David Tenny

Across rural America, pulp and paper mills have been closing or downsizing at an alarming rate. These mills once purchased their wood fiber, including pulpwood, chips and sawdust, from sustainably managed forests. Mill closures have caused 50 million tons of annual wood fiber processing capacity to disappear, wiping out hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue for forest owners and sawmills. This isn’t just a market problem. It’s a rural jobs problem, a housing problem and a forest-health problem. …We need new markets for this material.  A simple, commonsense and bipartisan way to help create new markets is to fix the definitions of woody biomass in the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) so wood fiber can fully qualify as an eligible feedstock, as intended. …The good news is… Airlines want more sustainable fuel, and forest owners and sawmills have wood fiber to create biofuels.