These days, the logging industry’s representatives sound oddly happy about all those dead trees in California’s forests. And they should be — they’ve successfully manipulated public fears about wildfire into a last-minute legislative bailout for expensive, greenhouse gas-belching “biomass” power plants. Logging interests are convinced the bailout will allow them to ramp up logging of public and private forests statewide.

The price tag? Nobody knows yet. But you’ll pay it on your electric bill.

And your money will be wasted because the logging industry’s whole premise is wrong. Three scientific studies have examined actual fires occurring in California forest types with different levels of “snags” (standing dead trees) from drought and native bark beetles. They all found that snags do not increase fire intensity or spread, contrary to widespread misconceptions.

One study published last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that “the annual area burned in the western United States has not increased in direct response to bark beetle activity.” Another determined that, “in contrast to common assumptions of positive feedbacks, we find that insects generally reduce the severity of subsequent wildfires” in conifer forests.

Making matters worse, burning trees for bioenergy is a climate-change disaster. Measured at the smokestack, burning forest biomass emits a shocking 45 percent more CO2 into the atmosphere per megawatt hour of energy produced than burning coal.

Moreover, the notion that patches of forest dominated by snags are somehow destroyed or lost is so scientifically inaccurate that it’s an urban myth. Such areas are known by ecologists as “snag forest habitat,” and they are comparable to old-growth forest in terms of native biodiversity and wildlife abundance. Last year, more than 250 scientists urged Congress to oppose logging of snag forests, noting that they are “quite simply some of the best wildlife habitat in forests.”

Public safety is also at stake. The language in the biomass bailout bill, SB 859 — inserted into a budget bill on the last day of the legislative session, with no debate or public review — could actually make fires more dangerous for towns in forested areas.

Instead of focusing on forests adjacent to communities and emphasizing protection of lives and property, the bill would throw public money at private biomass power plants to take countless trees from deep in the forest where more logging won’t protect anyone.

Diverting resources away from community protection doesn’t make any sense. That is, unless your biomass plant needs a bailout and you don’t really care where the money comes from. The logging industry concedes that these old tree-burning power plants can’t compete with modern, efficient renewable energy. That’s why these companies like SB 859: it forces utilities to keep buying expensive biomass electricity. And it forces all utility customers to pay for it.

It’s a disturbing example of how special interests squeeze money and favors out of our government: Identify a public concern, twist the facts to fit their agenda and convince a pliant legislature to do their bidding in the dark of the last night of the legislative session.

Be sure to think of them next time you open your electric bill.

Chad Hanson is a research ecologist with the John Muir Project, based in Big Bear City. Kevin Bundy, based in Oakland, is the climate legal director of the Center for Biological Diversity.