There is a clear pattern to the madness. First make up something unsubstantiated by fact. Two declare it a crisis that requires acting without congress and circumventing existing laws. Three destroy something that will take generations to repair, if it can be repaired. Four repeat with something else so quickly that people forget the last few things destroyed.
This executive action blames forest management for increased wildfires, but the IPCC has predicted this exact problem for decades. Unsurprisingly, climate change is not mentioned.
I guess we’re to believe that forests are being poorly managed by every government in every country around the world?
We are going to have to create a new term for "emergency", since this one is used for all manner of situations ranging from timber production to heart attacks.
“Emergency” is the cheat code written into many laws to circumvent ordinary procedural requirements or limits. Would you like it better if they were forced to call it “exigent circumstances” instead?
Seems like this might be a way to reduce reliance on Canadian timber. Canada exports 45 billion CAD (USD ~30 billion) yearly, mostly to the USA. Substituting American timber could move some of that economic activity south of the border, reducing Canada's GDP by up to 1% and moving several hundred thousand jobs.
Is there a good reason we want to do this though? It doesn’t pay very well and the work is seasonal.
This feels like “adding any job no matter the job” is the goal, as opposed to investing in our citizenry through education, training and using subsidies to help with the transitioning to better paying employment like high tech manufacturing, pharmaceutical production, professional trades etc.
We should really be focusing on the quality of jobs added and encourage that growth, preferably with an eye on long term stability
The last admin attempted that, creating well paying union jobs in clean energy and chip manufacturing. But it takes time, TSMC took 3-4 years from breaking ground to startup in Arizona. The electorate expects results immediately, which is impossible. And so, the thrashing continues. You can’t sell long term investment in the US, there is no will, but systems take time and investment to come up to speed.
I agree with what Biden was trying to do and the last part about the thrashing and lack of long term focus.
However I don’t think it’s the electorate that wants it now the same way a petulant child wants a toy. It’s the lack of clear vision and support that makes the electorate so desperate for it to happen. If we were to actually reinvest in our citizenry (meaning the wealthy in this country would need to pay a little more in taxes) and have proper support for people in the meantime the public would be supportive and it would be better for the country as a whole.
Instead it seems the US is trying to inch its way to becoming some type of modern Game of Thrones
> It’s the lack of clear vision and support that makes the electorate so desperate for it to happen. If we were to actually reinvest in our citizenry (meaning the wealthy in this country would need to pay a little more in taxes) and have proper support for people in the meantime the public would be supportive and it would be better for the country as a whole.
What does this look like? Progressive taxes go up, better safety nets, those are straightforward. What does a solid middle class look like when all the cheap labor manufacturing comes back to automation (~8% of US jobs are manufacturing).
The US service sector is almost 80% of the economy. We are walking into perpetual labor shortages due to structural demographics. So perhaps we don’t need “good, union jobs” and instead need to make sure people are paid enough to live comfortable lives, regardless of job (services, manufacturing, whatever). Some combination of universal healthcare (squeeze out the profit potential, cram down non care costs), public housing (see how Austria does it) to prevent investor capture, increasing the minimum wage further faster, etc.
One can argue that the high level of unionization in the 1950s at around a third of the workforce help set an expectation for job compensation. Kind of a “herd-immunity” against low pay.
Maybe it’s not union jobs as you point out, but I agree that there’s a real cost of living crisis where minimum wage jobs are simply too far from a reasonable (not even comfortable) existence.
The public wouldn't be supportive because they have no idea what is going on or how politics is connected to any of it.
For instance, they don't know who was president in 2020, and everyone thought "the economy" was bad for the last four years at the same time as they answered surveys saying they personally were doing great.
Statistics can hide or not capture a lot too. That’s the thing we should be talking about and not enough people looked at hard enough.
Stancil isn’t wrong per se, he’s quite right in many respects but I don’t know that his work captures the many facets of what is (and was at the time) going on
It's not a statistical problem. Economic statistics like that aren't complicated indirect calculations, they literally just call people up and ask how they're doing.
I saw one argument that people didn't like high interest rates, but if everyone is saying they are doing fine but have heard other imaginary people are doing badly, that most likely means they've picked up bad vibes from the media.
> everyone thought "the economy" was bad for the last four years at the same time as they answered surveys saying they personally were doing great
Most of HN would rationally answer a survey that way. High paid tech job, flexible hours, good benefits. But also informed enough to know that many others are struggling and financially insecure.
Depending on how the questions were asked, even a person barely getting by might respond that they were personally doing OK (employed, insured, able to pay rent and groceries) while knowing that the economic situation for their friends, family, neighbors was rough and knowing that if they got laid off tomorrow that they'd struggle to find an equivalent replacement job.
What you said is always true, and was /less/ true during that period (because unemployment was down), so it doesn't make sense that people answered this way more often. They were just wrong.
We aren't really reliant on Canadian timber. The US produces more board-feet of timber than any other country in the world[1], and most of it is used domestically.
If we were dependent on Canadian timber, we probably wouldn't be exporting the exact same lumber to them[1]. They're our largest importer of lumber.
The simpler explanation is that we have (or had) a free trade agreement with Canada, and it's just plain cheaper for all parties to import or export when/where the supply chain is already present.
It could be a distribution cost issue. It could be cheaper to use Canadian lumber in some parts of the US than it is to transport US lumber from where it is sourced to where it is needed.
There are also regional specializations. Like, BC has a substantial amount of Western Red Cedar which the north western states can’t meet the demand for alone.
We also send raw materials to be processed by mills in the USA. This isn’t as common as it once was. Then we also send lumber which US mills process. Some examples would be fir boards would are turned into flooring, window sash, stair treads, etc. BC produces a ton of material like this which is fodder for all kinds of mills, large and small. We try to keep that business here, but we tend to mostly dimension raw materials for export, rather than actually mill them and add any meaningful value.
We import a lot of hardwood lumbers from the USA. I’ve personally bought and milled American hardwoods for furniture in my home. We have beautiful hardwoods in Canada, but there are a lot in the USA we simply don’t grow, or at least not commercially.
There’s also the phenomenon of intra-industry trade. One big example is natural gas, which the US exports to Canada and Mexico, while paradoxically importing natural gas from Canada.
Beef and pork are another example I can think of though, this has to do with specific cuts and quality for various markets.
trees are not the problem. we have so much timber inventory. you can't increase timber production without solving mill capacity and logging labor issues. we have so many fucking trees. we need more tree nimbys so tree prices will go up. timber != lumber.
I have no pretense they did this in a calculated or intentional way, but I think it's actually probably the correct move given the lack of controlled burns nowdays.
Logging an area doesn’t necessarily decrease the fire danger. If you go to cut blocks in the PNW you’ll notice huge piles of slash in every cut block.
There are ways to log that do decrease fire risk, but generally those are not the techniques used in industrial logging since they are less profitable and tend to leave quite a few trees standing.
Fuel reduction for wildfire mitigation, if that's what you are referring to, doesn't focus on mature trees, which are pretty important for the long term health of forests.
This doesn't so much address the health of forest ecosystems so much as remove them, which really fucks stuff up. Habitat destruction, changes to waterways and luvial fauna, soil erosion. We already do a lot of timber farming, like a lot of DT policies it's hard not to read this as a simply spiteful move.
Timber harvest doesn't work as an alternative to forest fires. This is timber industry propaganda. It produces shallow ecosystems and monoculture forests. Forest fires work just fine, and we continue to have them every year whether we do controlled burns or not. Many species rely on the natural fire cycle and we shouldn't try to prevent fires through timber harvest, it just makes fires and erosion and biodiversity worse.
Honestly I’d love to see the world move away from timber to an easier to manage renewable resource. Whatever happened to those homes made out of 100% recycled material?
Sustainable forestry is possible, and using wood harvested from such forests in buildings is very climate friendly. It’s one of the best ways to capture carbon for a long time. But of course it requires regulation by effective government, which USA no longer has.
Timber is great as a building material, so long as we source it responsibly, with an eye towards sustainable harvest and minimal ecological impact. It can be done, it's just not as cheap as letting the timber companies do whatever they want.
It's so strange how all the federal agencies all spout obvious propaganda now with this new regime and its loyalty tests.
Just know that the entire rest of the world will generally not be queueing up to kiss the ring. Absolutely no human being, let alone nations full of them, enjoys being humiliated and ground into the dust as a mere opening ploy in negotiations.
Humanity will route around the USA. What sane actor will make deals with a psychopath that rips up contracts it made yesterday?
What functions domestically will kill the host organism, and electing someone different in 4 years won't fix permanent damage done.
Unfortunately, it reflects on all, and our mark is diminished in value. Thanks MAGA.
There is a clear pattern to the madness. First make up something unsubstantiated by fact. Two declare it a crisis that requires acting without congress and circumventing existing laws. Three destroy something that will take generations to repair, if it can be repaired. Four repeat with something else so quickly that people forget the last few things destroyed.
Republicans already laid out as a tactic for the very reasons you state. Crazy thing is they were transparent in how they were going to act.
Project 2025 even documented how this would work
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“Emergency” my ass. More like made up crap to bully Canada by orange buffoon who hates trees as much as windmills.
This executive action blames forest management for increased wildfires, but the IPCC has predicted this exact problem for decades. Unsurprisingly, climate change is not mentioned.
I guess we’re to believe that forests are being poorly managed by every government in every country around the world?
We are going to have to create a new term for "emergency", since this one is used for all manner of situations ranging from timber production to heart attacks.
“Emergency” is the cheat code written into many laws to circumvent ordinary procedural requirements or limits. Would you like it better if they were forced to call it “exigent circumstances” instead?
Maybe we should enumerate the types of emergencies it applies to so there’s a limit beyond a gentleman’s agreement.
Fake it till you make it (a genuine emergency, that is)
Emergency of convenience?
Or a Reichstag fire Emergency? The Reichstag fire was Hitler's pretext for declaring the national emergency that ended democracy during his reign.
Mussolini did it earlier in 1922 but the pretext was more vague. So perhaps just a Mussolini emergency?
Seems like this might be a way to reduce reliance on Canadian timber. Canada exports 45 billion CAD (USD ~30 billion) yearly, mostly to the USA. Substituting American timber could move some of that economic activity south of the border, reducing Canada's GDP by up to 1% and moving several hundred thousand jobs.
Is there a good reason we want to do this though? It doesn’t pay very well and the work is seasonal.
This feels like “adding any job no matter the job” is the goal, as opposed to investing in our citizenry through education, training and using subsidies to help with the transitioning to better paying employment like high tech manufacturing, pharmaceutical production, professional trades etc.
We should really be focusing on the quality of jobs added and encourage that growth, preferably with an eye on long term stability
The last admin attempted that, creating well paying union jobs in clean energy and chip manufacturing. But it takes time, TSMC took 3-4 years from breaking ground to startup in Arizona. The electorate expects results immediately, which is impossible. And so, the thrashing continues. You can’t sell long term investment in the US, there is no will, but systems take time and investment to come up to speed.
I agree with what Biden was trying to do and the last part about the thrashing and lack of long term focus.
However I don’t think it’s the electorate that wants it now the same way a petulant child wants a toy. It’s the lack of clear vision and support that makes the electorate so desperate for it to happen. If we were to actually reinvest in our citizenry (meaning the wealthy in this country would need to pay a little more in taxes) and have proper support for people in the meantime the public would be supportive and it would be better for the country as a whole.
Instead it seems the US is trying to inch its way to becoming some type of modern Game of Thrones
> It’s the lack of clear vision and support that makes the electorate so desperate for it to happen. If we were to actually reinvest in our citizenry (meaning the wealthy in this country would need to pay a little more in taxes) and have proper support for people in the meantime the public would be supportive and it would be better for the country as a whole.
What does this look like? Progressive taxes go up, better safety nets, those are straightforward. What does a solid middle class look like when all the cheap labor manufacturing comes back to automation (~8% of US jobs are manufacturing).
The US service sector is almost 80% of the economy. We are walking into perpetual labor shortages due to structural demographics. So perhaps we don’t need “good, union jobs” and instead need to make sure people are paid enough to live comfortable lives, regardless of job (services, manufacturing, whatever). Some combination of universal healthcare (squeeze out the profit potential, cram down non care costs), public housing (see how Austria does it) to prevent investor capture, increasing the minimum wage further faster, etc.
One can argue that the high level of unionization in the 1950s at around a third of the workforce help set an expectation for job compensation. Kind of a “herd-immunity” against low pay.
Maybe it’s not union jobs as you point out, but I agree that there’s a real cost of living crisis where minimum wage jobs are simply too far from a reasonable (not even comfortable) existence.
The public wouldn't be supportive because they have no idea what is going on or how politics is connected to any of it.
For instance, they don't know who was president in 2020, and everyone thought "the economy" was bad for the last four years at the same time as they answered surveys saying they personally were doing great.
See:
https://minnesotareformer.com/2024/02/16/will-stancil-repeti...
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-median-voter
Statistics can hide or not capture a lot too. That’s the thing we should be talking about and not enough people looked at hard enough.
Stancil isn’t wrong per se, he’s quite right in many respects but I don’t know that his work captures the many facets of what is (and was at the time) going on
It's not a statistical problem. Economic statistics like that aren't complicated indirect calculations, they literally just call people up and ask how they're doing.
I saw one argument that people didn't like high interest rates, but if everyone is saying they are doing fine but have heard other imaginary people are doing badly, that most likely means they've picked up bad vibes from the media.
> everyone thought "the economy" was bad for the last four years at the same time as they answered surveys saying they personally were doing great
Most of HN would rationally answer a survey that way. High paid tech job, flexible hours, good benefits. But also informed enough to know that many others are struggling and financially insecure.
Depending on how the questions were asked, even a person barely getting by might respond that they were personally doing OK (employed, insured, able to pay rent and groceries) while knowing that the economic situation for their friends, family, neighbors was rough and knowing that if they got laid off tomorrow that they'd struggle to find an equivalent replacement job.
What you said is always true, and was /less/ true during that period (because unemployment was down), so it doesn't make sense that people answered this way more often. They were just wrong.
And we all suffer for it.
The education is a hidden selector and got us here in the first place
So much more got us here than that. This was 40 years in the making
We aren't really reliant on Canadian timber. The US produces more board-feet of timber than any other country in the world[1], and most of it is used domestically.
[1]: https://www.eworldtrade.com/blog/top-10-wood-producing-count...
The fact that the US produces more is no proof US doesn’t rely on Canadian timber.
If we were dependent on Canadian timber, we probably wouldn't be exporting the exact same lumber to them[1]. They're our largest importer of lumber.
The simpler explanation is that we have (or had) a free trade agreement with Canada, and it's just plain cheaper for all parties to import or export when/where the supply chain is already present.
[1]: https://oec.world/en/profile/bilateral-product/wood-products...
It could be a distribution cost issue. It could be cheaper to use Canadian lumber in some parts of the US than it is to transport US lumber from where it is sourced to where it is needed.
Yeah, you nailed it.
There are also regional specializations. Like, BC has a substantial amount of Western Red Cedar which the north western states can’t meet the demand for alone.
We also send raw materials to be processed by mills in the USA. This isn’t as common as it once was. Then we also send lumber which US mills process. Some examples would be fir boards would are turned into flooring, window sash, stair treads, etc. BC produces a ton of material like this which is fodder for all kinds of mills, large and small. We try to keep that business here, but we tend to mostly dimension raw materials for export, rather than actually mill them and add any meaningful value.
We import a lot of hardwood lumbers from the USA. I’ve personally bought and milled American hardwoods for furniture in my home. We have beautiful hardwoods in Canada, but there are a lot in the USA we simply don’t grow, or at least not commercially.
Canada sends raw lumber to the US for processing. The US exports processed lumber back to Canada.
There’s also the phenomenon of intra-industry trade. One big example is natural gas, which the US exports to Canada and Mexico, while paradoxically importing natural gas from Canada.
Beef and pork are another example I can think of though, this has to do with specific cuts and quality for various markets.
Why does the US need to do this?
> Canada exports 45 billion CAD (USD ~30 billion) yearly, mostly to the USA
https://vizhub.com/curran/canadian-exports-to-us-treemap?mod...
According to this (2022) it seems lower than that?
trees are not the problem. we have so much timber inventory. you can't increase timber production without solving mill capacity and logging labor issues. we have so many fucking trees. we need more tree nimbys so tree prices will go up. timber != lumber.
We want more timber !! Cut more wood !! Chop chop chop !!
[dead]
Every day a new embarrassment to read. I can’t handle it anymore.
[dead]
I have no pretense they did this in a calculated or intentional way, but I think it's actually probably the correct move given the lack of controlled burns nowdays.
Logging an area doesn’t necessarily decrease the fire danger. If you go to cut blocks in the PNW you’ll notice huge piles of slash in every cut block.
There are ways to log that do decrease fire risk, but generally those are not the techniques used in industrial logging since they are less profitable and tend to leave quite a few trees standing.
Here’s a good primer that lays out the basicshttps://davidsuzuki.org/expert-article/will-logging-more-in-...
Fuel reduction for wildfire mitigation, if that's what you are referring to, doesn't focus on mature trees, which are pretty important for the long term health of forests.
This doesn't so much address the health of forest ecosystems so much as remove them, which really fucks stuff up. Habitat destruction, changes to waterways and luvial fauna, soil erosion. We already do a lot of timber farming, like a lot of DT policies it's hard not to read this as a simply spiteful move.
Timber harvest doesn't work as an alternative to forest fires. This is timber industry propaganda. It produces shallow ecosystems and monoculture forests. Forest fires work just fine, and we continue to have them every year whether we do controlled burns or not. Many species rely on the natural fire cycle and we shouldn't try to prevent fires through timber harvest, it just makes fires and erosion and biodiversity worse.
This. Don’t buy into the propaganda.
Honestly I’d love to see the world move away from timber to an easier to manage renewable resource. Whatever happened to those homes made out of 100% recycled material?
Sustainable forestry is possible, and using wood harvested from such forests in buildings is very climate friendly. It’s one of the best ways to capture carbon for a long time. But of course it requires regulation by effective government, which USA no longer has.
Timber is great as a building material, so long as we source it responsibly, with an eye towards sustainable harvest and minimal ecological impact. It can be done, it's just not as cheap as letting the timber companies do whatever they want.
It's so strange how all the federal agencies all spout obvious propaganda now with this new regime and its loyalty tests. Just know that the entire rest of the world will generally not be queueing up to kiss the ring. Absolutely no human being, let alone nations full of them, enjoys being humiliated and ground into the dust as a mere opening ploy in negotiations. Humanity will route around the USA. What sane actor will make deals with a psychopath that rips up contracts it made yesterday?
What functions domestically will kill the host organism, and electing someone different in 4 years won't fix permanent damage done. Unfortunately, it reflects on all, and our mark is diminished in value. Thanks MAGA.
[dead]
Link is broken?