Letter: Hitting the mark

Published 12:15 am Thursday, November 21, 2024

In her Nov. 16 guest column on paying the cost of wildfires in Oregon, Natalie Whitesel correctly asserts that the frequency of wildfires has been trending upward due to climate change.

The cost of fighting the fires has exceeded the Oregon Department of Forestry’s resources, requiring money from the state’s general fund to bolster their wildfire budget. Ultimately, that means money coming from taxpayers’ pockets to fight wildfires.

Whitesel identifies climate change as the root cause of the drought conditions engendering wildfires. Putting carbon into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels is the main driver of climate change. Therefore, she concludes, tax the large industrial corporate polluters to cover the cost of fighting the fires.

Whitesel identifies natural gas facilities and large industrial plants as the main culprits. She says that current legislative attempts to put an acreage-based tax on private timber harvest is “missing the mark.” But it is Whitesel who’s missing the mark here, with a less than in-depth understanding of who the biggest polluters are.

Based on data compiled by a research team at Oregon State University, the Oregon Global Warming Commission identified the logging and wood products industry as the largest carbon dioxide polluter in the state.

Industrial timber harvesting, and all of the related infrastructure in delivering wood products to the market place, accounts for 35% of the state’s carbon pollution.

In light of the science, it makes perfect sense to enact a harvest tax on the large corporate timber companies, which are owned primarily by out-of-state investment corporations.

ROGER DORBAND

Astoria