Forest management and wildfire prevention are subjects of intense interest in Southwest Washington.

This is a case of how distorted political advertising can become.

It involves our timber and fishing industries, which get little media coverage these days despite the fact that they are still economic bread and butter to rural Southwest Washington.

Southwest Washington Congressional challenger Joe Kent has bashed incumbent Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez for opposing the “Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny Act” (REINS Act).

The long-sought Republican legislation would require congressional approval of all major regulations issued by federal agencies — those having an estimated economic impact of $100 million or more — before those regulations could take effect.

The bill passed the Republican-controlled House in June on a party line 221-210 vote, but it has no chance in the Democratic controlled Senate. It was first introduced in 2009 and passed the House several times, but it has never won Senate approval.

Her vote against the legislation was, to Kent, a sign that Gluesenkamp Perez did not want to ease regulations that have limited logging on federal lands and undercut salmon fishing and restoration.

“She wants to keep all the power with unelected bureaucrats,” Kent said in one of his summer video posts on his campaign Facebook page.

He has also said her opposition to the bill will continue to make it difficult to manage forests to prevent wildfires and prevent sea lions from chomping salmon.

I believe, yes, that more needs to be done to reduce sea lion predation and improve forest management. But that’s not the issue here. The problem with these campaign assertions is that they wrongly suggest that, by voting for the REINS Act, Gluesenkamp Perez would have helped deregulate salmon and forestry laws and regulations.

What this is, pure and simple, is a use of the legislative process as a bludgeon to make MGP look bad. It’s an old political trick — in addition to old news.

For one thing, to blame the incumbent, first-term Democrat for timber and salmon restrictions ignores the fact that most of these mandates were adopted decades ago, when Gluesenkamp Perez was a child.

REINS wouldn’t rein much

Kent also ignores the fact that the REINS Act would only apply to major new regulations. Regulations adopted under laws such as the National Environmental Policy Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act and the Endangered Species Act to protect spotted owls, old-growth forests, sea lions and threatened ecosystems would not change if REINS ever becomes law.

Pull Quote

‘Climate change is greatly increasing the flammability of the fuel available for wildfires — this means that a single spark, regardless of its source, can rapidly turn into a blazing inferno.’

Yan Boulanger, a research scientist

“The premise of (Kent’s) video is essentially that the passing of the REINS Act would prevent wildfires in Southwest Washington. The idea that the REINS Act would magically stop wildfires and unleash the timber industry displays a deep misunderstanding of this complex issue,” said Tim Gowen, Gluesenkamp Perez’s campaign manager.

And of course none of this even touches upon the wisdom of conserving and protecting species in the first place, an issue that Kent seems to care little about. He seems to forget, too, that federal judges — not bureaucrats — have ordered many of these protections to comply with the Endangered Species Act.

Kent also ignores the fact that current law already empowers Congress to overturn agency overreach through the Congressional Review Act (CRA).

Overstepping

And there’s also the issue of separation of powers. Under the U.S. Constitution, Congress enacts laws; the executive branch (regulatory agencies) adopts regulations to enforce them.

The line at which agencies overstep their authority is debated frequently, with Republicans often focusing on their cost to business and consumers and Democrats stressing the good they do to protect public health, safety and welfare.

There clearly is a balance to be struck, but the law already reserves Congress the right to intervene when it believes regulators have overreached. And there is a flip side: How much do you want Congress — which is so subject to special interest money — to meddle in and delay action on important policy matters?

Gluesenkamp Perez recognizes that there “are problems with our current system for approving timber harvests on federal land, and the Congresswoman has worked diligently to identify and address those problems,” Gowen said.

“The Congresswoman has … introduced some targeted legislation that would, if enacted, ultimately increase the amount of timber harvested in SW Washington without endangering the long-term health of the woods.”

Kent advocates forest thinning and other management techniques to reduce fire danger in forests that are diseased, insect-infested tinderboxes ready to explode in flames. All well and good — and in line with what MGP advocates, too. But he’s off base in another aspect of forest fire control.

Fire risk grows

Why does he deny the role of human-induced climate change in boosting the threat of catastrophic wildfires? This past summer he scoffed at the idea that human-driven climate change fueled the record wildfires that scorched 37 million acres in Canada this year and sent clouds of choking smoke through much of the eastern U.S.

An international team of climate scientists that gathered this summer at the Imperial College of London had this to say after evaluating those conflagrations: Climate change has made fires of this magnitude seven times more likely and increased fire intensity 20%.

“Climate change is greatly increasing the flammability of the fuel available for wildfires — this means that a single spark, regardless of its source, can rapidly turn into a blazing inferno,” according to Yan Boulanger, a research scientist who contributed to the study

Other researchers have estimated that lighting strikes — a major trigger of wildfires — will increase by 50% over the next century as the earth’s climate warms.

If Kent wants to talk seriously about forest policy, he needs to accept the truth about climate change and refrain from using political gimmicks to embarrass his opponent.