A $50 Billion Wildfire Fix

The Biden administration says it wants to seriously address the need to slow down, and maybe stop, the catastrophic wildfires that have decimated forests and cities in the West the last decade or so.

The plan is to spend $50 billion to aggressively thin forests in areas where people are moving into the urban wilderness interface. The clash of forest and people have created dangerous hotspots.

The administration wants to double the number of controlled fires it does and do more logging in those areas to eliminate trees and vegetation that feeds the fires.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said the early projects will be in California’s Sierra Nevadas and in large portions of the PIA Western Alliance states of Oregon, Washington and Arizona.

“You’re going to have forest fires. The question is how catastrophic do those fires have to be,” Vilsack said. “The time to act is now if we want to ultimately over time change the trajectory of these fires.”

Source link: Associated Press — https://bit.ly/3u4uczT