"The MAGA Plan To Stop Forest Fires: Remove The Forest"

"Project 2025 plans to increase commercial logging to fight wildfires. Ecologists and fire experts say this will make fires worse."

"As the world continues to burn fossil fuels, the climate crisis has pushed wildfires into unnatural “megafires” that consume millions of acres in a single season. This year’s wildfire activity is nearly 3,000 percent higher in California than last year; and within the next three decades, one in seven homes could be at major risk. More concerning is the threat to human lives; last year, the deadliest wildfire in over a century killed 102 people in Maui; and much of the East Coast experienced its worst air quality ever because of Canadian wildfires.

But MAGA Republicans have put together a plan that they say will help ease the wildfire crisis. It’s laid out in Project 2025, a more than 900-page document published by conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation.

In a brief section easily missed, the authors detail an overhaul of the U.S. Forest Service, the federal agency charged with managing wildfires on public lands. Currently, the Forest Service is implementing a 10-year strategy to reduce wildfire risk, which includes science-backed methods like prescribed burns, tree thinning, and pruning.

But under the Project 2025 plan, these wildfire prevention strategies would be heavily stripped down, and primarily focused on one: making it easier for companies to cut down trees and sell them."

Arielle Samuelson reports for HEATED September 3, 2024.

Source: HEATED, 09/09/2024