Doug LaMalfa

I mean, I just--unbelievable to me that we think we are going to electrify everything and do it economically.

We have to vastly increase our pace and scale of doing forestry work, instead of these half measures we have been doing so long.

we are somehow not in favor of your mission and firefighting and forest management.

We need more water storage. We need smarter allocation of water and not so much environmental water running out.

I was pretty bummed out here recently in Committee that the Forest Service testified against my bipartisan legislation.

I just cannot imagine how taking this tool away upon the millions of acres we are burning every year, especially in the West, is going to be a good idea while we wait for a brand-new process to relitigate whether this is a good material.

Congress is going to have to just direct which projects are to be built and get them going because agency staff have figured out the formula to keep any project from ever getting built.

I think they have maybe spent around $20 billion for a project originally told to be $33 billion, and probably estimates are conservative at $120 billion.

I remind you, CO2 is only--take this home--0.04 percent of our atmosphere. It is not the end of our world we have in CO2.

They didn't listen, and now they are dealing with the ramifications.

Thank you, Chairman Bentz, and also Chairman Westerman, for allowing us to have this field hearing...

Since 2000, we have averaged more than 70,000 wildfires per year and an average of 7 million acres burned annually.

What are we doing here when we can hardly keep the retardant available to us, yet so little is being done on these illegal grow sites for marijuana and such?

To every single Member of the Congress in this room, it is your constituents who will be put in danger if there is injunction of fire retardant.

We appreciate your leadership on this critical issue and that the legislation has strong bi-partisan support.

Yes, and we are so far behind, though, now it is really hard to introduce the fire, so we have to do a lot more mechanical harvest and find a narrow window of time in the winter or whatever that you can actually burn things, which I…

We must be able to fight wildfires with everything we have, and limiting firefighting agencies' ability to do so flies in the face of forest conservation and our mission to protect nearby residents.

the bogging down is what is causing us to lose.

We support your efforts on H.R. 1586.

And we should be ashamed, totally ashamed, when we let our public lands grow up to where they are fire hazards...

The ACRES Act is a simple solution to hold our Federal agencies accountable, to see the actual work they are doing will reduce the enormous risk of wildfire.

The use of retardant is a vital tool that our firefighters need to have at their disposal.

In the Forest Service testimony, it was expressed that the Biden administration opposes touching the Clean Water Act.

I am in full support of your proposed legislation H.R. 1586, Forest Protection and Wildland Firefighter Safety Act of 2023.

It seems to make perfect sense, the correlation there between fire and the overloaded inventory.