Last October, CSE and Save the Olympic Peninsulaprevailed in their lawsuitseeking to force Washington’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR) to consider climate impacts of logging mature legacy forests as required by the State Environmental Policy Act (SEPA). In that ruling, Judge Keith Harper found that DNR’s determinations of non-significance (DNS) for two Jefferson County timber sales were clearly erroneous for failing to make any mention, let alone analysis of, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with logging or other climate impacts such as increased temperatures or landslide risk.

Instead of using that decision as an opportunity to protect carbon rich forests from logging, DNR has doubled down on its pattern of climate denial by authorizing dozens of new, high impact logging proposals that once again fail to account for climate impacts. But this time, the agency has cut and pasted about a page and a half of obfuscatory language into its SEPA environmental checklists in hopes of heading off round two of climate litigation. 

In response, CSE and its partners Legacy Forest Defense Coalition (LFDC) and STOP have challenged the agency’s failures once again and will likely be heading back to court to expose the myths and falsehoods contained in the band-aids DNR has slapped on to its environmental checklists. In particular:

• Despite Judge Harper’s decision, DNR claims that it has no obligation to consider climate impacts at the project level. Instead, the agency argues that generic discussions contained in past, non-project EISs shield the agency from doing anything more. However, SEPA, recent court decisions, and DNR Commissioner’s Order 202006 do not, in fact, provide this discretion. To the extent that prior landscape or programmatic EISs are relevant, they must be incorporated into project-level SEPA documents through an orderly phased review process and supplemented with site specific information, such as estimates of project-level GHG emissions, the forgone sequestration associated with new roads, or temperature changes associated with loss of the forest canopy.

• DNR asserts that “[u]sing a gross estimate of carbon dioxide released from the harvest of an individual stand of timber provides no useful information” for evaluating climate impacts. This is an irrational statement. Anthropogenic releases of GHG pollution are the primary driver of climate change. And mature forest logging projects like the Juneau timber sale are ‘carbon bombs’ that each release tens of thousands of metric tons CO2 and convert some of the world’s most productive carbon sinks into net sources of emissions for well over a decade after logging. Quantifying GHG pollution released or committed in association with DNR logging projects would provide the agency with information needed to minimize such pollution in project level design through, for example, barring any new road construction, logging of mature forests, or clearcutting.