Before he retired in 2022 Bob Beck was Wyoming Public Media's News Director for thirty four years. In 2012 he began an interview with Senator John Barrasso (Earth hater-WY) asking the question: "Senator, why do you hate the environment?"
During remarks to the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee in 2021, US Forest Service Chief Randy Moore outlined a plan to ship logs from as far away as California to sawmills owned by Hulett, Wyoming's Neiman Enterprises. Now, Chief Moore is seeking a 6.5% increase in 2025 funding beyond the $12 billion in annual appropriations to hire additional firefighters.
On Thursday Barrasso and Moore clashed as lumber prices crash and sawmills face a glut driven by wildfires, especially in Canada, flood markets with timber salvage in part due to human influences on global climate patterns. Barrasso is seeking the Republican Senate whip position backed by career criminal, Donald Trump who would compel the Forest Service to rake millions of ecoregion acres to clear woody debris.
The Forest Service relies on provisions in the emerging farm bill for funding including, "an extension of the Landscape Scale Restoration Program through 2029, providing competitive grants for large-scale forest restoration projects that span across jurisdictions, an authorization for Regional Foresters to appoint individuals to local Resource Advisory Committees enhancing local cooperative resource management activities and provisions in the Wood Innovation Grant Program that would prioritize proposals that include the use or retrofitting of existing sawmill facilities in counties in which the average annual unemployment rate exceeded the national average by more than 1 percent."
Sen.
Barrasso is already notorious for encouraging moral hazard and adding layers of government overreach to
the farm bill and subsidies for loggers like Neiman Enterprises who rip up forests in Wyoming, South Dakota, Colorado and Oregon. The Bearlodge District of the Black Hills National Forest plans several mechanical fuel treatments that prop up Wyoming Republican lobbyist, Jim Neiman.
Republicans began hating the Earth in 1991 after the fall of the Soviet Union when the Red Scare became a new Green Scare.
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