fire
Blue Skies and Wildfire in California
An opinion piece in the NY Times reveals a disconnect between history and what we expect from wildfires and air quality
There’s a lot of news coverage about the wildfires on the West Coast right now, and rightly so. But with that news coverage comes a lot of commentary, some of which might lead us down the wrong policy path. I want to highlight an example from the New York Times opinion page, not because it …
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CONTINUE READINGWarren’s public lands policy proposal
The Senator’s policy proposals have a lot of good points, but could be even better
Senator Elizabeth Warren has become famous for her policy plan documents as she runs for President. A few months ago, she released a new one focusing on public lands. The key points in her plan include: A moratorium on all new fossil fuel leasing on federal public lands Providing 10% of US renewable energy from …
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CONTINUE READINGPublic Lands Watch: Forest Service proposes NEPA regulatory revisions
Forest Service proposes revisions to NEPA regulations to increase exemptions for logging and other projects
The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) has long been a lightning rod for debates over public land management. NEPA requires federal agencies to fully analyze and publicly disclose the environmental impacts of proposed major federal actions that significantly affect the environment, including analysis of a reasonable range of alternatives and a response to public comments. …
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CONTINUE READINGPublic Lands Watch: Fire Appropriations and 2018 Omnibus
2018 Omnibus bill expands future funding for fire suppression efforts, and streamlines environmental review for some timber projects
Tom Schumann helped draft this blog post. The 2018 budget act signed into law on March 23, 2018 will increase the funding available for wildfire suppression, enabling the Forest Service and Interior Department to respond to ever more severe fires while easing the strain on their overall budgets. Before the new law, Congress limited appropriations …
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CONTINUE READINGPublic Lands Watch: Resilient Federal Forests Act
Bill to reduce environmental protections for timber management on federal lands passes House
The Resilient Federal Forests Act (RFFA), H.R. 2936—which would curb environmental review under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) for a variety of forest management activities on National Forest and BLM lands—passed the House November 1. (We previously wrote about a version of this bill in committee here.) NEPA requires agencies to consider whether proposed …
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CONTINUE READINGAir quality and wildfire
We may need to burn more to get less smoke
One of the impacts of California’s difficult fire season has been air pollution. Fires produce smoke. Large wildfires produce a lot of smoke. And large wildfires in the southern Sierra Nevada produce smoke in the southern Central Valley – the part of the United States that already has some of the worst air quality in …
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CONTINUE READINGThe Future of Fire Policy
Climate change will require reconsideration of how we manage fire
It has been a brutal fire season here in California. It’s been brutal in part because of a historically bad drought. But unfortunately, the end of the drought (when it comes) will not be the end of our fire problems. Those fire problems are the result of long-term, human-caused trends that will only continue: climate …
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