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It’s a tough time to be a tree. Earth has lost a third of its forests over the past 10,000 years. And now anthropogenic climate change is threatening forests like never before. From the Amazon to the Arctic, wildfires are getting bigger, hotter, and more frequent as the climate changes. After burning to the ground, many forests now struggle to recover due to climate change.
“Forests are far more vulnerable in the climate change era than people think,” said Craig Allen, a landscape ecologist who retired last year from the U.S. Geological Survey.
If the earth's temperature rises four degrees Celsius, many trees won't be able to survive. For example, the Yellowstone region’s high-elevation spruces and subalpine firs could be wiped out. Forest cover could drop by half by 2100, and the density of what remains would drop even more.
If the world's nations can keep their promise to limit warming to below two degrees Celsius, it could hold forest losses in Yellowstone to around 15 percent. High-elevation trees would struggle, but some old growth would be able to survive, and Yellowstone’s forests—like many in the world—would be different but not unrecognizable.
Senator Mike Lee’s ‘McMansion Subsidy Act’ will not fix affordable housing
A deep dive into Senator Lee's HOUSES Act reveals that it not only threatens our public lands, it could actually incentivize the construction of luxury homes and hotels while doing nothing to address housing affordability.
For one, the bill contains no mention of affordability. There is absolutely nothing in the bill that restricts the type of housing that can be developed—no mention of median income, rent restrictions, or price restrictions. The bill also lacks any meaningful density requirement, encouraging sprawl. Combined with a lack of any sort of affordability requirement, this is essentially an invitation to build suburban mansions on our public lands.
Finally, the bill opens up 15 percent of the land sold under the program to commercial development. It also considers any development that is at least 50 percent housing to be residential. That could feasibly result in the construction of hundreds of hotels and mixed-use buildings that will do nothing to ameliorate the housing shortages faced by rural Westerners.
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We must continue to proactively ensure that historically underrepresented communities benefit from our efforts to address the climate crisis and make our nation's public lands and waters accessible and welcoming to everyone."
