Colorado’s petition to the federal government to accept the state’s plan for managing more than 4 million acres of roadless national forest land contains road-building exemptions for coal mining, ski area expansion and logging to reduce wildfire danger.

Conservation groups want the Obama administration to reject the Colorado petition and make the 2001 Clinton roadless rule, or a modernized version of it, the law of the land. That rule was quickly tossed out by the Bush administration and tied up in court for years.

State officials argue that the full scope of the mountain pine bark beetle epidemic that has killed more than 2 million acres of lodgepole pine trees in Colorado and Wyoming was still relatively unknown in 2001 and that temporary logging roads are needed to thin dead and dying forests.

One concession of the plan submitted to U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack last week was to take the road-building exemption in and around communities down from a 1.5-mile radius to just half a mile. That’s still too deep into the woods, some experts say.

“If the goal is to protect homes, I would focus the creation of the defensible space very locally. I know of no evidence that would argue that it needs to be more than a mile or beyond 40 meters for that matter,” said Dr. Barry Noon, a professor of wildlife ecology at Colorado State University.

“I have a cabin, for example, in the Roosevelt National Forest, at 8,600 feet, that’s surrounded by a lot of dead lodgepole, and I’m simply going to thin my forest out to about 100 feet.”

But wildland firefighting crews on the Western Slope wouldn’t mind have a little more elbow room to battle blazes in and around towns, pointing out that a fire in Glenwood Springs a few years ago jumped Interstate 70 and the Colorado River. In Vail, firefighters are trying to clear a 150-foot buffer zone around the entire town.

“Localized treatment of bug-infested stands makes sense to me,” Noon said. “What doesn’t make sense to us is the proposals to harvest bug-infested stands or thin them at broad spatial scales, and particularly if doing that requires the building of new roads. There is an extensive scientific literature documenting the negative effects of roads on ecosystems.”

Sen. Mark Udall told the Colorado Independent he backs the state rule, which was crafted in a laborious process that began during Republican Gov. Bill Owens’ administration and was continued by Democratic Gov. Bill Ritter.

“I support the roadless proposal that the governor and the previous governor and a team of citizens from across the political spectrum have designed,” Udall said. “Not everybody agrees with every single element in the roadless plan, but I would like to see it applied to Colorado so that we can protect those landscapes that are roadless for their water and air and wildlife values.”

Asked specifically about a recent report co-authored by Noon and concluding that beetle-killed forests aren’t necessarily more susceptible to wildfire, which is mainly driven by drought, Udall said mountain communities and Front Range water supplies are clearly in danger.

“Those studies are certainly worth considering and drought certainly plays a role in the potential for wildfire, but at the same time when you have standing trees that are all dead, particularly before they cast all their needles, you’re really playing with fire if you let them stand in close proximity to communities or reservoirs or water treatment systems,” Udall said.

Udall has introduced the National Forest Insect and Disease Emergency Act, which would provide more funds to the Forest Service to mitigate the fire danger posed by the bark beetle epidemic.

State Rep. Christine Scanlan (D-Dillon), whose district includes some of the counties hardest hit by the beetle-kill outbreak, praised Ritter’s plan for dealing with the wildfire danger head-on.

“Colorado industries that depend on development in wilderness, such as mining and skiing, would be equally ravaged were this proposal to completely prohibit development in roadless woodland,” Scanlan said in a prepared statement.

“Gov. Ritter’s proposal resolves these conflicts by allowing limited expansions to meet pressing needs for beetle response, ski slope expansion and coal mine operations. This proposal ensures that all animals – both those who live in the woods and those who merely work or relax there – can fully appreciate Colorado’s natural splendor.”

Dr. Stuart Pimm, chairman of Duke University’s Department of Conservation, disagrees wholeheartedly. He sent a letter to the Obama administration late last year urging a reversal on the apparent federal acceptance of the Colorado plan.

“Large blocks of forests protect watersheds and biodiversity, while their destruction massively contributes to greenhouse gas emissions and consequent climate disruption,” Pimm said. “It is essential that we keep these forests intact and not sacrifice the ecosystem services they provide for the short-term profits of special interests.”

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For the second day in a row, Republicans successfully canceled a Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing on Udall’s National Forest Insect and Disease Emergency Act, which would provide more funds to the Forest Service to mitigate the fire danger posed by Colorado’s ongoing pine bark beetle epidemic.

State Sen. Dan Gibbs, D-Silverthorne, whose mountain district has been ravaged by a more than 90 percent mortality rate in huge swaths of national forest, flew to Washington at his own expense– a $600 roundtrip– but had to return before he could testify.

“If Republican leadership had any idea of what we are facing in Colorado with this epidemic, they would stop these games now and let us do our jobs and help Colorado with this serious issue,” Gibbs said in a release. A former wildland firefighter, Gibbs has been very active on both the state and national beetle-kill-mitigation front.

The issue is largely nonpartisan in Colorado, where every passing fire season brings more and more concern about potentially catastrophic blazes in and around the state’s mountain communities. Finding funds to thin dead forests close to towns, ski resorts and reservoirs has been a top priority for Udall dating back to his days in the U.S. House.

“We had a year-long debate on health care insurance reform,” Udall said on a conference call with reporters Wednesday. “There were over 100 amendments included in the bill itself that were introduced by Republicans. It was controversial and contentious, but we resolve our difference at the ballot box on Election Day and we resolve our differences in Congress by holding up or down votes.”

Udall said playing games with public safety was a dangerous gambit for Republicans, especially using an arcane rule that allows members of the Senate to object to any hearing starting after 2 p.m., as well as any hearing that starts two hours after a Senate session begins.

Udall said an Armed Service Committee hearing on the 2011 budget and military strategy in the Pacific was canceled over the objections of ranking Republican Sen. John McCain, who asked for an exception. Two generals and an admiral traveled from Korea, Hawaii and Nebraska to testify.

Udall said a Veteran’s Affairs Committee hearing on plans to end homelessness among veterans and a Committee on Environment and Public Works hearing on improving energy security and the environment through transportation policy were both cut short because of the two-hour rule.

“That’s the definition of an arcane rule, but one that could create great mischief as it has over the last few days,” Udall said. “Who wants to work around rules like that when you’ve got fire season looming?”

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Photo: Bob Spencer

Co-sponsored by Republican U.S. Sen. James Risch of Idaho — whose state also has been hit hard by the rice-sized bugs — the National Forest Insect and Disease Emergency Act would provide tax and other incentives for companies harvesting beetle-killed dead trees for biofuel or biopower.

“[The bill] pays people to use biofuels in productive ways, which is already allowed in the Farm Act, and then those biofuels can be credited under the Clean Air Act, interestingly enough,” Udall said in a conference call with reporters Monday. “The biofuel credit is not being used to the extent it could be right now. That would be an important development for the Forest Service as they encourage potential harvesters who would want to turn that biomass into biofuel.”

Calling the epidemic that has killed millions of acres of lodgepole pines across the state “one of the biggest natural disasters we face in the West,” Udall outlined a bill that doesn’t inject much cash into the equation but instead aims to provide public land managers with better regulatory tools for dealing with the pine beetle fallout.

The bill would authorize creation of “insect emergency areas” that the Forest Service can prioritize for treatment to reduce fuel loads and therefore fire risks; expedite environmental analysis by encouraging use of the Healthy Forest Restoration Act; expand throughout the West the “good neighbor authority” used in Colorado and Utah to treat public lands adjacent to private property and homes; and provide some funding for stewardship contracts to clear out beetle kill.

Foresters and other user groups such as ski resorts trying to cope with the decade-old outbreak have for years complained that rules dictating timber sales have hampered thinning efforts near mountain towns and other tourist attractions, putting key segments of the state’s economy at risk of catastrophic wildfires. Time-consuming environmental analysis requirements and the price per tree for harvesting low-value beetle kill have made widespread thinning difficult, they claim.

But environmentalists don’t want to see longstanding environmental review policies tossed aside so quickly, particularly given the ongoing debate about the effectiveness of thinning efforts deep into forests. While they agree with aggressive thinning and clearing dead trees near communities — the so-called Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) — conservationists say there isn’t much benefit in working too deeply into the national forests.

“My belief has always been that when you put the right policies in place and you make the right policy proposals, the politics follow along appropriately,” Udall said. “There is a public safety concern here, there is an economic concern, there’s also an environmental concern, and they’re all linked together.”

Udall talked about the state’s largest wildfire in 2002, the Hayman blaze, which consumed more than 138,000 acres of national forest near the Front Range. That fire caused erosion that adversely impacted Denver’s drinking water supplies. He also acknowledged the threat to hundreds of miles of power lines crisscrossing federal lands hit hard by beetles.

Biopower advocates have long argued that existing technology widely used in Europe and increasingly in other parts of the United States would allow companies to chip up dead trees no longer suitable for commercial lumber, gasify the chips at high heat and convert the biomass into heat or electricity.

The process is virtually carbon-neutral when factoring in decomposition if the trees are left to rot or wildfire if they’re left to burn. Stewardship contracts are viewed as key in providing long-term feedstock. Udall has sent a letter of support to the Department of Energy for a biomass power plant Vail is seeking a grant to build.

But on Monday Udall talked about converting beetle-kill trees, which are already being turned into pellets for wood stoves in Kremmling, into other forms of biofuel.

“There’s been a lot of conversations among a lot of us about how do you create markets for this potential biofuel,” he said. “You can only make so many fence posts and so many pencils and so many bark-beetle belt buckles.

“And when you put into the mix that much of this timber is not particularly well-suited for middle- or even high-end lumber markets, then there’s a natural inclination to consider whether, with the new technologies we have, could you turn this biomass into biofuels, particularly ethanols. And the Farm Act, the Ag Credit Act and the Clean Air Act all provide opportunities to provide additional incentives to see if this is a real and sustainable operation or economic activity.”

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