As Oregon Gov. Kate Brown crafted a bill in 2018 to enact sweeping limits on greenhouse gas emissions, leaders at an obscure state agency worked behind the scenes to discredit research they feared would persuade her to target one of the state’s most powerful industries. (1/10)
The research calculated for the first time how much carbon was lost to the atmosphere as a result of cutting trees in Oregon. It concluded that logging, once thought to have no negative effect on global warming, was among the state’s biggest climate polluters. (2/10)
Researchers led by Oregon State University forest ecologist Beverly Law found that the state could dramatically shrink its carbon footprint if trees on private land were cut less frequently, a recommendation that pushed against the approach of Wall Street investment funds. (3/10)
The findings alarmed forest industry leaders in Oregon, who quickly assembled scientists and lobbyists to challenge the study and its authors. (4/10)
Among the groups leading the fight was the Oregon Forest Resources Institute, a quasi-governmental state agency funded with tax dollars that is, by law, restricted from influencing or attempting to influence policy. (5/10)
Leaders at the institute worked behind the scenes for months to persuade lawmakers and the dean of Oregon State’s College of Forestry that the research was flawed, informing timber lobbyists of their efforts along the way. (6/10)
The institute needs to “develop a swift, fairly immediate, response so that this study doesn’t drive all of the initial narrative,” Timm Locke, the agency’s forest products director at the time, wrote in a May 2018 email with the subject line “Bev Law carbon BS.” (7/10)
Then, Locke, a public employee, offered to help a timber lobbyist draft a counterargument “those of us in the industry can use.” (8/10)
The email is one obtained as part of an investigation by @ Oregonian, @OPB and @ProPublica, which found that the institute has acted as a public-relations agency and lobbying arm for the timber industry, skirting legal constraints that forbid it from doing so. (9/10)
Read the full story: trib.al/cpW0IrK (10/10)
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