Udall Responds to Pine Beetle Legislation Question

A while back (April), I emailed Rep. Mark Udall’s office regarding two pieces of legislation: H.R. 5216 and 5218. I wanted to know the status of the bills, which were introduced to Committees way back in January. Both bills deal with expanding resources in order to deal with the millions of acres of trees killed by the mountain pine beetle. I have received a response from Rep. Udall and am reproducing it below:

Thank you for asking about bills I have introduced to respond to problems in Colorado’s forest caused by bark beetles and other insects. I appreciate hearing from you and apologize for my delay in responding.

As you noted, both H.R. 5216 (the “Wildfire Risk Reduction and Renewable Biomass Utilization Act”) and H.R. [5218] (the “Fire-Safe Communities Act”) have been referred to the relevant Committees. Regrettably, at this point neither has been scheduled for a hearing or other action. I have been and will continue to seek to have these bills considered, but each of the relevant committees has many pending measures and is also engaged in oversight activities related to other subjects within their jurisdiction.

Working to reduce the danger to Colorado’s communities from severe forest fires has been a priority for me since I was first elected to Congress, and I will continue to work toward that goal.

I will continue to monitor the pine beetle kill problem, including these two bills. I think these pieces of legislation are part of the important fight to mitigate the beetles’ effect.

Pine Beetle Update

As a resident of the Mountain West, I’ve seen first-hand the effects of mountain pine beetles (Dendroctonus ponderosae) in forests.* Areas of formerly dark green pine trees turned rust red. Those areas have gotten larger quickly over the past few years due to lack of sustained cold temperatures during our winters. Identifying human-influenced climate change as the cause is not a stretch, it’s widely accepted by scientists.

There is now mounting evidence that the hundreds of thousands of acres of dead trees in Colorado, and many more beyond the state’s borders, will cause those forests to change from carbon sinks to carbon sources. A little background: healthy forests act as giant reservoirs (sinks) of carbon dioxide. The trees absorb CO2 during their respiration and production of chlorophyll. The difference now is as these trees die by the millions, all that stored carbon will be released back into the atmosphere. An atmosphere that, as mentioned above, humans have been busy injecting CO2 and other greenhouse gases during the trees’ life spans.

Overall, that situation doesn’t sound very good. It gets a little bit scarier when one realizes that computer climate models haven’t been programmed to take this process into account yet. Activists have been proposing for some time now that high latitude forests could be protected and expanded to help trap some of the atmospheric CO2. It now appears that those forests are falling to the effects of already induced climate change. And let’s be honest: the climate changes we’ve seen so far haven’t been catastrophic. Scientists are noting smaller-scale changes around the world: large ice shelf collapses, record Arctic ice melt, etc. Those forests cannot be counted on as people had hoped in the future, at least not until we control our GHG emissions and decrease the GHG concentrations in the atmosphere.

I began covering this problem with an eye toward some solutions. Rep. Mark Udall (D-CO02) introduced a couple of bills dealing with the mountain pine beetle kill back in January:

Ritter’s Forest Health Council

I’ve written a little bit about the pine beetle kill problem facing Colorado and the region. Rep. Mark Udall’s (D,CO-02) bills (H.R. 5216 & H.R. 5218) haven’t been acted upon yet in the House. As has been demonstrated before, Gov. Bill Ritter has an honest interest in what happens in his state. With respect to the beetle problem, Ritter created a Forest Health Council last week.

From his press release:

“Many people have been working on this issue for years,” Gov. Ritter added. “The time has come for a unified, coordinated and aggressive action plan that enlists all stakeholders as collaborative partners in this fight. The time has come for state government to lead that effort. The Colorado Forest Health Advisory Council will bring together local, state, federal and private interests to identify and implement short-term actions and long-term forest health strategies.”

Catastrophic beetle kill in Colorado

An article in the Denver Post a couple weeks back continued the story about the damage that pine beetles continue to do to our lodgepole forests. 500,000 acres were affected last year, bringing the total number up to 1.5 million acres. In my travels through Colorado’s Rocky Mountains last year, I noticed entire mountainsides have now been devastated by this phenomenon. Experts anticipated that our forests would soon look similar to Yellowstone Park after the 1988 fire season. That kind of damage is going to take hundreds of years to recover from.

Some more recent news on this subject: Two bills were introduced by Rep. Mark Udall (D, CO-02) to do something about the situation.

H.R. 5216 would amend the newly-enacted energy legislation to allow more trees to be removed from National Forests to qualify for incentives to use “renewable biomass” to generate energy.

H.R. 5218 focuses on additional steps to help Colorado communities act to reduct potential damage from wildfires. This includes setting up responsible personnel and procedures, grants for responsible development and grants for establishing fire-hazard assessment maps.

I’m not sure how I feel about the first bill. Something needs to be done with the dead trees – catastrophic fires is not the best solution. But is using them for renewable biomass the thing to do? I’m not sure and will look into it some more. The second bill seems like a good idea. I’m curious how it’s all going to be funded, as well. There are a lot of competing interests for a shrinking pie. I don’t want to see the region devastated by fires when the situation could have more easily been mitigated beforehand.