MONTANA

US to plant more trees as climate change kills off forests

BILLINGS – The Biden administration on July 25 said the government will plant more than one billion trees across millions of acres of burned and dead woodlands in the U.S. West, as officials struggle to counter the increasing toll on the nation’s forests from wildfires, insects and other manifestations of climate change.

Destructive fires in recent years that burned too hot for forests to regrow naturally have far outpaced the government’s capacity to plant new trees. That has created a backlog of 4.1 million acres in need of replanting, officials said.

The U.S. Agriculture Department said it will have to quadruple the number of tree seedlings produced by nurseries to get through the backlog and meet future needs. That comes after Congress last year passed bipartisan legislation directing the Forest Service to plant 1.2 billion trees over the next decade and after President Joe Biden in April ordered the agency to make the nation’s forests more resilient as the globe gets hotter.

Much of the administration’s broader agenda to tackle climate change remains stalled amid disagreement in Congress, where Democrats hold a razor-thin majority. That has left officials to pursue a more piecemeal approach with incremental measures such as the announcement.

To erase the backlog of decimated forest acreage, the Forest Service plans over the next couple years to scale up work from about 60,000 acres replanted last year to about 400,000 acres annually, officials said. Most of the work will be in western states where wildfires now occur year round and the need is most pressing, said David Lytle, the agency’s director of forest management.

Blazes have charred 5.6 million acres so far in the U.S. this year, putting 2022 on track to match or exceed the record-setting 2015 fire season, when 10.1 million acres burned.

Many forests regenerate naturally after fires, but if the blazes get too intense they can leave behind barren landscapes that linger for decades before trees come back.

WYOMING

Governor certifies trigger abortion bill

CHEYENNE – Gov. Mark Gordon issued a letter on July 22 to the Wyoming secretary of state, stating Gordon has certified the trigger abortion prohibition bill.

The governor’s action will take effect in five days, meaning that, in most cases, abortions will be prohibited in the state.

In a one-paragraph letter to Ed Buchanan, the current and outgoing secretary of state, Gordon wrote that he was certifying the results of the attorney general’s review “stating that enforcement of” the Wyoming statute “is authorized under the recent decision of the United States Supreme Court.”

This was in response to a report sent a day earlier to his office and to the Wyoming Legislature’s Joint Judiciary Committee by state Attorney General Bridget Hill. She reviewed the final Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade at the end of June, and she determined the enforcement of Enrolled Act 57 would be fully authorized under the decision.

“I believe that the decision to regulate abortion is properly left to the states.” Gordon said in a separate statement.

He also said that as a pro-life governor, his focus will continue to be on ensuring the state is doing all it can to support Wyoming mothers, children and families.

State’s rig counts little changed, up from last year

CHEYENNE – The number of rigs drilling for oil and natural gas in the state is little-changed from the previous month, yet they have more than doubled in count from a year earlier, recently released Wyoming statistics show.

The rig count in recent days was 21, the Wyoming Oil and Gas Conservation Commission reported this past week. In a similar report issued by the agency about a month ago, the figure was 19, which itself was unchanged from a month before that.

However, in keeping with recent trends, the latest figures are significantly up from a year ago. The most recent rig count of 21 compares to 10 at this time last year, the oil and gas commission said. It cited Baker Hughes historical records.

The energy industry has rebounded somewhat as prices for gas, oil and other energy commodities have risen. High prices at the gas pump have attracted considerable attention locally and throughout the nation.

In the state overall, most of the rigs currently deployed are for oil, an Oil and Gas Conservation Commission spokesperson said by phone on July 15. She noted that the latest figures are from recent days, as reported by a subscription-based energy information tracking service.

NEW MEXICO

FBI: 170 missing Native Americans in state, reservation

ALBUQUERQUE – In an effort to address the crisis of missing Indigenous people, the FBI announced on July 25 it is releasing a list of more than 170 Native Americans it has verified as missing throughout New Mexico and the Navajo Nation that stretches into Arizona and Utah.

FBI officials said at a news conference that the effort is being publicized to help locate the missing individuals, increase transparency and encourage relatives of missing Indigenous persons who aren’t on the list to reach out to local law enforcement and file a report.

The project is in addition to the FBI’s continuing efforts to call attention to unsolved Indigenous homicides and missing person cases it is investigating.

FBI officials said the list is the result of almost six months of work combining and validating different databases of missing Indigenous persons in New Mexico.

The FBI plans to update the names monthly.

Partners involved in the project include the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Bureau of Indian Affairs Office of Justice Services, New Mexico’s Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Relatives Task Force, New Mexico Attorney General’s Office, New Mexico Department of Public Safety, New Mexico Department of Indian Affairs, Bernalillo County District Attorney’s Office and the City of Albuquerque Office of Equity and Inclusion.

State’s tax changes benefit lower-income residents

SANTA FE – The tax burden for funding state government and public schools in New Mexico is shifting slightly toward wealthier residents as the state stops collecting taxes on most Social Security benefits.

The legislature’s budget and accountability office estimates that recent state tax reforms will reduce state income by about $94 million during the budget year that began July 1. New Mexico this month stopped collecting income taxes on social security benefits for individuals who make $100,000 or less, or joint tax filers who report $150,000 or less in annual income.

The estimates were published July 19 as the legislature’s lead state budget-writing committee met in Silver City to discuss tax policy, wildfire recovery efforts and trends in crime and crime prevention.

New Mexico will ramp down income tax collections further through an exemption for military pensions, the creation of a child tax credit and an expansion of other tax credits aimed at low-income households.

As a result, state government will forgo an estimated $403 million in annual income for the fiscal year starting in July 2023.

The analysis indicates that tax changes will benefit lower income residents more than those in upper income brackets.

At the same time, the state’s direct financial reliance on the energy industry – dominated by fossil fuels – is expected to increase.

New Mexico, the nation’s No. 2 producer of crude oil behind Texas, is experiencing a windfall in state government income tied to oil and natural gas production through a variety of taxes, royalties and lease sales as energy prices surge.