Polar Bear Fight: Round 2

The polar bear won't receive unneeded, economically devastating protection without a fight, as litigants are lining up to challenge the Bush Admin's latest cave-in to the radical environmental agenda.

We Republicans used to fight against Statism, working diligently to keep federal over-reach at bay. There were a dozen ways the Bush Dept. of Interior could have denied the environmentalists' ploy to seize control of America's economy through the Endangered Species Act, but they folded. With no true Republicans left in Washington, it's come to this: Alaska and private enterprise are stepping in where the lost GOP fears to tread.

First, Alaska via AP:

ANCHORAGE, Alaska - The state of Alaska will sue to challenge the recent listing of polar bears as a threatened species, Gov. Sarah Palin announced Wednesday.

I like Palin more and more. Too bad McCain's not inviting her to Sadona.

She and other Alaska elected officials fear a listing will cripple oil and gas development in prime polar bear habitat off the state's northern and northwestern coasts.

Palin argued that there is not enough evidence to support a listing. Polar bears are well-managed and their population has dramatically increased over 30 years as a result of conservation, she said.

On the private sector side, I got this email today from the Pacific Legal Foundation, one of the nation's leading champions of property rights:

PLF WILL FIGHT POLAR BEAR LISTING THAT THREATENS TO CHILL THE ECONOMY

Crushing, economy-wrecking regulation in the name of “global warming.” Is that what the future holds for the United States? Not if Pacific Legal Foundation can help it.

The first big, dangerous step toward oppressive global warming restrictions on economic activity—and personal liberty—came last week. Federal officials bowed to environmentalist pressure and put polar bears on the Endangered Species Act list.

Pacific Legal Foundation is swinging into action to fight this move. We are immediately ready to file the 60-day notice that is required for litigation involving the ESA.

Yes, you do have to give the federal government 60 days' notice that you intend to sue. It would be nice if they'd extend the same courtesy to mere citizens.

Why? Because the listing is wrong—scientifically and legally. And it can be used as a tool by enviro-radicals to curtail vast amounts of productive activity, throughout the country.

The Polar Bear Isn’t In Peril

There simply isn’t verifiable evidence that polar bears are in danger. Quite the contrary. As an editorial in Investors Business Daily reported last week, polar bear numbers “are actually growing. There might be as many as 25,000, and probably no fewer than 22,000, today, while 50 years ago, there were somewhere between 8,000 and 10,000.”

The newspaper went on to quote PLF Principal Attorney Reed Hopper: “ ‘Never before has a thriving species been listed under the Endangered Species Act, nor should it,’ said [Hopper]... . Hopper also notes another reason the listing was unwarranted: The polar bear has already survived two global warming eras that were as hot or hotter than the anticipated coming climate change.”

The government is following questionable computer models that project shrinking ice floes—but ice has been shrinking for a couple of decades already, yet polar bears are increasing!

Meanwhile, the government of Canada—where more polar bears reside—says they’re not threatened. Indeed, the polar bear is already among the most protected species in the world.

They go on to quote the same economic arguments against the listing (not that economic arguments hold any weight in species listings; they don't). They also got this juicy quote from the Center for Biological Depravity:

According to the Center for Biological Diversity, which petitioned to list the polar bear, a listing could subject “all U.S. industries” emitting greenhouse gases to the “purview of the Endangered Species Act.”

To channel Johnny Cochran: "You're up to your ears in s*** if you emit."

I wrote a check to PLF today to help them with their lawsuit. Won't you, too? Here's their donate page.

As If The Polar Bear Listing Weren't Enough

No sooner is the ink dry on yesterday's disastrous threatened listing of the polar bear than the Greenies are back with another proposed listing for a species supposedly impacted by theoretical global warming. From E&E News:

The Bush administration will consider Endangered Species Act protections for a California seabird whose island habitat, environmentalists say, is threatened by climate change.

The Fish and Wildlife Service announced today that protection may be warranted for the ashy storm-petrel, so it will perform a formal status review.

The small, smoke-gray seabird nests and forages on a handful of offshore islands near San Francisco, Los Angeles and San Diego. Its population has already experienced sharp declines. The largest colony in central California decreased by 42 percent from 1972 to 1992, according to a study by scientists at the Point Reyes Bird Observatory in California.

By the way, don't assume that just because scientists did these population studies that they are right. From the snail darter to the spotted owl, the population studies used in endangered species listings are frequently very flawed.

Now here comes the global warming connection:

The review comes in response to a petition and legal challenge from the Center for Biological Depravity Diversity. The storm-petrel petition is one of many requests the group has made for protection of species affected by climate change. Its most high-profile complaint concerned the polar bear, which the administration agreed to list as "threatened" yesterday after several lawsuits. The center also has successfully pressed for the listing of two coral species affected by climate change.

The center's petition predicts sea-level rise could drown important habitat for the bird in sea caves and offshore rocks. Warmer, less productive waters and ocean acidification are expected to reduce the numbers of the storm-petrel's prey -- small larval fish and plankton.

Also under attack by the Center is shipping and other off-shore activities, because they have "lights that can confuse its nocturnal flights." I'll bet there's no proof of that either, but it makes a good argument for a group that is committed to the depopulation of the American West. Click the link, scroll down to the section on water supply, and you'll see the group's founder, Kieran Suckling, pictured, talking about his vision of a depopulated West.

The storm-petrel listing petition is more evidence of the Center's strategy of litigation-storms and listing-storms. They are not content with the ludicrous polar bear listing alone, so they immediately back up their victory yesterday with another listing petition. It's sort of like jurisdiction shopping; they file multiple listing petitions and multiple lawsuits, so that if one falls flat, they've got a back-up.

They did the same thing in the California delta. Once they found a fawningly sympathetic judge who decreed water deliveries to SoCal would have to be cut by 30 percent (YIKES!) to protect the Delta Smelt, the Center promptly filed a listing petition for the long-finned smelt, another Delta fish whose listing would result in further pump cut-backs.

Combine the Center's global warming and water supply litigation and listings and you've got a plan for getting people to move elsewhere, except that people will have nowhere with a good economy to move to, since any growth at all will be stopped because it could lead to a chunk of ice melting of Kamchatka somewhere.

We have seen the enemy; it is within, and its weapon is the Endangered Species Act.

Looking Closer At The Polar Bear Listing

Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne tried to mute the impact of his listing today of the polar bear by assuring us in his comments that he's covered our fears of economic meltdown by preparing an administrative guidance:

“I am also announcing that this listing decision will be accompanied by administrative guidance and a rule that defines the scope of impact my decision will have, in order to protect the polar bear while limiting the unintended harm to the society and economy of the United States.” ...

[Fish & Wildlife Service] Director [Dale] Hall will issue guidance to Fish and Wildlife Service staff that the best scientific data available today cannot make a causal connection between harm to listed species or their habitats and greenhouse gas emissions from a specific facility, or resource development project, or government action.

Forget it; the guidance might as well have been written on toilet paper; it cannot alter the provisions of ESA, and you have to dig no further into the final rule to find this:

This final rule activates the consultation provisions of section 7 of the Act for the polar bear.

That means that any project in the US -- Alaska or lower 48 or anywhere else our flag flies -- that could increase greenhouse gases will now be subject to a challenge by enviros if it doesn't undergo a section 7 review, and that they will almost certainly win those challenges. So thanks to Kempthorne's pathetic punt today, projects like factories, power plants (as if we'll ever build another one of those), developments on the urban fringe and new roads or transmission lines will be challenged, and subsequently cut back, delayed or even stopped.

This was the Greens' intent all along; otherwise they wouldn't have petitioned for listing, so they won very big today. Even so, the mere mention of the guidance document got the paranoid hyper-greens on the left hysterical and paranoid, as evidenced by this blogger:

Ah ha! Since the news on this is just filtering out this minute, you'll forgive me for my delusional optimism spawned from the new listing rule for the imperiled polar bear. No, you knew it was too good to be true that the Fish and Wildlife Service's acknowledgment that the polar bear is threatened by sea ice loss and that sea ice is lost by global warming would mean that we would try to stop global warming.

[He then quotes parts of the same Kempthorne quote]

No, we must instead continue to "allow continuation of vital energy production in Alaska," i.e. drill for oil in polar bear habitat. Right. Of course we do. Must. Protect. The. Oil. Economy.

Alaska, Iraq, Afghanistan.... all territories conquered by the Army of Big Oil. And we know who is the Commander in Chief of that particular military.

That will be the Greenie/Warmie response, and they will argue it time and again on project after project, periodically finding sympathetic judges and setting detrimental precedents.

Accompanying the decision was a special rule, allowed under section 4(d) of the act only for threatened listings like today's, not endangered listings. We have used 4(d)s in the past to circumvent some of the more onerous aspects of a listing, but this one is pretty darn milquetoast, dealing mostly with things like Native American take of bears.

There is, however, a lengthy section on successful mitigation measures for oil and gas exploration in Alaska, specifying things like having no operations within a mile of a polar bear den, and having bear biologists on hand to monitor operations. The results of these measures, says the rule, have been positive:

Data provided by monitoring and reporting programs in the Beaufort Sea and in the Chukchi Sea, as required under the incidental take authorizations for oil and gas activities, have shown that the mitigation measures have successfully minimized effects on polar bears. For example, since 1991, when the incidental take regulations became effective in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas, there has been no known instance of a polar bear being killed or of personnel being injured by a bear as a result of oil and gas industry activities. The mitigation measures associated with the Beaufort Sea incidental take regulations, which, based on the monitoring and reporting data, have proven to minimize human–bear interactions, will be part of the Chukchi Sea incidental take regulations currently under review.

That could give some cover to Alaskan oil ops, but the Greenies/Warmies will peck away at it, creating more and more restrictions, limiting the number of days exploration or extraction can occur, challenging the roadway that links the Prudhoe Bay facilities to the South, ad infinitum. And what of oil projects in, say, Texas or Montana? For that and any other industrial development, the 4(d) also tries to limit when section 7 consultations will be required:

But in the simplest terms, a Federal agency evaluates whether consultation is necessary by analyzing what will happen to listed species or critical habitat “with and without” the proposed action. Typically, this analysis will review direct effects, indirect effects, and the effects that are caused by interrelated and interdependent activities to determine if the proposed action “may affect” listed species or critical habitat. For those effects beyond the footprint of the action, our regulations at 50 CFR 402.02 require that they both be “caused by the action under consultation” and “reasonably certain to occur.” That is, effects are only appropriately considered in a section 7 analysis if there is a causal connection between the proposed action and a discernible effect to the species or critical habitat that is reasonably certain to occur. One must be able to “connect the dots” between the proposed action, an effect, and an impact to the species and there must be a reasonable certainty that the effect will occur.

This is clearly an attempt to limit the enforcement of the provisions of Section 7 only to those projects that would, say, slap a subdivision down over a bunch of polar bear dens, or light big bonfires on the shrinking icecap. Would that it were so.

Again, all the Greenies/Warmies have to do is find a judge who finds a direct correlation between the emissions of a factory in Kansas to the melting of ice in the Arctic, and they're off and running. There are precedents that have protected property owners from the arbitrary and capricious enforcement of Section 7, notably Arizona Cattlegrowers’ Association v. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (273 F.3d 1229, 9th cir. 2001), but everything is endlessly challengable in the ESA world, and challenges mean delay, which mean negative economic impact and sometimes dead projects.

A bolder administration would have said that because polar bear populations have increased, because last summer's loss of polar sea ice was more than made up for with this freezing winter's massive new formations, and because the US has cut carbon emissions substantially and is on the way to cutting them further, a listing isn't warranted at this time.

Not doing so is probably just a sign of how weak and disappointing the Bush administration has become. There is an argument that could be made that this is all strategery, i.e., better to get a "threatened" listing with a guidance and a 4(d) from this administration than a real stinker for the next administration ... but I'm tired of scanning the distant horizons for some sign of good performance from the inept Bush administration ... beyond the surge, anyway. Thank God for the surge.

Bush Authors Polar Disaster

It looks like very, very bad news on the polar bear front:

WASHINGTON -- The Bush Administration Wednesday handed environmentalists a major victory, determining there was sufficient scientific evidence to declare the polar bear a threatened species, according to several people close to the matter.

Opponents said it could not only trigger major new obstacles for oil companies seeking to drill in the Arctic -- where some of the last remaining reserves are to be found -- but could also potentially affect nearly every regulatory decision that might impact global warming, including decisions for coal power plants. (WSJ)

The ruling isn't out yet, and this could be a bad early read. But if they're right and the Bush administration folded to the Greens on this issue, it will be a legacy-maker for him ... and certainly not a good one.

If you play the markets, know that if the decision comes down the way the WSJ says it will, oil prices will continue to rise. Good for Big Oil, bad for everyone else.

Greens Mount Big Polar Bear Push

It's clearly a case of Greens Gone Wild. From the Center for Biological Depravity Diversity to Al Gore's newbie, We Can Solve It (Cutely, "We" for short), they've all got their electronic petitions and letter-generators going wild, flooding the Dept. of Interior with please to ignore science and buy into hysteria list the polar bear under the Endangered Species Act.

"We" is taking a very low key approach, asking folks to sign a petition that says only:

"Mr. Secretary, please ensure that the polar bear gains the protection of the Endangered Species Act today."

The email I got from We today said 100,000 had signed the petition and they're shooting for a goal of 115,000. That sounds fishy; clearly their initial goal was something big and round, like 200,000 or 500,000.

The Center is much more hyper in its pitch for its own petition:

On Thursday, the federal government will make one of the most important decisions in conservation history.

True enough, thus far.

If it declares the polar bear to be an "endangered" species, the decision will set off an unprecedented worldwide discussion on global warming… and establish legal requirements to do something about it.

They don't say what that "something" is -- basically putting any new project of any kind that has a footprint under the federal microscope.

If the government refuses, desperately needed global action will again be delayed by the Bush administration's stubbornness. Short-term corporate profits will continue to control political agendas and threaten life on Earth. All of life on Earth.

How can Bush delay global action? He only has authority (limited authority) over one small part of the globe. Besides, the ESA doesn't allow economic impacts -- "short-term corporate profits" -- to influence decisions on listings, and the Center knows it, since they raise the argument all the time in their endless river of litigation. But that makes lousy rhetoric.

They go on to state a goal of 60,000 signatures on their petition.

Interestingly, another major environmental litigation mill, the Natural Resources Defense Council, apparently isn't on board with the polar bear since its current list of issues shuns the bear. Why? If the critter's about to go under, the NRDC would definitely be engaged. It litigates regularly on endangered species issues.

Perhaps the NRDC knows what we all know -- that the polar bears are doing just fine, thank you, and this is all a false effort to misuse the Endangered Species Act as an economic jackhammer instead of a law to protect animals.

This Thursday And $200-A-Barrel Oil

Thursday is it: The big day for the future of our global economy.

It's not a particularly big day for the polar bear, even though its the cause of all that may follow this Thursday's mandated decision by the Dept. of the Interior regarding the proposed listing of the bear under the federal Endangered Species Act. We could devastate the global economy to save the bear and have no effect on it whatsoever, since the threat to it is only theoretical, while the threat to our economy posed by a listing is anything but.

The theory, for those who have been in hibernation, is that global warming is threatening the polar bear due to thinning polar ice. Never mind that this year's icepack is just about the thickest on record. To save the bear, we must SAVE THE PLANET and STOP GLOBAL WARMING.

That means anything, down to turn the key in your Yukon (or your Prius, for that matter) is contributing to the EXTINCTION OF THE CUTE POLAR BEARS and must be stopped. New power plants? Drilling on the North Slope? Forget it.

Here's a nice summary on the economic consequences of a listing from Kevin Hasset of the American Enterprise Institute, writing at Bloomberg:

There are two reasons why that decision, if it is made, will be momentous.

Geographic Reach

The first is the possible wide geographic reach of the global warming argument. The snail darter almost killed a single dam. The polar bear could, in theory at least, stop everything.

Suppose someone wants to build a coal-burning power plant in Florida. Environmentalists might challenge the construction on the grounds that the plant will emit greenhouse gases leading to global warming and an increased threat to polar bears.

It is hard to say how such challenges would play out. My guess is that it would heighten the pressure on the U.S. to adopt a cap-and-trade emissions program or a carbon tax.

The second impact of this ruling is that it will likely end all Arctic exploration for oil and gas, at least in the U.S. Given surging world demand for oil, increased supply is the only thing standing between us and $200-a-barrel oil.

Costly Restrictions

These restrictions will have a large cost. "The U.S. Geological Survey and the Norwegian company StatoilHydro estimate that the Arctic holds as much as one-quarter of the world's remaining undiscovered oil and gas deposits,'' Scott Borgerson, an international affairs fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote in the March/April issue of Foreign Affairs. "Some Arctic wildcatters believe this estimate could increase substantially as more is learned about the region's geology."

Many biologists believe that global warming is a serious threat to the polar bear. If that leads to the polar bear being listed as threatened this week, then the world you live in will have fundamentally changed.

Calling It

I've worked with the Endangered Species Act for about 20 years now through some of the hairiest listings of the recent era and here's my take on what will happen Thursday.

First, Interior will not list the polar bear as endangered; there is clearly no basis for that.

On the more likely listing as "threatened," Interior will also defer, opting instead to list a few distinct population segments whose numbers have been declining in recent years. The listing will require more study and additional controls on local impacts to those populations, but will be crafted to keep global warming out of the picture.

Science is part of the reason for this prediction, although I've seen Interior ignore science in the past. George Bush is the other reason. If Gore had been elected, the bear would have been listed years ago and we'd be suffering the consequences. If the decision were not to be made before the next president takes office, any of the three candidates could be counted on to list the bear.

So Bush is the final hope for sanity, and the scenario I've laid out is more likely than him denying the listing outright. Such a denial would be justified, but even George has been looking a little green lately. I hope I'm right. $200-a-barrel oil will be just the start of the heartburn we'll suffer if I'm wrong.

If Polar Bear Is Listed, Don't Breathe

OK, the picture of the polar bear eating a horse head is gross -- but it shows the polar bear as it is, not the cuddly critter the Greenies would like you to see them as, as they rally all their resources to get the bear listed as an endangered species.

I've written frequently on the proposed bolar bear listing (see links below), but I admit I've never stated the consequences of a listing as clearly as Hugh Hewitt did yesterday. Here's what he said:

The short version: If the polar bear is listed, every activity that emits a greenhouse gas of any sort in the lower 48 AND which receives a federal permit or requires federal agency action of any sort --even if that permit or action is unrelated to the emission of the gases-- those activities will be subject to new review by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, and the approval may not be forthcoming, will certainly at least be delayed, and will almost certainly come with massive new costs attached.

Thus coastal building programs that require federal flood insurance or Army Corps of Engineers permits, highway construction that gets FHA funding, or joint NASA-private industry initiatives that result in launchings, all these and hundreds of thousands of additional federal permits and actions get gathered in under Section 7 of the Endangered Species Act.

Environmentalist groups have standing to sue to demand the Section 7 process be followed, and they collect attorneys fees when they succeed. It is the full employment act for environmental activists.

As Power Line (which directed me to Hugh, with a hat-tip to Jim) sums it up:

Come to think of it, every time you breathe you emit carbon dioxide which, according to the wackos, "endangers" the polar bear. Good thing you don't (yet) need a permit to breathe; so far, it's only the economy that is in danger of being killed off. Come to think of it, every time you breathe you emit carbon dioxide which, according to the wackos, "endangers" the polar bear. Good thing you don't (yet) need a permit to breathe; so far, it's only the economy that is in danger of being killed off.

There are mulitple source of data, both U.S. and Canadian, that shows polar bear populations are healthy, and last summers big polar ice melt-off was answered this winter with the fastest build-up of polar ice in recorded history.

I'm very glad this decision is being made by George Bush's Department of Interior. Yes, he's gotten squirly on global warming lately, but I think the imminent decision will come down on the side of science, and there will be no listing.

See also:

White Bears And Black People
Too Much Sea Ice For Polar Bears
Di Caprio Lies And Hustles Bucks
Dying Polar Bear Rebuttal Kit
The May's And Might's Of Global Warming

Sophie's Choice For Greenies

Nature can be such a cruel master:

Salmon-eating sea lions authorized to be slain

PORTLAND, Ore. -- State and fedeal officials say they have done all they can to stop protected California sea lions from munching on threatened salmon at teh base of the Bonneville Dam on the Columbia River, using pyrotechnics, beanbag rounds fired from shotguns and traps.

But the sea lions, who arrive each spring at the base of the dam for the spring chinook working their way upriver to spawn, have pretty much given them [the humans, not the salmon] the flipper.

So on Tuesday, the government authorized Oregon and Washington to kill the
worst offenders, listing about 60, identifiable by branding, scars or other markings, for "immediate removal."

"Immediate removal" is a euphanism for "kill the #$@%!&," as in "al-Qaeda ordered the immediate removal of occupants of the World Trade Center."

The article is delightful since it highlights the sort of conunbrum the Greenies pile onto themselves because of their meddling ways. But it is also troubling on so many levels, being indicative of a thick green stripe running through journalism today, and of the belief that humans are no better than animals. From the top:

• In paragraph one, the use of pyrotechnics, bean bags etc., is symbolic of the environmentalists' hypocrisy: They tell us to keep our hands off the earth, but they think they have a right to put their righteous hands all over it in order to manage it. In truth, if they would just let the sea lions eat, eventually there wouldn't be enough salmon left and the sea lions would move on. Enough salmon would get through and the population would come back.
  
• In paragraph two, I was extremely miffed by this: "But the sea lions, who arrive each spring ...." Why would that bug me? Simple. "Who" is reserved for humans (and perhaps pets); the correct usage here is "which." It's a typical mistake in today's Greenie world,
  in which animals are placed on a par with humans as just a fellow sentient being. Any good editor would have caught this; apparently there are no good editors left.
  
• And finally, in paragraph three, did you share my consternation at "worst offenders?" Says who? What laws of nature are the sea lions offending? None. They are not offenders of natural law, worse or otherwise. Have we agreed to make animals subject to human laws, so these sea lions are offenders under the Endangered Species Act? Are we to believe that the sea lions are capable of making moral judgment about eating salmon? How many threatened salmon are OK? How many would make them "offenders?"

That little two-and-a-half inch story in today's Fresno Bee packed quite a wallop. Sorry; I couldn't find a link in the paper's on-line edition. You'll just have to take it on faith -- and don't worry, unlike sea lions, I can make moral judgments, so I wouldn't lie to you.