Continue tax credit

If Congress is serious about helping entrepreneurs make electricity from the wood that fuels catastrophic wildfires, it needs to start acting like it.

We're talking about biomass plants.

They burn waste wood to produce power.

It's renewable power, with one big plus.

The trees and the brush that produces the megawatts is the same combustible stuff that the Forest Service and BLM want to haul out of the woods before a lightning bolt or a carelessly discarded cigarette supplies the spark.

The agencies' dilemma in many cases is that those trees — mainly slender, sickly ones that can't be sawed into lumber — are worth so little that no one can make a profit cutting them and trucking them away.

But biomass plants could be primary buyers of that debris.

Because it's still a fledgling industry, incentives, among them a federal tax credit for renewable energy, remain a vital part of many business plans for potential biomass plants.

Congress, unfortunately, seems not to realize how important that tax credit is.

We can't, at any rate, otherwise explain why senators have introduced a bill that extends the tax credit by only one year.

Trouble is, building a biomass plant can take twice that long.

Congress can't reasonably expect investors to lay out millions of dollars without a guarantee that the tax credit that makes the deal pencil out will still be available when the first load of wood arrives.

Lawmakers should continue the tax credit for renewable energy for at least five years.

We'd prefer the excess wood in our forests produce electricity instead of a mushroom cloud of smoke.

Besides, the jobs in biomass plants, unlike those on the fire lines, don't end when the last hot spot is doused.