PoliticalWilderness

Part 8

The War on Wolves,American Public Wilderness Lands,Climate Change,Global Environment, Special Interest Groups,and The U.S.A. Congress
What is the Deep Root that Connects All of Them?

The Western U.S.A. Burns at an Unprecedented Rate, Congress Recesses for August Before Approving Firefighting Budget, While President Obama’s Senior Science Advisor Issues Statement Linking Wildfires to Climate Change.

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VIEW HERE:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDsNq-rVplE

Reposted from Think Progress:

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/07/30/3465759/house-forest-service-money-wildfires/

"HOUSE REPUBLICANS FIDDLE WHILE FOREST SERVICE RUNS OUT OF MONEY TO FIGHT WILDFIRES"

“In case the Republican leadership hasn’t noticed, the west is going up in flames..."

http://stopwaronwilderness.blogspot.com/p/current-issues-pertaining-to-wilderness.html

Dustin Ellison attempts to beat down a roadside hot spot with a mat from his car on Monday, May 5, 2014, in Guthrie, Okla.

CREDIT: AP PHOTO/NICK OXFORD

With multiple fires burning in the West, http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/07/17/3461159/state-of-emergency-wildfires-grow/ and the U.S. Forest Service’s (USFS) wildfire budget expected to run dry in the coming days, http://www.fs.fed.us/news/releases/forest-service-increases-its-firefighting-aircraft-fleet-fire-season-begins House Democrats have launched an all-out effort to force an up-or-down vote on a bipartisan proposal that would provide wildland firefighters the resources they need to do their jobs.

One hundred and ninety-six House Democrats have thus far signed on to what is known as a discharge petition, http://democrats.naturalresources.house.gov/press-release/defazio-pushes-critical-bipartisan-wildfire-funding which would force House Republican leaders to bring the stalled Wildfire Disaster Funding Act of 2014 to a vote. https://beta.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/house-bill/3992

Instead of debating a measure to provide needed resources for fighting wildfires, however, the House this week is expected http://thehill.com/homenews/house/213668-gop-border-bill-focused-on-security to vote on a bill that would waive at least 14 environmental laws http://appropriations.house.gov/uploadedfiles/07.29.14_fy_2014_supplemental_appropriations_bill.pdf within 100 miles of the southern U.S. border, and has already spent time voting on legislation http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-house-vote-endangered-species-act-20140729-story.html to weaken the Endangered Species Act (ESA).

“With rising temperatures and record droughts across the country, we could be headed into one of the worst wildfire seasons in our history,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said http://www.democraticleader.gov/newsroom/pelosi-statement-emergency-wildfire-spending-discharge-petition/ in launching the discharge petition on July 11. “But with fires raging across the west, the money is running out — and House Republicans can’t be bothered to act.”

Fire conditions are regionally variable, and worse than normal in California and the Pacific Northwest this year

The Wildfire Disaster Funding Act, which President Obama included in his Fiscal Year 2015 budget proposal for Congress and which is also championed by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-CO) and Sen. Mike Crapo (R-ID), would treat the worst 1 percent of wildfires like other natural disasters by allowing the federal government to draw from special disaster funds to support response efforts.

A May analysis http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/green/news/2014/05/13/89616/putting-out-the-fire-3-reasons-why-president-obamas-proposed-reforms-to-the-wildfire-budget-are-critical-for-our-public-lands/ by the Center for American Progress found that this type of reform proposal would have “far-reaching benefits for American communities, parks, and public lands,” by helping free up resources for fire prevention, fuels reduction, and mitigation.

As part of their campaign for an up-or-down vote on the wildfire funding bill, House Natural Resources Committee Democrats released an analysis http://democrats.naturalresources.house.gov/sites/democrats.naturalresources.house.gov/files/The%20Cost%20of%20Extreme%20Wildfires%20FINAL.pdf Tuesday that found that between 2008 and 2012 the U.S. Forest Service had to spend $1.6 billion “fighting the worst 1 percent of American wildfires, accounting for 30 percent of the agency’s total firefighting costs.”

“In case the Republican leadership hasn’t noticed, the west is going up in flames. Yosemite is burning, but they have turned a blind eye to continue this political, partisan ESA sideshow” said Peter DeFazio (D-OR) in releasing the report. “We should have dropped this charade and done something real — fixed wildfire funding before our agencies run out of money. There is no excuse for inaction.”

With DeFazio and his colleagues only 22 signatures short of the 218 required to force a vote on the bill, this new report may be partly aimed at attracting the support of Republican members whose districts are prone to wildfires and whose communities depend on federal agencies to help defend life and property.

Members from states like California, Arizona, and Oregon — the three states with the highest spending on catastrophic wildfires — may in the coming weeks face growing pressure from constituents to help pass the wildfire funding bill and avoid the type of recurring budget shortfalls that have plagued land management agencies and Western communities in recent years.

In seven of the past twelve years, the USFS and the Department of the Interior (DOI) have significantly exceeded http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/05/02/3433590/wildfires-more-expensive/ their wildfire budgets, forcing the agencies to divert funds from other critical programs such as forest restoration and regular thinning practices, intended to reduce the numbers of wildfires.

The pattern appears to be repeating itself: addressing the Western Governors Association in June, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack estimated http://trib.com/news/state-and-regional/obama-pitches-wildfire-plan-to-western-governors/article_61c1726f-47c1-5891-a012-15af7c76d9d7.html that “fighting wildfires this year will cost about $1.8 billion” which is “$470 million more than Congress has budgeted.”

Claire Moser is the research and advocacy associate with the Public Lands Project at the Center for American Progress. You can follow her on Twitter at @Claire_Moser. Matt Lee-Ashley is a senior fellow and director of the Public Lands Project at the Center for American Progress. You can follow him on Twitter at @MLeeAshley.

Tags: ForestsWildfires

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Reposted from Green Bay Gazette

http://www.greenbaypressgazette.com/story/opinion/columnists/2014/07/29/wisconsin-forests-deserve-better/13341361/

WISCONSIN FORESTS DESERVE BETTER

http://stopwaronwilderness.blogspot.com/p/current-issues-pertaining-to-wilderness.html

Baldwin-Timber

(Photo: File/Gannett Wisconsin Media)

Tammy Baldwin 10:03 p.m. CDT July 29, 2014

Devastating wildfires are raging in Washington and Oregon. And many other states have felt the heartbreaking impacts of their destruction.

That's why I am pleased the emergency supplemental appropriations bill includes $615 million for wildfire suppression, to provide much needed support to these suffering communities.

But it's not just Western states that feel the impacts of wildfires. In fact, wildfires hurt Wisconsin too. That's because there is a broken budget process called "fire borrowing." which forces the U.S. Forest Service to take funding intended to manage our national forests and instead uses it to fight wildfires in other states. This cripples the Forest Service and diverts critical funding from our state.

Related: Baldwin says Ryan is forest bill obstructionist

http://www.greenbaypressgazette.com/story/news/investigations/2014/07/26/baldwin-ryan-forest-bill-obstructionist/13184709/

Special report: Timber Trouble

http://archive.greenbaypressgazette.com/section/WIS2005?odyssey=refresh

In Wisconsin, over 50,000 people are employed in the forest products industry from jobs in forestry and logging to paper makers in the state's many mills. The industry pays over $3 billion in wages into the state's economy and ships products worth over $17 billion each year. Unfortunately, fire borrowing has led to long project delays that are impacting this vital industry and jeopardizing the jobs it supports.

The practice of fire borrowing has increased in recent years, triggered when we have a bad fire season and the Forest Service runs out of funds available for firefighting. When fire funding is gone, the agency transfers funds from other parts of its budget and "borrows" them to pay for the fire suppression. When these funds are diverted, agency work is put on hold.

No business owner would select a supplier who couldn't provide a clear delivery schedule, or who would routinely delay delivery of products for undetermined amounts of time. Loggers and other local businesses that partner with the Forest Service have to deal with such uncertainty because of fire borrowing. Government can work better than this.

Fortunately, Congress now has the chance to solve this problem. The Senate emergency supplemental appropriations bill would solve this broken process by treating the largest fires like other natural disasters, such as hurricanes and tornadoes, and it would stabilize the rest of the Forest Service budget so that other essential work — ranging from timber sales to the management of forest health — can be completed on schedule. Furthermore, the proposal is fiscally responsible because it would help reduce long-term costs by allowing for increased fire prevention activities and because it would not increase the amount that Congress can spend on natural disasters.

Ending fire borrowing has strong bipartisan support. In fact, over 120 members of the House or Representatives and Senate and more than 200 groups ranging from the timber industry to conservation groups to the National Rifle Association support the Wildfire Disaster Funding Act, the bipartisan bill that contains the fire borrowing fix included in the supplemental. The consensus is that we need to get this fix done this year.

While there is strong bipartisan support for ending fire borrowing, it's unclear if the House is going to support this fix in its version of the supplemental appropriations bill. In fact, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan has consistently stood in the way of bipartisan solutions offered in both the House and Senate. He has ignored the fact that the current budget structure is flawed and has resulted in the Forest Service taking the forest management funding Wisconsin's forests rely upon and instead using it to fight wildfires.

As his House Republican colleague Rep. Mike Simpson of Wyoming recently pointed out, "Unfortunately, continuing the status quo, as Chairman Ryan advocates, prevents us from reducing the cost and severity of future fires by forcing agencies to rob the money that Congress has appropriated for these priorities to pay for increasingly unpredictable and costly fire suppression needs."

The bipartisan solution that I support for Wisconsin is a fiscally responsible fix to a devastating problem with wide-ranging impacts. It will help us respond to wildfires and it will support businesses and thousands of jobs in the timber industry in Wisconsin and throughout the country. I urge my fellow Wisconsin colleagues as well as my colleagues in the House and Senate to come together, supporting the end to fire borrowing, and solve this problem once and for all.

U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Madison, serves on the Senate Committee on Energy & Natural Resources.

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Reposted from AlterNet:

http://www.alternet.org/environment/congress-lets-western-states-burn-fails-find-funding-combat-wildfires

CONGRESS LETS WESTERN STATES BURN, FAILS TO FIND FUNDING TO COMBAT WILDFIRES. RECESS BEGINS WITHOUT LAWMAKERS ACTING ON LEGISLATION TO FUND FIREFIGHTING EFFORTS IN OREGON, WASHINGTON AND CALIFORNIA

http://stopwaronwilderness.blogspot.com/p/current-issues-pertaining-to-wilderness.html

ENVIRONMENT

AlterNet / By Cliff Weathers

Photo Credit: Sergi Votit/Shutterstock

August 1, 2014

Congress is heading home for summer vacation, failing to act on emergency funding to combat the wildfires that are raging in the West.

President Obama had requested $615 million in emergency funding to help the U.S. Forest Service and Interior Department pay for firefighting efforts, and the Democratic-controlled Senate proposed a $2.7 billion spending bill to deal with both the wildfires and the influx of unaccompanied minors along the Southwest border. But Senate Republicans used a procedural objection to block its consideration.The House did not introduce a bill to combat wildfires.

Although Congress returns next month, the fire season in some states will have passed its peak.

Ironically, without emergency funding from Congress, the Forest Service and Interior Department will need to transfer money from elsewhere in their budgets, including funds earmarked to remove flammable vegetation from forests, projects that help prevent such fires from raging in the first place.

The two federal agencies have budgeted over $1 billion for firefighting this year — five times more than 20 years ago — but that may not be enough.

Wildfires are currently raging through the Pacific Northwest and California, in regions that have been affected by unseasonably warm temperatures and drought. The long-range forecast in the region calls for above-average temperatures through October, which can translate into fuels that are much drier than usual.

Fires continue to rage in Oregon, and communities in the southwestern part of the state are being asked to evacuate their homes, as fire spreads along the border with California. Some 5,300 acres in the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument have been scorched and the town of Ashland, just to its east, is threatened by the fire. Meanwhile, lightning has sparked two new large wildfires in the state.

About 780 square miles of land is currently burning in Oregon, and a continued heat wave, along with forecasted lightning storms, are expected to bring more fires to the region.

Fires in central Washington, which have raged since early July, are threatening the state’s famous orchards at the time apple harvest begins.

In California, a wildfire in Yosemite National Park is being fought back, but still threatens a rare grove of giant sequoias. The fire is 58% percent contained as of Friday. Some firefighters at the scene have been redeployed to another fire 100 miles away in the Sierra Nevada foothills.

Over the past few weeks, dozens of wildfires have scorched hundreds of thousands of acres and forced thousands of residents from their homes in the three states. Only a few weeks into the three-month fire season in Washington and Oregon, the total area of scorched ground is already higher than in any full year over at least a decade.

More than 3,500 people — including National Guard troops and firefighters from across the nation -- have been battling the fires.

Satellite imagery drives home the message of the fires’ severity. Vast plumes of smoke are moving south and east across the nation, spewing ash particulates as far away as New England and the Gulf of Mexico.

After a mild, damp spring, much of the Pacific Northwest has been experiencing a heat wave this summer, with temperatures reaching past 100 degrees. But it was the lightning and high winds associated with thunderstorms that have breathed the fires to life, according to fire officials.

Fires in high-elevation timberlines, where there are few homes and people, are being allowed to burn as firefighters concentrate on the ones that are more threatening to civilization.

Worrisome during this fire season is California, which is very susceptible to wildfires. The entire state has been under drought conditions for months, with most areas under “exceptional” or “extreme” drought conditions. Powerful Santa Ana winds have helped make conditions ideal for wildfires since January. It’s the first time in 15 years that all of California has been under drought conditions.

So far, California's firefighting agency, Cal Fire, has responded to more than 3,700 wildfires, which is a huge increase in the average number of fires at this point in the year. More than 52,000 acres have burned in the state this year.

Cliff Weathers is a senior editor at AlterNet, covering environmental and consumer issues. He is a former deputy editor at Consumer Reports. His work has also appeared in Salon, Car and Driver, Playboy, and Detroit Monthly among other publications. Follow him on Twitter @cliffweathers and on Facebook.

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August 3. 2014

CONGRESS ALLOWS WESTERN STATES

TO GO UP IN SMOKE