Green Policies Increase Risk of Colorado Forest Fires, experts say

Environmentalist policies against logging may have helped this summer’s Rocky Mountain fires to expand, experts told the Washington Free Beacon. Robert Zubrin, a senior fellow at the Center for Security Policy and President of the aerospace engineering research and development firm Pioneer Astronautics, blamed environmentalists for the spread of these fires. “They facilitated the spread of fire by keeping people from logging, adding firebreaks, and using pesticides,” he said. Zubrin wrote a book on this subject, Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism, which he will present today at the American Enterprise Institute. Zubrin recently wrote that climate change does not explain these fires. “The culprits here … have not been humans, but Western Pine Beetles,” he wrote, which turned “over 60 million acres of formerly evergreen pine forests into dead red tinder, dry ammunition” for fires. Zubrin told the Free Beacon that logging would solve the problem. “Logging as part of a program of rational forest management” could decrease the risk of fire by “thinning out mature trees that are the pine beetles’ major targets,” and creating “gaps between forests, to act as firebreaks and beetle-breaks,” he said...more