I spent some time in Colorado and northern California this summer. I could not believe the number of beetle-killed trees I saw. Thousands of dead and dry trees, waiting for a spark. They were everywhere and in many areas that looked to me to be totally inaccessible to anything less than a helicopter, so I don’t know how the threat can be cost-effectively removed.
The threat will be removed when those ravaged forests burn. Pine beetles don’t do fire drills.
I’ve seen the same in Idaho. They probably need to do controlled burns in the winter to clear these trees. Then plant something not so susceptible to that beetle. Assuming such exists.
Colorado is a mixed bag. On the one hand, I have heard that bad forestry practices are what allowed the beetles to be able to spread so badly. On the other hand, pretty early on, normal people won out over environmentalists and changed the rules to allow logging of the dead trees.
There is a whole industry that has grown for the last ten years of companies turning these diseased trees into wood pellets for wood stoves and other products. When they started logging beetle kill trees about ten years ago, nobody thought there would be an industry outside of wood pellets, because the beetles stain the wood. But stained wood has become fashionable now, and so many companies use it.