Last week, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) announced the implementation of Phase VII of the Lacey Act. This extends coverage to a wider range of products. Now, declarations will be required for all plant products, including wooden furniture and timber, unless they are made of 100% composite materials. Per the Federal Register notice: “Currently, most of HTS chapter 4412 has already been implemented, with two specified exemptions. APHIS established the exemptions in 2009 as a temporary exception for plywood that contained composite material. Since then, APHIS has established a special use designation for such material and is therefore eliminating the exemptions, and the entire chapter will be covered.” …Phase VII includes a wider range of products including industrial or medicinal plants, purses, plywood, laminated wood, tools, matches with natural wood stems, footwear, as well as goods made of natural cork, bamboo, and rattan.
In a May 2, I concluded that Lumber is in a bearish trend and the trend is always your best friend. The path of least resistance of physical lumber futures could depend on the Fed’s monetary policy path over the coming weeks and months. Higher rates will likely be bearish, while rate cuts could ignite an explosive upside move. Nearby July physical lumber futures were at the $527 per 1,000 board feet level on May 1 and have only edged higher to the $538.50 level on June 1. …We could see a sudden rally if mortgage rates fall below 6%, as many existing homeowners have financing at or below the 3% level. The existing home shortage means the demand for new construction could soar, and lumber is the critical ingredient in homebuilding. …Lumber prices are stuck in neutral, for now. When they decide to move, watch out, as another period of explosive and implosive price action will likely follow.
Fueled by a lack of existing inventory and pent-up demand, single-family permit growth is occurring across all tracked geographic regions of the nation. The opposite holds true for the multifamily sector, according to the latest findings from the NAHB Home Building Geography Index for the first quarter of 2024. After continued declines in the growth rates of the single-family Index, all markets moved into positive territory for single-family construction. This marks the first time since the first quarter of 2021 for which all regions are showing year-over-year growth. Single-family growth rates declined to lows in the first quarter of 2023, but as lack of existing inventory and pent-up demand started to have a larger effect, single-family construction moved upwards over the year. …Looking at single-family HBGI market shares, small metro – core counties continued to have the largest market share at 28.8%.
Washington D.C. – U.S. Senator Lisa Murkowski, Vice Chairman of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, introduced S.4370, the Tribal Forest Protection Act Amendments Act of 2024, to promote greater indigenous stewardship of Federal and Indian forest and rangelands. The 2004 TFPA law was intended to protect Indian forest lands and resources from various threats, including wildfires, by allowing Tribes to enter into agreements with the Forest Service or the Bureau of Land Management to carry out forest management activities on federal lands that are “bordering or adjacent to” lands under tribal jurisdiction. In practical terms, the “bordering or adjacent to” requirement has proved too restrictive as it does not adequately capture the sites, features, cultural landscapes, sacred places or objects with cultural value to Native peoples that may be located on federal land that does not border Indian land. 
State officials on Tuesday announced awarding about $6.3 million in grants to businesses, nonprofit groups and school districts around the North State to find solutions to reducing forest waste that pose a fire risk from thick and overgrown land. The money is designed to help businesses purchase equipment to process forest waste that typically can’t be milled into lumber. The money also will be used to train people to do forest thinning and prescribed fire and other logging and natural resource jobs. The state has set a goal to annually thin out and treat 1 million acres of overgrown and dense forests to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfires that have devastated communities and forests across the state over the past 10 years, said John McCarthy, the California Department Forestry and Fire Protection’s program manager for wood products and bioenergy.
The cause of climate change is excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Forests can play an important role in removing carbon dioxide from the air, as they transform it into tree trunks, roots, and leaves. Much of the Hoosier National Forest has been accumulating carbon for more than 80 years. Since forest activists convinced the U.S. Forest Service to reduce the amount of timber harvesting in 1990, the Forest Service estimates the amount of carbon stored in the Hoosier has increased more than 40%. …Allowing forests to mature allows them to absorb and store more carbon dioxide. When trees are harvested, some of the carbon remains locked away in the form of wood products such as lumber in houses. However, the process of timbering releases about 10-25% of the carbon from a stand back to the atmosphere. The Forest Service’s plan for logging … mature forest in the Hoosier National Forest will release much of its long-stored carbon.
The U.S. exported 819,341.5 metric tons of wood pellets in April, down from 938,662.3 metric tons the previous month, but up from 720,209.2 metric tons in April of last year, according to data released by the USDA Foreign Agricultural Service on June 6. The U.S. exported wood pellets to approximately 16 countries in April. The U.K. was the top destination for U.S. wood pellet exports at 500,136.1 metric tons, followed by Japan at 180,621 metric tons, France at 62,371.9 metric tons, the Netherlands at 32,400.9 metric tons and Belgium-Luxembourg at 24,717.8 metric tons.
WASHINGTON — Month after month, global temperatures are setting new records. Meanwhile, scientists and climate policymakers warn of the growing likelihood that the planet will soon exceed the warming target set at the landmark Paris 2015 climate talks. Making sense of the run of climate extremes may be challenging for some. Here’s a look at what scientists are saying. The European Union’s climate-watching agency Copernicus declared last month that it was the hottest May on record, marking the 12th straight monthly record high. Separately, the World Meteorological Organization estimated that there’s almost a one-in-two chance that average global temperatures from 2024 to 2028 will surpass the hoped-for warming limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times that was agreed in the Paris talks. And one more: Earth warmed at a slightly faster rate in 2023 than 2022, a group of 57 scientists determined in a report in the journal Earth System Science Data.
DOTHAN, Ala. – A site dedicated to sustainable and renewable bioenergy has made its home in Dothan, Alabama. A partnership between Rex Lumber and Brian Fehr Group led to the grand opening of Peak Renewable BioEnergy. Peak Renewables BioEnergy is a Canadian company that says it is dedicated to harnessing the power of renewable resources and sustainable practices to reduce its carbon footprint and ensure a sustainable, clean energy future. To achieve its goal, Peak Renewables manufactures fibrous utility wood pellets as an economical substitute for coal. The Dothan plant receives wood shavings from Rex Lumber plants in Alabama and Florida, then those shavings become wood pellets. After being created at the Dothan plant, the pellets are shipped to Europe. “This is just an expansion of [that] process and allows us to take our by-products and further use them in an environmental way”, said Caroline Dauzat, an owner of Rex Lumber.
OREGON – The end of wildfire season is a relief for residents in areas prone to blazes this time of year, but it often marks the beginning of a new battle between first responders and their own mental health. For wildland firefighters, wildfire season–which from mid-May through late September–is a seasonal opportunity to earn extra money, but it can come with a hefty price tag. “There can be acute exposures where it’s a massive call where there’s highly traumatic events; those are easily identifiable, and they never go away. They stay with you for the rest of your career. And then there’s the incremental, the calls that add up over time,” said Matt Laas, fire service safety officer for the Oregon State Fire Marshal. Laas has worked as a first responder for 28 years and says firefighters usually work 24 hour shifts with their off hours plagued by sleep deprivation.