Dear Board:
Thinning is unscientific and damaging.
The amount of carbon that burns in a fire is tremendously
exaggerated in the Draft Scoping Plan. It is nowhere near 80% as
stated; it is more like 3%.
Thinning does not make forests less vulnerable to fire. Recent
studies have shown that it often worsens fire risk.
A great deal of carbon storage is lost when trees are logged.
When part of the logged debris is sent to a power plant, the carbon
is released immediately.
More carbon can be sequestered and stored in forests by sensible
forest management, which includes increasing plantation rotation
lengths, eliminating even-aged management, eliminating salvage
logging, and letting dead trees rot in place, storing carbon for
decades until the material helps to rebuild the soil.
More carbon could be stored if PGE stopped cutting millions of
trees instead of fixing their own defective and antiquated
equipment and their bare wire distribution lines. Unfortunately the
Legislature yielded to pressure and greenlit this massacre of the
environment.