Climate change crowd willfully ignorant when it comes to forest management to prevent fires

Washington Times:

Here in the town dubbed the “gateway to the Sierras,” the haze from the Ferguson Fire is fading as Yosemite National Park prepares to reopen, but the debate over how to stop wildfires from razing the state again next year continues to smolder.

California’s catastrophic wildfire season has illuminated the yearslong stalemate between those who want to cut back the overgrown, beetle-infested national forests and environmentalists who have axed efforts to fell more trees, blaming the destructive fires on climate change.

Now the Trump administration is moving to break the logjam. As he tours one California fire site after another this summer, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has pressed for more active forest management while throwing cold water on the climate-first approach.

“I’ve heard the climate change argument back and forth,” Mr. Zinke told KCRA3 in Sacramento on Sunday. “This has nothing to do with climate change. This has to do with active forest management.”

His comments fueled the ire of the environmental movement, including the Center for Western Priorities, which accused him of “either being willfully ignorant or purposely deceptive.”

“Any politician ignoring the role a warming climate plays in record-setting wildfire seasons loses all credibility as an honest broker,” said center deputy director Greg Zimmerman. “Instead, Zinke is in California using an ongoing natural disaster to push an unpopular political agenda.”

Elsewhere, Mr. Zinke has insisted that no matter what your take on global warming, the light-touch approach to thinning the national forests is doing more harm than good.

Wildfires have devastated 695,313 acres in California this year. The Mendecino Complex Fire, the largest in state history and one of nine major blazes still roiling the state, was 70 percent contained Monday after having burned 331,339 acres, according to the National Interagency Fire Center.

In West Redding, where the massive Carr Fire was 61 percent contained Monday after having burned 201,680 acres, Mr. Zinke said that “we’re going to actively manage our forests, reduce the fuel load, and make sure that when we do replant, we replant diversity of species.”

“The president’s right. This is an example of, we have to actively manage our forests,” the interior secretary said in video from The Sacramento Bee. “I’ve heard the argument of climate change. It doesn’t matter whether you believe or don’t believe in climate change. What is important is that we manage our forests.”

In December, the U.S. Forest Service announced that California had set a record with 129 million dead trees on 8.9 million acres, the result of a five-year drought and beetle-kill, but that its tree morality task force had removed only about 1 million.

Meanwhile, the logging industry has continued its free fall, with timber harvesting dropping by 80 percent in the past 40 years, as projects in the national forests are killed or delayed by “frivolous litigation from radical environmentalists who would rather see forests and communities burn than see a logger in the woods,” as Mr. Zinke put it in a Thursday op-ed.
...

The environmentalists are just wrong.  The dead trees and the underbrush act as an accelerant to fires which causes them to quickly spread and fuel more and larger fires.  Clearing the underbrush and the dead trees should be a top priority.  The dead trees could be used by the lumber industry that would lower construction cost and increase production of furniture making.  That means the Forest Service would have industry help in the forest management.