Shitstain Administration Releasing Tongass Forest Logging Plan, Because FUCK YOU EARTH
The Trump administration has announced it will move forward with a plan to roll back regulations protecting millions of acres in America’s largest national forest from logging, sparking an outcry from environmental advocacy organizations, Alaskan tribal nations, and fishermen.
More than half of the Tongass national forest – a 16.7m-acre old-growth temperate rainforest in south-east Alaska – has been protected for the last two decades by the so-called “Roadless Area Conservation Rule”, which prohibits development in designated wild areas. The US Forest Service is expected to release a final environmental impact statement on Friday which would allow for the Tongass to be exempt from the rule, moving one step closer to ending the protections entirely.
Supporters of the exemption see it as increasing access to federal lands for such things as timber harvests and development of minerals and energy projects. Republican leaders in Alaska have lobbied the federal government to reverse the rule over the last two years. In a Washington Post op-ed published last year, the Republican senator Lisa Murkowski wrote that the regulations were “an unnecessary layer of paralyzing regulation that should never have been applied to Alaska”. Under the former governor Bill Walker, the state asked the federal government to consider the exemption in 2018, and members of Alaska’s congressional delegation last fall supported a draft proposal that listed an exemption as a preferred alternative.
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Once the review is released, at least 30 days must pass before a final decision is made. The Tongass, which covers more than 25,000 sq miles (64,750 sq kim), is one of the largest relatively intact temperate rainforests in the world, and a majority of the forest is in a natural condition, “unlike most other national forests”, the Forest Service has said. The Tongass plays an important role in the battle against climate change, as its trees absorb roughly 8% of the carbon dioxide pollution coming from the US. “The Forest Service’s environmental impact statement is junk science on assessing the impacts of releasing the carbon,” Dominick DellaSala, president of the non-profit Geos Institute, which studies the climate crisis, told the New York Times. “They are saying that the carbon that would be released by logging the timber is insignificant … There’s no science that supports their analysis.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/24/tongass-national-forest-trump-administration-logging
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