Mark Udall, A Practiced Liar

It should make people outside Colorado angry when they read a statement like the one Mark Udall recently issued promoting his very limited bill to thin Colorado forests:

“As quickly as the beetle epidemic is spreading throughout Colorado, the needs related to forest health and fuel reduction in our national forests are vast and urgent. These funds are critically important for the health and safety of our forests and communities--and ultimately the west, as Colorado stands at the source of life giving rivers that can be impacted by our unbalanced forest condition," said Rep. Mark Udall.

That statement is very impressive until one realizes that Udall's bill does nothing to promote fuel reduction in "our national forests" except close in to mountain towns. In fact, he and the Sierra Club strongly oppose "promoting forest health and fuel reduction" in our national forests

Colorado, as Udall correctly states, is at the source of rivers that can be impacted by "our unbalanced forest condition." Neither Mark Udall nor his environmentalist extremists give a whit about those rivers or the 17 downriver states they irrigate. Instead of allowing the management of the forests in a way that would protect those rivers, Udall wants to make the forests into wilderness areas that cannot, by law, be managed.

Udall's bill does allow and fund very limited fuel reduction near Colorado ski towns and some very local watersheds. No roads are to be built. His goal is to get elected US Senator. Having ski areas burned out before the election wouldn't help. That is why he is so willing to give the Sierra club what it wants while publicly pretending his bill does something it doesn't do.

Thinking the Implications All the Way Through

The environmentalist left, personified by the Sierra Club and it's poster boy, Mark Udall, has adopted a strategy of allowing forest fires to burn, not only burn, but burn hot.

He and they don't want there to be forest roads which might be used to thin forests to prevent severe burn overs that put a crust on the soil. Crusted soil, like that in the Hayman burn area make it difficult to reforest the area. Estimates are that it will take 700 years before that area is fully restored.

Yes, Udall has sponsored a bill to thin near mountain communities. That is a half measure intended to protect him from criticism should there be the large scale property loss that would accompany a fire near one of those communities. He was careful to assure the environmentalist left that the thinning would be very limited.

Now, his allies at Colorado Confidential are reporting that forest fires release large amounts of mercury into the atmosphere:

"The mercury in the forest is not harming anything,. But when a fire releases it from the vegetation and the soils, it comes down again, precipitated in rain or snow, where it may end up in a body of water. There it gets converted in methyl mercury. That's what we're concerned about. The more fires we have, the more mercury will end up in the waterways," [ NCAR scientist Hans Friedli ] says."

This is one more argument for forest thinning. It demonstrates once again that the Sierra Club, Mark Udall, and the rest of the environmentalist left can't seem to think the policies they want to impose on the rest of us all of the way, or even part of the way through.

Udall Throws $22 Million at his Problem

Mark Udall may have come to realize that his bear hug with the environmentalists can be blamed for the destruction of millions of acres of forests by fire and beetle.

Now, he has sponsored a bill to get the Congress to appropriate $22 million so that the forest service can "help communities cope with wildfire threats, create wildfire response plans and provide grants for beetle-killed trees to be used for energy production. "

The entire Colorado delegation is behind the bill, and that is good news. The bad news is that Udall's bedfellows in the environmentalist left oppose it.

Sloan Shoemaker, director of the Carbondale-based Wilderness Workshop, said it’s good to see the congressional delegation working together to address bark beetle concerns. But “the bill’s a mixed bag” because he fears it will streamline the public involvement process under the National Environmental Policy Act.

“It feels like they’re monkeying with bedrock environmental legislation in order to sort of apply the wrong solution to the problem,” he said.

The environmentalist left wants the right to go into court in Colorado to slow the thinning process. They think thinning is the "wrong solution," and that the only right solution is to let the forests burn.

A Wayne Allard spokesman thought the bill would pass if a national environmentalist group didn't oppose it. So much for that.

While we applaud this bill, we wonder if Mark Udall's purpose is to use it to insulate him from his own record of environmental extremism. $22 million doesn't go far, given the magnitude of the problem. Consider that it costs $600 an acre to reseed a burned forest. What must it cost per acre to remove the undergrowth and excess trees? Common sense suggests several thousand dollars per acre. If we assumed that it cost only two thousand dollars per acre, $22 million would thin only 11 thousand acres, or 17 square miles (an area a little bigger than 4 miles by 4 miles).

Unfortunately, Udall's inclusion of bio fuels grants in the bill suggests that he is unserious about solving the problem. Allowing the forest service to keep forest roads open to the public might do more good than this bill, and yet Udall opposes that.