Recent headlines have climate change-concerned Americans scratching their heads. Did President Biden’s Earth Day message about mitigating climate change by protecting mature and old-growth forests get lost in the woods? What about his executive order to protect 30% of the U.S. by 2030?

In September, flush with money from the Inflation Reduction Act, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced a package of up to $2.8 billion in grants to timber owners and producers across the U.S. to “improve” forest management. Of those funds, $30 million were awarded to New England. And then President Biden declared the week of Oct. 17 National Forest Products Week, celebrating products made from logged trees instead of the clean water, carbon storage and wildlife habitats that are maximized by leaving forests alone. Despite the messages about climate change, this money isn’t for protecting forests; rather, it’s to cut them down.

Look: We all use wood products, just as we all use electricity, but “Climate Smart Forestry” lives up to its hype just about as well as “Clean Coal.” Despite its trendy greenwashed label, the success of lumber and wood-products in storing carbon fails miserably to measure up to what living trees do. Each and every day, the forests of New England suck carbon out of our air – it’s how they grow. Carbon, water and sun create the alchemy that makes wood. When left alone, eastern U.S. forests become a carbon sink of global significance.

Misleading language from a USDA news release found its way into every media outlet that ran the story around New England, including in Maine. The Associated Press reported: “The U.S. Department of Agriculture is funding a major push to try to store more carbon in New England’s forests.” But the project’s aims are anything but.

When trees are cut, carbon accumulation comes to an abrupt halt. Much of the stored carbon is immediately lost to the atmosphere, and it will take generations for the debt to be repaid. When a tree is cut and processed it will typically lose 30% to 50% of its stored carbon to the atmosphere. Eighty-six percent of the carbon lost from northeastern U.S. forests, annually, stems from logging. By one estimate, when allowed to grow old, New England forests will accumulate and store an average of two to four times more carbon than current levels. Old forests support our most imperiled forest species, produce exceptional water quality, and are more resilient to changes in the climate.

Common tree species in New England may live 400 years, but few trees of this age exist in our region today. Less than 0.4% of the region’s original, old-growth forests remain.

The trouble is, only 3.3% of New England’s forests – including just 3.7% of Maine’s – are on track to grow old. Two studies from 2022, one from Maine and one from New Brunswick, point to how current logging harms populations of native mammals and birds.

Better for our climate, for our water quality and for biodiversity are investments to rapidly increase the pace and scale of protections for private forest lands from logging, to recover the old-growth forests that once blanketed New England.

If we are serious about storing carbon in our forests to mitigate climate change, an even more important opportunity in the short term is increasing protections for New England’s state and federal forests, which on average contain 30% more carbon than private forests across the region, and only provide 2.8% of northern New England’s wood supply. The Biden administration and USDA should stop promoting myths and act today to secure carbon by promulgating a durable rule that puts all mature and old-growth forests on federal public lands off limits to timber harvest across the US.

Time is running out to take action on the climate and extinction crises. For Maine and New England’s private and public forests, the best solution is remarkably simple, low cost and rapidly scalable: Let our trees grow old.

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