Fire Facts

Floor Speech

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Mr. PALMER. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Arkansas (Mr. Westerman) for holding this discussion about forest management.

Mr. Speaker, I rise today because ``California's forests suffer from neglect and mismanagement, resulting in overcrowding that leaves them susceptible to disease, insects and wildfire.'' These are not my words. They are the words of the Little Hoover Commission, an independent State oversight agency in California.

In their 2018 report entitled ``Fire on the Mountain,'' the Little Hoover Commission called for a transformational change in California forest management practices after ``A century of mismanaging Sierra Nevada forests has bought an unprecedented environmental catastrophe that impacts all Californians.'' That is a direct quote from the report.

California's own Legislative Analyst's Office agreed and found that limitations on timber harvests and emphasis on fire suppression and an increasing number of environmental permitting requirements have led to unhealthily dense forests.

Thankfully, both groups recognize that commonsense forest management practices could not only help prevent wildfires, but also reduce carbon emissions. Properly managed and healthy forests are more resilient and sequester more carbon than overgrown forests.

Simple recommendations like shifting from fire suppression to using fire as a tool and setting up long-term forest management strategies are just a couple of the low-cost solutions that can help us achieve healthier forests.

Unlike policies such as the Green New Deal, these practices would actually help address wildfires and would not cost trillions of dollars to implement. Furthermore, these actions can all be taken today, and they fall in line with some of the things that my Republican colleagues and I have been suggesting on the Select Committee on the Climate Crisis: that if we take action to mitigate and adapt to the climate change that we know is going to occur, we could avoid some of the catastrophes that we are seeing play out in California right now and in other places in the West.

If you care about protecting our citizens from wildfires and reducing carbon emissions, then you should support responsible forest management. Instead of wasting time on unrealistic solutions, we should take serious action to prevent unnecessary wildfires and improve the carbon sequestration potential of our forests.

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