Dr. James Hansen, former Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and current Director of the Program on Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions at Columbia University, penned a January 29, 2026 opinion piece in the Boston Globe speaking out against wildfire “fuel reduction” in forests and opposing the “Fix Our Forests” Act, which would bypass bedrock environmental laws to ramp up public lands logging as proposed by the Trump administration.
In his piece, “A logging bill masquerading as wildfire protection” (also published on his Substack), Dr. Hansen says “considerable evidence establishes that the open conditions created by such logging may lead to lower humidity, higher wind speed, higher temperature, abundant grass fuel, and increased fire intensity.”
Dr. Hansen’s concerns focus on what he calls the “deliberately misnamed,” Fix Our Forests Act, which has already passed through the U.S. House of Representatives, with its companion bill introduced by Colorado’s U.S. Senator John Hickenlooper potentially coming to a vote on the Senate floor any day.
Fix Our Forests is a “Trojan horse, pretending to protect vulnerable communities from wildfire risk and improve forest health. It does neither,” Dr. Hansen writes. “Instead, it heeds the command of President Trump’s Executive Order 14225, which calls for the ‘immediate expansion’ of US timber production from lands managed by the US Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management.”
Dr. Hansen cites an abundance of peer viewed scientific studies, including those of Dr. Chad Hanson from California, whose work and character has been relentlessly attacked in the media by government agencies that need taxpayer funding to carry out “fuel reduction,” such as the U.S. Forest Service.
Dr. Hansen also highlights the disastrous climate impacts of expanding already unprecedented levels of public lands logging, pointing out how, “thinning may increase forest-derived carbon emissions ‘by three to five times relative to fire alone,’ in part because only a fraction of the carbon in felled trees ends up stored as lumber.”
The western U.S. is facing an unprecedented tens to hundreds millions of acres of proposed “fuel reduction” across federal, state, county, and even municipal forests, including the largest logging scheme in Colorado history. Sadly, much of this scientifically-contested cutting is supported by corporate-funded NGOs like The Nature Conservancy, and is promoted uncritically by most media outlets, if it’s reported on at all.
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