since the Berkeley fire, two stories emerge. The story coming from California’s politicians emphasizes climate change. The other story, which comes from professional foresters, stresses how different forest management practices might have made many of the recent fires far less severe—and perhaps avoided entirely.

Specifically, California’s misguided forest management practices included several decades of successful fire suppression, combined with a failure to remove all the undergrowth that results when natural fires aren’t allowed to burn.

Back in 1923, tactics to suppress forest fires were in their infancy. But techniques and technologies improved apace with firefighting budgets. By the second half of the 20th century, an army of firefighters could cope very effectively with California’s wildfires. The result is excessive undergrowth, which not only creates fuel for catastrophic and unmanageable superfires, but competes with mature trees for the sunlight, water, and soil nutrients needed for healthy growth.

This is the real reason why California’s forests are not only tinderboxes but are also filled with dying trees. Now Californians confront nearly 20 million acres of overgrown forests.

By the time you read this, Californians may be coping with yet another round of superfires. During the 2020 fire season, an estimated 4.2 million acres burned, the most since recordkeeping began. To put this into perspective, this is more than 6,500 square miles, an area nearly the size of the State of New Jersey.

To gauge the extent of the devastation, relying on the square miles of the containment areas may be somewhat misleading. Drive up Highway 70 in the Feather River Canyon today and note that while all of it was designated as burned, the destruction was uneven, with some hillsides left intact while others were scorched.

But there is no question that some of the most devastating fires in modern history have hit California in recent years, killing hundreds, displacing thousands, and costing billions.

Clearly, when the state faces multi-year droughts, the summer fire risk gets progressively worse. In such conditions, a few lightning strikes can spark a conflagration. But during the 2020 fire season, why is it that the Creek Fire consumed nearly 400,000 acres and displaced over 12,000 people, but spared the forests surrounding Shaver Lake? What happened?

It wasn’t luck. The forests around Shaver Lake had been carefully managed for decades. The undergrowth was regularly thinned, either mechanically or through controlled burns, and mature trees were selectively logged. These practices nurtured an ecosystem that was, and remains, healthier and more diverse than those found even in forests that remain untouched by fires. Why aren’t all of California’s forests managed the way Shaver Lake is managed?

Negligence, not Climate Change, Causes Superfires

In 2019, President Trump tweeted, “The Governor of California, @GavinNewsom, has done a terrible job of forest management.” Newsom tweeted back, “You don’t believe in climate change. You are excused from this conversation.”

Meanwhile, former California Governor Jerry Brown addressed Congress in October 2019, saying, “California’s burning while the deniers make a joke out of the standards that protect us all. The blood is on your soul here and I hope you wake up, because this is not politics, this is life, this is morality. You’ve got to get with it—or get out of the way.”

Despite California’s current and former governors both being ardent members of the catastrophe chorus, climate change is not the primary cause of California’s recent superfires. Newsom, Brown, other extreme environmentalists, and the policies they demanded, are the reason California’s wildlands are going up in flames. They are the ones who need to be excused from the conversation. They are the ones who need to get out of the way. They are the ones who are in denial.

For about 20 million years, California’s forests endured countless droughts, some lasting over a century. Natural fires, started by lightning and very frequent in the Sierras, were essential to keep forest ecosystems healthy. In Yosemite, for example, meadows used to cover most of the valley floor, because while forests constantly encroached, fires would periodically wipe them out, allowing the meadows to return. Across millennia, fire-driven successions of this sort played out in cycles throughout California’s ecosystems.

Also for the last 20 million years or so, climate change has been the norm. To put this century’s warming into some sort of context, Giant Sequoias once grew on the shores of Mono Lake. For at least the past few centuries, forest ecosystems have been marching into higher latitudes because of gradual warming. In the Sierra Foothills, oaks have invaded pine habitat, and pine, in-turn, have invaded the higher elevation stands of fir. Today, it is mismanagement, not climate change, that is the primary threat to California’s forests.

This can be corrected.

In a speech before Congress in September, Representative Tom McClintock (R-Calif.) summarized the series of policy mistakes that are destroying California’s forests. McClintock’s sprawling 4th congressional district covers 12,800 square miles, and encompasses most of the Northern Sierra Nevada mountain range. His constituency bears the brunt of the misguided green tyranny emanating from Washington, D.C. and Sacramento.

“Excess timber comes out of the forest in only two ways,” McClintock said. “It is either carried out or it burns out. For most of the 20th Century, we carried it out. It’s called ‘logging.’ Every year, U.S. Forest Service foresters would mark off excess timber and then we auctioned it off to lumber companies who paid us to remove it, funding both local communities and the forest service. We auctioned grazing contracts on our grasslands. The result: healthy forests, fewer fires and a thriving economy. But beginning in the 1970s, we began imposing environmental laws that have made the management of our lands all but impossible. Draconian restrictions on logging, grazing, prescribed burns and herbicide use on public lands have made modern land management endlessly time-consuming and ultimately cost-prohibitive. A single tree thinning plan typically takes four years and more than 800 pages of analysis. The costs of this process exceed the value of timber—turning land maintenance from a revenue-generating activity to a revenue-consuming one.”

When it comes to carrying out timber, California used to do a pretty good job. In the 1950s the average timber harvest in California was around 6.0 billion board feet per year. The precipitous drop in harvest volume came in the 1990s. The industry started that decade taking out not quite 5 billion board feet, and by 2000 the annual harvest had dropped to just over 2 billion board feet. Today, only about 1.5 billion board feet per year come out of California’s forests as harvested timber.

Expand the Timber Industry

What McClintock describes as a working balance up until the 1990s needs to be restored. In order to achieve a sustainable balance between natural growth and timber removals, California’s timber industry needs to triple in size. If federal legislation were to guarantee a long-term right for timber companies to harvest trees on federal land, investment would follow.

Today only 29 sawmills remain in California, along with eight sawmills that are still standing but inactive. In addition, there are 112 sites in California where sawmills once operated. In most cases, these vacant sites of former mills are located in ideal areas for rebuilding mills and resuming operations.

The economics of reviving California’s timber industry are compelling. A modern sawmill with a capacity of 100 million board feet per year requires an investment of $100 million. Operating at a profit, it would create 640 full-time jobs. Constructing 30 of these sawmills would create roughly 20,000 jobs in direct employment of loggers, haulers, and mill workers, along with thousands of additional jobs in the communities where they are located.

The ecological impact of logging again in California’s state and federal forests will not become the catastrophe that environmentalists and regulators once used as the pretext to all but destroy that industry. Especially now, with decades of accumulated experience, logging does more good than harm to forest ecosystems. There is ample evidence to prove it.

In forests managed by Sierra Pacific, for example, owl counts are higher than in California’s federally managed forests. Even clear-cutting, because it is done on a 60- to 100-year cycle, does more good than harm to the forests. By converting one or two percent of the forest back into meadow each year, areas are opened up where it is easier for owls to hunt prey. Also, during a clear cut, the needles and branches are stripped off the trees and left to rejuvenate the soil. The runoff is managed as well, via contour tilling which follows the topography of the hillsides. Rain percolates into the furrows, which is also where the replacement trees are planted.

How the Forests Surrounding Shaver Lake Were Saved

While clear-cutting will not destroy most ecosystems, since it is only performed on one to two percent of the land in any given year, there are other types of logging that can be used in areas deemed more ecologically sensitive. Southern California Edison owns 20,000 acres of forest around Shaver Lake in Southern California where they practice what is known as total ecosystem management.

Earlier this year, when the Creek Fire burned an almost unthinkable 550 square miles in Southern California, the 30 square mile island of SCE managed forest around Shaver Lake was unscathed. This is because for decades, SCE has been engaged in timber operations they define as “uneven age management, single-tree selection,” whereby the trees to be harvested are individually designated in advance, in what remains a profitable logging enterprise. Controlled burns are also an essential part of SCE’s total ecosystem management, but these burns are only safe when the areas to be burned are well-managed with logging and thinning.

The practice of uneven age management could be used in riparian canyons, or in areas where valuable stands of old-growth trees merit preservation. The alternative, a policy of hands-off preservation, has been disastrous. Tree density in the Sierra Nevada is currently around 300 per acre, whereas historically, a healthy forest would only have had around 60 trees per acre. Clearly, this number varies depending on forest type, altitude, and other factors, but overall, California’s forests, especially on federal lands, contain about five times the normal tree density. The result is trees that cannot compete for adequate moisture and nutrients, far less rain percolating into springs and aquifers, disease and infestation of the weakened trees, and fire.

This alternative—manage the forest or suffer fires that destroy the forest entirely—cannot be emphasized enough. In the Feather River Canyon, along with many other canyons along the Sierra Nevada, the east-west topography turned them into wind tunnels that drove fires rapidly up and down the watershed. Yet these riparian areas have been among the most fiercely defended against any logging, which made those fires all the worse. The choice going forward should not be difficult. Logging and forest thinning cannot possibly harm a watershed as much as parched forests burning down to the soil, wiping out everything.

Expand the Biomass Power Industry

If removing trees with timber operations is essential to return California’s forests to a sustainable, lower density of trees per acre, mechanical removal of shrub and undergrowth is an essential corollary, especially in areas that are not clear cut. Fortunately, California has already developed the infrastructure to do this. In fact, California’s biomass industry used to be bigger than it is today, and can be quickly expanded.

Today there are 22 active biomass power plants in California, generating just over a half-gigawatt of continuous electric power. That’s one percent of California’s electricity draw at peak demand; not a lot, but enough to matter. Mostly built in the 1980s and ’90s, at peak, there were 60 biomass power plants in California, but with the advent of cheaper natural gas and cheaper solar power, most of them were shut down. These clean-burning plants should be reopened to use forest trimmings, as well as agricultural waste and urban waste as fuel.

At a fully amortized wholesale cost estimated somewhere between 12 cents and 14 cents per kilowatt-hour, biomass power plants cannot compete with most other forms of energy. But this price is not so far out of reach that it could not be subsidized using funds currently allocated to other forms of renewables, infrastructure, or climate change mitigation. Moreover, this kilowatt-hour price necessarily includes the labor-intensive task of going into the forests and extracting the biomass, creating thousands of good-paying jobs. The numbers could work.

If, for example, biomass power capacity in California were roughly doubled to one gigawatt of continuous output, a six cents per kilowatt-hour subsidy would cost about $500 million per year. This must be compared to the annual cost of wildfires in California, which easily exceeds a billion per year. It also must be compared to the amount of money being thrown around on projects far less urgent than rescuing California’s forest ecosystems, such as the California High Speed Rail project, which has already consumed billions. And if this entire subsidy of $500 million per year were spread into the utility bills of all Californians, it would only amount to about a 1.5 percent increase.

Further in support of this economic analysis is the fact that much of the kilowatt-hour price for biomass electricity is amortization of the initial construction cost of the generating plant. If, as appears likely, Americans endure another multi-year bout with broad-based inflation, that fixed amortization cost will become less significant as all electricity rates rise with inflation. That, in turn, would make biomass electricity more competitive, reducing the required subsidy.

Pressure the Feds

About half of California’s forests lie on federal land. Does that mean nothing can be done? Far from it. With Democrats from California presiding over the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives, and a sitting president who owes his position to California-based tech billionaires and tech corporations, whatever California really wants from the federal government, California is going to get.

Here’s what they should be asking for:

Revise the EPA’s “no action” restrictions, usually based on the “single-species management” practice, have led to more than half of California’s national forests being off-limits to tree thinning, brush removal, or any other sort of active management.

Change the U.S. Forest Service guidelines which only permit active forest management, even in the areas that are not off-limits, for as little as six weeks per year. While restrictions on when and where forests can be thinned may have sound ecological justifications in some ways, they are making it impossible to thin the forests. The ecological cost/benefits need to be reassessed. To be effective, thinning operations need to be allowed to run for several months each year, instead of several weeks each year.

The EPA needs to streamline the NEPA (National Environmental Policy Act) application process so it is less expensive and time-consuming for qualified companies to get permits to extract timber from federal lands. They can also grant waivers to allow thinning projects to bypass NEPA, or at the least, broaden the allowable exemptions.

The federal government can accelerate granting of long-term stewardship contracts whereby qualified companies acquire a minimum 20-year right to extract wood products from federal lands. This would guarantee a steady supply of wood products which, in turn, would make new investment viable in logging equipment, mills, and biomass energy facilities.

Rules and conditions governing timber exports need revision. The export of raw logs from federal lands in the Western United States is currently prohibited. Lifting this prohibition would help because sawmill capacity is not capable of handling the increase in volume. Just with the new thinning programs already in place, logs and undergrowth are being burned or put in landfills.

As it is, California imports around 80 percent of the cut lumber used in its construction industry or sold through retailers to consumers. If there was an assurance of wood supply—which the national forests can certainly offer—investment would be made in expanding mill capacity. Suddenly the money that is being sent to Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia to purchase their cut timber would stay here in California, employing thousands of workers in the mills.

The state or federal government can set up revolving loan funds for investors to build sawmills, as well as biomass energy facilities, as well as chippers and other equipment, that would allow the industry to quickly ramp up operations and capacity.

Will Politicians Do the Right Thing?

The logic of these steps seems impeccable. Thin the forests. Restore them to ecological health. Adopt time-tested modern logging practices and revive the timber industry. Build biomass power plants on the perimeter of the forests. Reissue grazing permits for additional cost-effective brush thinning. Prevent ridiculous, costly, horrific, tragic wildfires. Help the economy.

But these steps have been known for decades, and nothing has been done. Every time policymakers were close to a consensus on forest thinning, government bureaucrats obstructed the process and the environmentalists sued to stop the process. And they won. Time and time again. And now we have this: millions of acres of scorched earth, air so foul that people couldn’t leave their homes for weeks, and wildlife habitat that in some cases may never recover.

California’s forest management policies have decimated the state’s timber industry, neglected its biomass industry, rejected the cattle industry, turned millions of acres of forest into scorched earth, and are systematically turning mountain communities into ghost towns.

If the goal was to have a healthy forest ecosystem, that was violated, as these forests burned to the ground and what remains is dying. If the goal was to do anything in the name of fighting climate change and its impact on the forests and do it with urgency, that too was violated, because everything they did was wrong. Even now, instead of urgent and far-reaching changes to forest management policies, we get more electric car mandates. That was the urgent response to the superfires of 2020.

California’s ruling elites, starting with Gavin Newsom among the politicians, and Ramon Cruz, the Sierra Club’s new president, may prove they care about the environment by sitting down with representatives from California’s timber, biomass energy, and cattle industries, along with federal regulators, and come up with a plan. They might apply to this plan the same scope and urgency with which they so cavalierly transform our entire energy and transportation industries, but perhaps with more immediate practical benefits both to people and ecosystems.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

 *   *   *

The Unelected Tyrants Who Burned Down California

/by

If this seems like an unfair title, it isn’t, though some of these tyrants were appointed by elected politicians. And all of these tyrants rely on laws that were passed by elected politicians. But while there is plenty of blame to go around, tyranny is what Californians have endured. A tyrannical system is entirely to blame for apocalyptic fires that are wiping out California’s forests, fouling the air, and killing everything in their path.

So who are these unelected tyrants?

We can start with federal and state bureaucrats. Principal among them are the careerist ideologues who dominate the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, abetted by the fanatics who run California’s Air Resources Board, along with dozens of other federal and state agencies. Joining them outside of government to assist in the incineration of California’s precious ecosystems are the lobbyists and litigants representing powerful environmentalist nonprofits such as the Sierra Club and the Center for Biological Diversity.

So numerous they escape individual accountability, these tyrants collectively have made it nearly impossible to engage in logging, forest thinning, or controlled burns. The policies, regulations, and judgments these tyrants relentlessly advocate and ruthlessly enforce are the reason California’s fires in recent years have been cataclysmic.

As a consequence, after more than a century of increasingly effective suppression of natural fires, California’s forests are now overgrown tinderboxes. They’re either going to get cleared out mechanically, or they’re going to burn like hell.

Opposing this tyranny does not signify a lack of concern for our natural environment, even though the tyrants routinely make the accusation. If you’ve ever been stirred by the sight of a California condor soaring above the wave-battered cliffs of Big Sur, you should thank an environmentalist. Most Californians agree that the condor, along with other species, was worth saving. But if the entire Ventana Wilderness is incinerated, condor habitat no longer exists. Similarly, if the entire Feather River watershed is reduced to cinder, hundreds of square miles of owl habitat will no longer exist.

By now, one may hope, most honest environmentalists know that when it comes to forest management, they’ve blown it. To paraphrase an old adage, they burned down the forest to save the trees. Maybe now they’ll help push for genuine, far-reaching, and swift reform. Then again, a lot of power and money can be had in perpetuating conflict. And recent actions by California Governor Gavin Newsom offer zero indication that help could be forthcoming from politicians. Newsom’s reaction to the ongoing inferno in California is to ban gasoline-powered cars, and declare that he has “no more patience for climate deniers.”

Let’s settle the climate “denier” issue straight away. If California’s summers are getting hotter, dryer, and lasting longer, then everything these unelected tyrants have been doing has been even more misguided, not less. And comprehensive regulatory reform and relief to start properly managing California’s forests is more urgently needed, not less.

So enough about the climate. Acknowledging climate change, regardless of its cause or trajectory, makes the case for forest management reform stronger, not weaker.

It is a great irony that alarm over climate change is used to justify endless proposals that call for urgent and unprecedented actions across all aspects of public policy, yet it cannot stimulate a swift and effective response to California’s burning forests. So what steps can be taken to quickly mitigate the damage of these catastrophic fires? And what ongoing steps can be taken to prevent them in the future?

In preparing this report, expert opinions were solicited from leaders in the timber, cattle, and biomass industries, professional foresters, and political representatives. All of them were in general agreement on the steps to be summarized here. None of them wanted to be quoted directly. The ire of the tyrants is real, and if you’re in these businesses, the power they wield is to be feared.

How to Revive California’s Forests

For about 20 million years, California’s forests endured countless droughts, some lasting centuries. Natural fires, started by lightning and very frequent in the Sierras, were essential to keep forest ecosystems healthy. In Yosemite, for example, meadows used to cover most of the valley floor, because while forests constantly encroached, periodic fires would wipe them out, allowing the meadows to return. Across millennia, fire-driven successions of this sort played out in cycles throughout California’s ecosystems.

Also for the last 20 million years or so, climate change has been the norm. To put this century’s warming into some sort of context, Giant Sequoias once grew on the shores of Mono Lake. For at least the past few centuries, forest ecosystems have been marching into higher latitudes. In the Sierra Foothills, the oaks have invaded the pine habitat, and the pine, in turn, has invaded the higher elevation stands of fir.

Today, it is mismanagement, not climate change, that is the primary threat to California’s forests.

In a speech before the U.S. Congress last September, Republican Tom McClintock summarized the series of mistakes that are destroying California’s forests. McClintock’s sprawling 4th Congressional District covers 12,800 square miles, and encompasses most of the Northern Sierra Nevada mountain range. His constituency bears the brunt of the misguided green tyranny emanating from Washington, D.C. and Sacramento. Here’s some of what McClintock said:

“Excess timber comes out of the forest in only two ways – it is either carried out or it burns out. For most of the 20th Century, we carried it out. It’s called ‘logging.’ Every year, US Forest Service foresters would mark off excess timber and then we auctioned it off to lumber companies who paid us to remove it, funding both local communities and the forest service. We auctioned grazing contracts on our grasslands. The result: healthy forests, fewer fires and a thriving economy. But beginning in the 1970’s, we began imposing environmental laws that have made the management of our lands all but impossible. Draconian restrictions on logging, grazing, prescribed burns and herbicide use on public lands have made modern land management endlessly time consuming and ultimately cost prohibitive. A single tree thinning plan typically takes four years and more than 800 pages of analysis. The costs of this process exceed the value of timber – turning land maintenance from a revenue-generating activity to a revenue-consuming one.”

When it comes to carrying out timber, California used to do a pretty good job. In the 1950s the average timber harvest in California was around 6.0 billion board feet per year. The precipitous drop in harvest volume came in the 1990s. The industry started that decade taking out not quite 5.0 billion board feet, and by 2000 the annual harvest had dropped to just over 2.0 billion board feet. Today, only about 1.5 billion board feet per year come out of California’s forests as harvested timber.

Reviving California’s Timber Industry

What Congressman McClintock describes as a working balance up until the 1990s needs to be restored. In order to achieve a sustainable balance between natural growth and timber removals, California’s timber industry needs to triple in size. If federal legislation were to guarantee a long-term right for timber companies to harvest trees on federal land, investment would follow.

The following map shows the locations of California’s 29 remaining sawmills, along with the locations of eight more that are inactive. In addition, there are 112 sites in California where sawmills once operated. In most cases, these vacant sites of former mills are located in ideal areas to rebuild a mill and resume operations. 

The economics of reviving California’s timber industry are compelling. A modern sawmill with a capacity of 100 million board feet per year requires an investment of $100 million. Operating at a profit, it would create 640 full-time jobs. Constructing 30 of these sawmills would create roughly 20,000 jobs in direct employment of loggers, haulers, and mill workers, along with thousands of additional jobs in the communities where they are located.

The ecological impact of logging again in California’s state and federal forests will not become the catastrophe the environmentalists and regulators have suggested as their pretext to destroy the logging industry. Especially now, with decades of accumulated experience, we know that logging does more good than harm to forest ecosystems. There is evidence to prove this.

In forests managed by Sierra Pacific, for example, owl counts are higher than in California’s federally managed forests. Even clear-cutting, because it is done on a 60 to 100-year cycle, does more good than harm to the forests. By converting one or two percent of the forest back into meadow each year, areas are opened up where it is easier for owls to hunt prey. Also, during a clear cut, the needles and branches are stripped off the trees and left to rejuvenate the soil. The runoff is managed as well, via contour tilling which follows the topography of the hillsides. Rain percolates into the furrows, which is also where the replacement trees are planted.

While clear-cutting would not destroy most ecosystems, since it is only performed on one to two percent of the land in any given year, there are other types of logging that can be used in areas deemed more ecologically sensitive. Southern California Edison owns 20,000 acres of forest around Shaver Lake in Southern California where the utility practices what is called total ecosystem management.

When the Creek Fire burned, earlier this year, an almost unthinkable 550 square miles in Southern California, the 30 square-mile island of SCE-managed forest around Shaver Lake was unscathed. The reason is that for decades, Edison has been engaged in timber operations the company defines as “uneven age management, single-tree selection,” whereby the trees to be harvested are individually designated in advance, in what remains a profitable logging enterprise. Controlled burns are also an essential part of SCE’s total ecosystem management, but these burns are only safe when the areas to be burned are caught up on logging and thinning.

The practice of uneven age management could be utilized in riparian canyons, or in areas where valuable stands of old-growth merit preservation. The alternative, a policy of hands-off preservation, has been disastrous. Tree density in the Sierra Nevada is currently around 300 per acre, whereas historically, a healthy forest would only have had around 60 trees per acre. Clearly this number varies depending on forest type, altitude, and other factors. Overall, however, California’s forests, especially on federal lands, contain about five times the normal tree density. The result is trees that cannot compete for adequate moisture and nutrients, much less rain percolating into springs and aquifers, disease and infestation of the weakened trees, and fire.

The choice before us—thin the overgrown forests or suffer fires that destroy the forests entirely—cannot be emphasized enough. In the Feather River Canyon, along with many other canyons along the Sierra Nevada, the east-west topography turned them into wind tunnels that drove fires rapidly up and down the watershed. Yet these riparian areas have been among the most fiercely defended against any logging, which made those fires all the worse. The choice going forward should not be difficult. Logging and forest thinning cannot possibly harm a watershed as much as parched forests burning down to the soil, wiping out everything.

Growing California’s Biomass Power Industry

If removing trees with timber operations is essential to return California’s to a sustainable, lower density of trees per acre, mechanical removal of shrub and undergrowth is an essential corollary, especially in areas that are not clear cut. Fortunately, California has already developed the infrastructure to do this. In fact, California’s biomass industry used to be bigger than it is today, and can be quickly expanded.

The next map shows the locations of 22 active biomass power plants in California, generating just over a half-gigawatt of continuous electric power. That’s one percent of California’s electricity draw at peak demand; not a lot, but enough to matter. Also shown on the map are the locations (blue highlighted) of idle biomass plants. Mostly developed in the 1980s and ’90s, at peak there were 60 biomass power plants in California, but with the advent of cheaper natural gas and cheaper solar power, most of them were shut down.

At a fully amortized wholesale cost estimated somewhere between 12 cents and 14 cents per kilowatt-hour, biomass power plants cannot compete with most other forms of energy. But this price is not so far out of reach that it could not be subsidized using funds currently being allocated to other forms of renewables infrastructure or climate change mitigation. The numbers could work.

If, for example, biomass power capacity in California were roughly doubled to 1.0 gigawatt of continuous output, a six cents per kilowatt-hour subsidy would cost about $500 million per year. This must be compared to the annual cost of wildfires, which easily exceeds a billion per year. It also must be compared to the amount of money being thrown around on projects far less urgent than rescuing California’s forest ecosystems, such as the California High Speed Rail project, which has already consumed billions. And if this entire subsidy of $500M per year were spread into the utility bills of all Californians, it would only amount to about a 1.5 percent increase.

Will the Unelected Tyrants Relent? Will Politicians Do the Right Thing?

The logic of these steps seems impeccable. Thin the forests. Restore them to ecological health. Adopt time-tested modern logging practices and revive the timber industry. Build biomass power plants on the perimeter of the forests. Prevent ridiculous, costly, horrific, tragic wildfires. Help the economy.

But these steps have been known for decades, and yet nothing has been done. Every time policymakers were close to a consensus on forest thinning, government bureaucrats obstructed the process and environmentalists sued to stop the process. And they won. Time and time again. And now we have this: millions of acres of scorched earth, air so foul that people couldn’t leave their homes for weeks, and wildlife habitat that in some cases likely will never recover. If this failure in policy doesn’t leave Californians livid, nothing will.

The forest management policies currently adopted in California have not only ruined the environment they were designed to supposedly protect. They have destroyed California’s timber industry, neglected its biomass industry, and are systematically turning mountain communities into ghost towns. This is tyranny, and perhaps even worse—it is tyranny that lacks either benevolence or wisdom.

If the goal was to have a healthy forest ecosystem, that was violated, as these forests burned to the ground and most of the remaining tracts of unburned forest are overgrown and dying. If the goal was to do anything in the name of fighting climate change and its impact on the forests, and do it with urgency, that too was violated, because everything they did was wrong. Even now, instead of urgent and far-reaching changes to forest management policies, we get more electric car mandates. That was the urgent response.

So California’s ruling elites, starting with Gavin Newsom among the politicians, and Ramon Cruz, the Sierra Club’s new president, can prove they care about the environment by sitting down with representatives from California’s timber industry, along with the unelected state and federal regulators to devise a plan.

Or they can continue to bloviate about “climate change,” unconcerned that climate change only makes it more urgent that California revive its timber and biomass industries.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

 *   *   *

Firefighters Union Backs Prop. 15 Instead of Forestry Reform

/by

Thousands of firefighters continue to battle blazes across California. In Orange County, two firefighters are in critical condition after suffering major injuries battling the Silverado Fire. Every year around this time, firefighters risk their lives, and some of them lose their lives, protecting the rest of us from these catastrophic fires.

Deep respect for what firefighters do, however, cannot excuse us of our obligation to criticize the political agenda of the firefighters union. Moreover, it is likely that if the firefighter union leadership redirected their political priorities, it would save lives and property. It would free up firefighting resources, allowing them to be concentrated in remaining trouble spots.

In this fraught political season, California’s firefighters union has decided to endorse Prop. 15, the controversial “split roll” ballot initiative. If enacted, Prop. 15 will require business properties to be reassessed at market rates. If passed, the increased tax revenue is estimated at between $6.5 billion and $11.5 billion per year.

It isn’t necessary to debate the pros and cons of Prop. 15 here. Nor is it necessary to recap why it is the mission of every public sector union in California to increase taxes, despite the fact that Californians already pay the highest overall taxes in the United States.

Most everyone agrees that if you are a victim of a fire, or are injured or killed fighting a fire, no amount of monetary compensation is adequate. But that perspective, which reasonable people acknowledge, has a corollary: If no amount of compensation is adequate, the limits of compensation should be governed by what is affordable.

Here, using 2019 data provided by the California State Controller, is what full time firefighters earn in pay and benefits. These numbers represent the average, the median numbers are even higher. And except in the data for CalFire pensions, these numbers do not include the individual cost of reducing unfunded pension liabilities, or prefunding retirement health benefits. Therefore these averages understate the true cost to taxpayers to pay California’s firefighters.

Notwithstanding the hypocritical nonsense about “closing corporate loopholes” and making “making rich corporations pay their fair share,” one widely broadcast television ad promoting Prop. 15 has a firefighter saying “to fight these fires, we need funding, plain and simple.”

That’s true, of course. And it will always be true, no matter how much money is forthcoming. Because public safety resources cannot possibly be permanently scaled to adequately address truly catastrophic wildfires. Instead, more effective methods of prevention – not just fire suppression – have to be reintroduced.

The Firefighters Union Needs to Stand Up to the Environmentalist Lobby

Debating whether or not full time firefighters should earn well over $200,000 per year, much less reducing it somewhat, may be a futile exercise. The firefighters union, like all public sector unions, exercises political control through campaign contributions. Politicians who are willing to tell a firefighter they make too much money are few and far between. As for convincing firefighters to quit their unions and thus defund them? Yeah, right. Quit a union that is the sole reason you’re making nearly a quarter million per year? Fat chance.

There’s another path, difficult to articulate because it might be interpreted as tacit acceptance of the legitimacy of public sector unions. But that’s a false choice. Public sector unions are an abomination. They have corrupted democracy, allowing government employees to run the government. They should be illegal and disbanded. Voluntary associations of government employees that have no collective bargaining power would be more than adequate to represent the interests of public sector workers. Laws governing all employees, public and private, would guarantee their rights as workers.

In the meantime, while we await a miracle, it still might be productive to suggest the firefighters union use some of their considerable influence to advocate something besides merely raising taxes and increasing their pay and benefits. And precedents for this have been set. In early 2019, the firefighters union marched with the United Teachers of Los Angeles, in a show of leftist solidarity that has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with fighting fires.

Firefighters belonging to unions ought to question these political priorities. Because the Californian Left may wield nearly all political power in California, but they do so with the consent of public sector unions. And this monolithic Left includes the environmentalist lobby that has all but destroyed the timber industry in California. And the timber industry, properly regulated, could profitably thin California’s conifer forests.

In 1950, nearly 6 billion board feet of timber was harvested out of California’s forests. In 2020, that harvest is down to 1.5 billion board feet. If California’s politicians were committed to lobbying and legislating for new state and federal laws that brought California’s timber industry back up to an annual harvest of 4 billion board feet, much of the super fires that have devastated towns, wildlife, watersheds, and cost lives, would become a thing of the past.

This is proven by the example of Shaver Lake, where 20,000 acres of forest managed by Southern California Edison stayed intact, even as the Creek Fire surrounded and destroyed everything around it. Logging, thinning, and controlled burns (only possible after logging and thinning), are the reason those trees survived. By restoring a timber industry in California, much of the resources necessary to fight fires in conifer forests could be redirected towards controlling fires in chaparral.

Forestry reform has many productive aspects. Along with expanding the timber industry, reintroduce cattle grazing in appropriate areas. Expand California’s network of biomass energy facilities, something that could fund forest and chaparral thinning with ratepayer funded subsidies that are often less than what other forms of renewable energy are costing consumers. But all of this requires standing up to an environmentalist lobby that thrives and profits off conflict rather than solutions.

Everyone is grateful to firefighters for the work they do. But their union needs to decide. Along with fighting for more pay and benefits for their members, are they going to remain an ancillary wing of California’s leftist ruling class? Or will they pick one fight where they defy the conventional wisdom, and perhaps provide the tipping point to change it?

Will California’s firefighting unions fight to reform California’s forest management laws and regulations? That would take almost as much courage as fighting forest fires. And it would help everyone and everything – people, trees, wildlife, the economy, and the tax base.

This article originally appeared on the website California Globe.

 *   *   *