Fire Improvement and Reforming Exceptional Events Act
Floor Speech
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. KILEY of California. Mr. Speaker, the best way to protect air quality is to stop catastrophic wildfires. This is a statement that should not be controversial and is one the truth of which we know all too well in California.
For years in my State, the State piled on regulation after regulation after regulation, piled on new forms of litigation, new fuel blends, all things that raise the cost of living for people in our State. Yet, even more perversely, at the same time, they made it more difficult to proactively mitigate the risk of wildfire through active forest management.
Let me tell you what the perverse result of that was. Between 2004 and 2020--this is a period of 16 years--you can aggregate all the emissions that were reduced through emission reduction policies in California--a period of 16 years leading up to the year 2020--take every single emission that was reduced as a result of State policy over those 16 years, and double that number of emissions were released into the atmosphere because of the fires that occurred just that year.
All of the sacrifices Californians had made over the preceding 16 years were wiped out two times over because of these devastating wildfires that, of course, on top of the environmental damage that they inflicted, caused untold damage to life and property and our communities.
The measure that we have before us today could not be more commonsensical. It is that we should not disincentivize States from taking steps that have been proven by the best science to reduce the risk of wildfires that are an absolute catastrophe for the environment. That includes the use of prescribed burns, which should not be considered a detriment to air quality when the entire point is to improve air quality over the long term.
This bill, in addition to other measures like the Fix Our Forests Act, which will allow us to do better forest management without as many arbitrary delays and hurdles to jump over, are vitally needed to assure that we don't continue to have wildfires that devastate our communities and devastate our environment.
I will say it again: The best way to protect air quality is to stop fires from happening, and this bill will help us do that.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Source