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The Trump admin has finalized their new rule exempting the entire Tongass National Forest from the Roadless Rule. This means removing protections from 9.3 million acres of America’s largest national forest. More on what that means below: 1/7 https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2020/10/28/trump-tongass-national-forest-alaska/
Home to the highest concentration of brown bears and bald eagles in North America the Tongass is an intact temperate rainforest ecosystem of 17 million acres. However, commercial timber interests have pushed for more logging in the region 2/7 https://earthjustice.org/news/press/2020/forest-service-pay-timber-industry-to-pick-trees-it-wants-in-alaskas-tongass-national-forest
The Tongass is the largest carbon sink in the United States, storing 1.5 billion metric tons of CO2-eq and sequestering an additional 10 million metric tons each year. 3/7 https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/green/news/2019/11/20/477495/trumps-energy-policies-put-alaska-climate-crosshairs/
Expanded industrial logging in the Tongass would be diametrically opposed to efforts to sequester carbon and protect carbon sinks to avoid exacerbating climate change. According to the Forest Service Tongass stores 8% of all carbon of US forests. 4/7
The timber industry in Southeast Alaska is entirely propped up by federal subsidies, ie. taxpayer $$. Over the last 40 years this has cost taxpayers $1.7 billion, an average of over $40 million annually. 5/7 https://www.taxpayer.net/energy-natural-resources/new-report-taxpayers-losing-hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars-on-tongass-timber-sales-over-last-two-decades-2/
There is broad national and local support for Roadless Rule protections in the Tongass. 94% of local subsistence hearing comments and 96% of written comments were opposed to repealing the rule. When the Roadless Rule was created 20 years ago, 95% of comments supported it. 6/7
Opening 9 million new acres of the Tongass to the failing timber industry is certainly a bad idea. It lacks popular support, sets back climate goals, and doesn’t make economic sense. #SaveRoadless #ProtectTheTongass 7/7
