Whitehouse, Schiff Introduce Bill to Reduce Wildfire Risk with Innovative Carbon Removal Solutions

Washington, D.C.—U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works (EPW), and Senator Adam Schiff (D-CA) introduced the Wildfire Reduction and Carbon Removal Act of 2025, which would reduce wildfire risk by scaling up carbon removal solutions.

Climate change is making wildfires more intense, which is causing hundreds of billions of dollars in economic losses each year, generating significant emissions, and creating a catastrophic feedback loop. While removing excess vegetation has been proven to reduce wildfire intensity, particularly in Western forests, insufficient public funding and the lack of commercial markets mean that flammable fuels are still building up to dangerous levels. Even where flammable fuels are removed, they are typically burned or landfilled, increasing overall costs and generating significant emissions.

The Wildfire Reduction and Carbon Removal Act would create a tax credit to incentivize biomass carbon removal and storage (BiCRS) using flammable fuels in high-risk firesheds, providing much-needed resources for adequate wildfire management, and securely storing the carbon from removed vegetation to reduce overall climate risk. Only biomass meeting region- and ecosystem-specific criteria to maximize fire reduction benefits and avoid environmental harms would be eligible for the credit.

“Climate change is making wildfires more intense and more destructive, increasingly putting lives, communities, and our entire economy at risk,” said Senator Whitehouse.  “Carbon removal is a key tool in our arsenal to mitigate these disasters, protect families’ health, and address the economy-wide harms from the climate crisis.”

“Removing the fuel for devastating wildfires while eliminating carbon pollution is a win-win for our communities and for future generations. This bill provides the ‘carrot’ to incentivize responsible management of our forests in ways that will keep harmful pollution out of our air in the short term and help prevent even more harmful polluting events like the wildfires that Californians survived earlier this year. This tax credit would be an important tool in our efforts to curb the worst impacts of the climate crisis and protect our communities from harm,” said Senator Schiff. 

“With wildfire season upon us, the need for sound forest management to reduce wildfire severity is clear,” said Kathy Fallon, Director of Land Systems at the Clean Air Task Force, which endorsed the legislation. “This bill will provide much-needed resources to reduce wildfire hazard and scale up durable storage solutions for forest carbon.”

Full text of the bill is available here, and a one-pager is available here.