(Seattle, WA) – Today U.S. Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) issued the following statement on President Joe Biden’s Executive Order to safeguard American forests and fight climate change. The executive order directs federal land managers to develop policies that protect old-growth trees which provide significant carbon storage and are important buffers against climate change, particularly as wildfires grow more severe and pose a greater risk to mature forests.
In November 2021, Senator Murray and her colleagues wrote to the Biden administration, urging them to conserve mature and old growth forests on National Forest System lands as a central climate strategy for the agency. In February 2022, Senator Murray and her colleagues wrote to the administration again requesting that relevant agencies move forward with the obligations set out in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) to protect and restore old growth forests and urged the Biden administration to take additional action to protect other carbon-rich mature forests across the nation for the long term
“Throughout my career in the Senate, protecting Washington state’s public lands and natural treasures has been one of my top priorities. We owe it to our kids and future generations to do everything we can to fight climate change and preserve the wild spaces that make Washington state so special—this executive order will do both. Protecting old-growth forests is a simple but important strategy in the fight against climate change. This is an important victory for Washington state and our environment, but I remain focused on working with my colleagues in Congress to send a landmark investment in climate action and clean energy to the President’s desk as soon as possible.”
Senator Murray has made clear that Congress must take bold climate action, recently outlining her priorities in a July 2021 op-ed to the Seattle Times, stating, “Congress must send President Biden a landmark investment in climate action that will protect our planet for current and future generations — nothing less will cut it.” Senator Murray has rallied her colleagues in the Senate as a leader in the fight to pass bold climate action legislation and continues to press for climate action in every way possible.
The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law that Senator Murray helped pass last year will help Washington state and the country transition to cleaner energy and electric vehicles, make the electric grid more reliable, help prevent and fight wildfires, and more—all while creating good-paying, union jobs. Notably, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law includes Senator Murray’s Clean School Bus Act, which provides federal grants to help transition the nation’s diesel school buses to zero emission, electric buses. The bipartisan package will allocate $5 billion towards zero emission and clean buses, and thanks to Senator Murray, funds will be prioritized for communities where air pollution is greatest.
Senator Murray has a long and accomplished record of protecting public lands in Washington state: from passing her Wild Sky Wilderness legislation into law in 2008, creating the first new wilderness area in the state of Washington in over twenty years at that time and protecting thousands of acres of low elevation old-growth forests—to legislation she authored and passed to protect Illabot Creek and the Middle Fork Snoqualmie and Pratt Rivers and expand the Alpine Lakes Wilderness in 2014. Currently, Senator Murray is fighting to pass her Wild Olympics Wilderness & Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, which would permanently protect more than 126,500 acres of Olympic National Forest as wilderness and 19 rivers and their major tributaries, a total of 464 river miles, as Wild and Scenic Rivers.
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