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The senate fiddles as America burns

sawyerloggingon

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The Rep congress passed this bill but it doesn't stand a chance in the senate and if it did pass Obama says he will veto it. Our forest will continue to burn up and millions will be spent every summer fighting fires instead of millions being added to our economy and more young fire fighters will be burned alive in these catastrophic crowning fires all because the democrats and Obama are owned by radical environmentalist. Yet another opportunity to increase employment and reduce gov spending goes up in smoke, literally.

WASHINGTON — The Republican-­controlled House on Friday approved a bill to sharply increase logging in national forests — a measure the GOP said would create jobs in rural communities and help reduce wildfires that have devastated the West.The bill also would add hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue from new timber sales while reviving an industry that has shed tens of thousands of jobs in the past three decades.The White House has threatened to veto the bill, which was approved on a 244-173 vote. Seventeen Democrats joined 227 Republicans to back the bill. Just one Republican, Rep. Chris Gibson of New York, opposed the bill. Keith Chu, a spokesman for Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said Wyden “agrees it’s time get the (timber) harvest up, to create more jobs in the woods and make forests healthier.”
Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore., said many rural counties in Oregon and other states “are literally on the brink of bankruptcy sitting next to national forests” where increased timber sales could provide a lifeline.
“They’re choked with smoke, and their economies are choked” by policies that prevent logging, Walden said.

House approves logging bill, but chances in Senate are slim | Local News | The Register-Guard | Eugene, Oregon
 
The Rep congress passed this bill but it doesn't stand a chance in the senate and if it did pass Obama says he will veto it. Our forest will continue to burn up and millions will be spent every summer fighting fires instead of millions being added to our economy and more young fire fighters will be burned alive in these catastrophic crowning fires all because the democrats and Obama are owned by radical environmentalist. Yet another opportunity to increase employment and reduce gov spending goes up in smoke, literally.

WASHINGTON — The Republican-*controlled House on Friday approved a bill to sharply increase logging in national forests — a measure the GOP said would create jobs in rural communities and help reduce wildfires that have devastated the West.The bill also would add hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue from new timber sales while reviving an industry that has shed tens of thousands of jobs in the past three decades.The White House has threatened to veto the bill, which was approved on a 244-173 vote. Seventeen Democrats joined 227 Republicans to back the bill. Just one Republican, Rep. Chris Gibson of New York, opposed the bill. Keith Chu, a spokesman for Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said Wyden “agrees it’s time get the (timber) harvest up, to create more jobs in the woods and make forests healthier.”
Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore., said many rural counties in Oregon and other states “are literally on the brink of bankruptcy sitting next to national forests” where increased timber sales could provide a lifeline.
“They’re choked with smoke, and their economies are choked” by policies that prevent logging, Walden said.

House approves logging bill, but chances in Senate are slim | Local News | The Register-Guard | Eugene, Oregon

That's a new one. Reduce fires by cutting down the trees in our national parks. Who thought that up?
 
That's a new one. Reduce fires by cutting down the trees in our national parks. Who thought that up?

Not national parks, national forest. Your reading comprehension skills suck or you actually don't know the difference between the two. Either way you have proven yourself unqualified to comment on this subject. It's Saturday morning, aren't cartoons on?:lol:
 
That's a new one. Reduce fires by cutting down the trees in our national parks. Who thought that up?

Creating fire breaks in national forests is a good idea, as well as providing timber and jobs. Smaller fires can be controlled but large unbounded tracts, which contain lots of fuel, will burn out of control leaving far more acres without trees in the end.
 
That's a new one. Reduce fires by cutting down the trees in our national parks. Who thought that up?

Here's the problem. In a natural state, lightning strikes cause occasional forest fires. The fires clean out dead wood, underbrush and naturally take out some trees and wild life but the act of not suppressing the fires and having many small ones keeps the forests in balance. Now, with human development, the fires are suppressed and there is additional fuel for the fires to spread in every direction so instead of having many small fires, we get huge ones which are difficult to fight. There is some rational for harvesting timber and it's not total destruction of the environment. Trees are a natural resource. they are replaceable. I'm not a fan of cutting old growth because of their uniqueness but generally cutting timber isn't necessarily bad.
 
And for those in the warmer crowd there is this to consider.

The House bill’s sponsor, Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Wash, said wildfires burned 9.3 million acres last year, while the Forest Service only harvested timber from about 200,000 acres. “We burned 44 times more acres than we’ve managed,” Hastings said. “Imagine the carbon imprint” of those wildfires, which are fed in part by overstocked forests.
 
Just depends on where the timbering is done I suppose. That said, I am not sure cutting wood off tract X doesn't just mean that Tract Y somewhere else won't be cut, so you would just be rearranging who gets the profits instead of servicing new demand. I say this because there was a lot of timbering going on in my area, but demand has dropped so much, the mills basically only take what they timber off their own lands because supply and demand have reach equilibrium.
 
Just depends on where the timbering is done I suppose. That said, I am not sure cutting wood off tract X doesn't just mean that Tract Y somewhere else won't be cut, so you would just be rearranging who gets the profits instead of servicing new demand. I say this because there was a lot of timbering going on in my area, but demand has dropped so much, the mills basically only take what they timber off their own lands because supply and demand have reach equilibrium.

Thinning our forest makes them healthy and less susceptible to catastrophic fires. I don't know where you live but in the PNW we export a lot of lumber and the demand is there. We could easily triple our harvest of national forest, clean them up, reduce fire danger and increase employment.
 
Thinning our forest makes them healthy and less susceptible to catastrophic fires. I don't know where you live but in the PNW we export a lot of lumber and the demand is there. We could easily triple our harvest of national forest, clean them up, reduce fire danger and increase employment.

I live in the mid-Atlantic and I am all for putting excise taxes out the ying yang on exported timber so if we both get our way, we will be a creditor nation in no time :2razz:
 
Not national parks, national forest. Your reading comprehension skills suck or you actually don't know the difference between the two. Either way you have proven yourself unqualified to comment on this subject. It's Saturday morning, aren't cartoons on?:lol:

In the west, raging fires are just a part of the ecology. Look at an aspen grove. It exist where a raging fire burned open a part of the forest. Aspens grow back faster and take over that area. The Lodgepole pine... it is a conifer tree and the cones carry the seeds for new trees. These cones only open up in a fire. No fire. No new pines.

The cones of the Lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta) are, conversely, pyriscent: they are sealed with a resin that a fire melts away, releasing the seeds. link...

I'm not a fan of these giant fires destroying towns and whatnot, but a lot of what's getting hammered is people building further into the wilderness. Just like those pompous millionaires who want to build mansions in florida on the barrier islands and when a hurricane inevitably wipes it out, they get the tax payer to rebuild it for them.

Also, watching the party of big business pretend that this isn't about making money for their campaign donors via logging companies but are soooo concerned about smoke jumpers' lives... I'm just not buying it.
 
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Also, watching the party of big business pretend that this isn't about making money for their campaign donors via logging companies but are soooo concerned about smoke jumpers' lives... I'm just not buying it.
Relax. The Democrats won't be in charge much longer, and then we can go back to a rational approach to managing our resources.
 
Relax. The Democrats won't be in charge much longer, and then we can go back to a rational approach to managing our resources.

Yes, by selling our resources to the highest bidder. No thanks.
 
Yes, by selling our resources to the highest bidder. No thanks.

Oh, so it makes more sense for them to go up in smoke...yeah, that makes sense!
 
Thinning our forest makes them healthy and less susceptible to catastrophic fires. I don't know where you live but in the PNW we export a lot of lumber and the demand is there. We could easily triple our harvest of national forest, clean them up, reduce fire danger and increase employment.

Clear cut lumbering is too destructive to the surrounding environment. Perhaps if you thinned out the weak wood with aerial lumbering it would be OK. The days of clear cutting are numbered. Wood needs to be farmed like we do paper pulp here in the east. Most of the private land is obviously already timbered out or you wouldn't want to raid our national treasures to send to China.
 
In the west, raging fires are just a part of the ecology. Look at an aspen grove. It exist where a raging fire burned open a part of the forest. Aspens grow back faster and take over that area. The Lodgepole pine... it is a conifer tree and the cones carry the seeds for new trees. These cones only open up in a fire. No fire. No new pines.

The cones of the Lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta) are, conversely, pyriscent: they are sealed with a resin that a fire melts away, releasing the seeds. link...

I'm not a fan of these giant fires destroying towns and whatnot, but a lot of what's getting hammered is people building further into the wilderness. Just like those pompous millionaires who want to build mansions in florida on the barrier islands and when a hurricane inevitably wipes it out, they get the tax payer to rebuild it for them.

Also, watching the party of big business pretend that this isn't about making money for their campaign donors via logging companies but are soooo concerned about smoke jumpers' lives... I'm just not buying it.

You are half right, in the west fires is part of the ecology but since we started fighting fires we have stopped the constant low ebb fires that burned out brush and small trees and left the bigger trees unscathed. Now we have a forest that has hundreds of trees an acre where there should be on average twenty. This leads to a stressed forest full of unhealthy trees and an understory of grand fir that has grown up into the canopy of old growth Ponderosa pine and larch that should be the only trees there. Logging this understory off to mimic what the forest should look like if fires had been allowed to burn the last 100 years gets rid of this ladder fuel and gets the forest healthy and back to what you could call normal and prevents these catastrophic burns that leave nothing in their wake.
 
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