Healthy forests are the most powerful and efficient carbon-capture system on the planet.
“Our planet’s future climate is inextricably tied to the future of its forests.”
(Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2018 Report)
Healthy forests = Healthy climate
America’s investment in sound forest management has been replaced with escalating expenditures on wildfire and tree mortality.
America is covered with 750 million acres of forests (1/3 of our land base), which are now burning and rotting at an unprecedented rate. Our forest products industry, our logging infrastructure, and our professional forester ranks are rapidly diminishing. California alone has shuttered over 150 sawmills and biomass power plants in the past 25 years, with only 35 remaining.
- Instead of restoring and maintaining our “carbon-capture systems,” under our watch, our forests are becoming places where towns burn down, ecosystems are destroyed,
and people die. - America is now the second leading IMPORTER of lumber in the world. Considering our abundant natural resources, coupled with the best foresters, loggers, and sawmilling infrastructure in the world, this is disgraceful!
OBJECTIVES of a REAL “Green Deal”
- Increase our forests’ carbon-capture capabilities by 10% by 2030. Promote sound forest management with projects that produce healthy, resilient forests. Healthy
forests capture carbon and are America’s best and most impactful contribution to slow global warming. - As we did with America’s energy sector, target a goal of America becoming the world’s leading exporter of timber products and technology by 2030.
- Build on the President’s Executive Order 13855 promoting better forest management. Double expenditures on forest management projects in the 2021 budget. Double them again by 2024. Sound forest management will reduce wildfires, their greenhouse gas emissions and associated costs.
Resilient forests = Increased carbon capture = Slowed global warming