Posted by
On the Right on Thursday, May 15, 2008 5:03:21 AM
Interior Declares Polar Bears ‘Threatened’ by Global Warming Backdoor Attempt at Cap-and Trade Legislation
Washington, D.C., May 14, 2008—Today the US Department of the Interior took the controversial step of listing the
polar bear as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act, despite lack of a sound scientific basis and
potentially enormous consequences for the U.S. economy. Listing the polar bear has long been a goal of global
warming activists who claim that a warmer world will shrink the bears’ habitat.
Advocates of the new listing claim that to remove the bears from their threatened status, the federal government
must first enact restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions, which will then, it is imagined, influence the global
climate to such an extent as to stop shifts in Arctic ice cover. Listing the bear will enable activist groups to use
litigation to force the nation into a regulatory nightmare of limits on energy use.
“We regret the listing,” said Competitive Enterprise Institute Director of Energy & Global Warming Policy
Myron Ebell. “We don’t think putting ‘high bars’ on it will work. We hope there will be immediate litigation
to challenge the listing on procedural and substantive grounds.”
Today’s listing does require a “high bar” for evidence that particular greenhouse gas sources are causing
actual harm to a particular population of polar bears. But “the ‘high bar’ just delays the day when global
warming activists will be able to impose their policy of energy suppression,” said CEI Senior Fellow Iain Murray.
“Secretary Kempthorne obviously knows that this listing will have dire consequences, but his attempts to erect
barriers to them will have all the strength of tissue paper. If anything, this listing shows the need for urgent
reform of the Endangered Species Act.”
Competitive Enterprise Institute Senior Fellow Marlo Lewis submitted lengthy comments last fall on behalf of CEI to
the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service detailing the reasons why the polar bear should not be listed. His comments can
be found here. (Richard Morrison, CEI)
Comment by Reed Hopper, Principal Attorney, Pacific Legal Foundation
Unwarranted Listing
Although Secretary Kempthorne stated he was compelled to list the polar bear as a "threatened" species
because of the "inflexibility" of the Endangered Species Act, the opposite is true. Rather than compel
the listing of a thriving species that is already protected, the Endangered Species Act prohibits such a listing.
Although some subpopulations have declined with increasing temperatures, the species overall has grown to the
largest population levels in recorded history. Additionally, due to other laws, international treaties, and strict
conservation measures, the polar bear is already among the most protected species in the world. No wonder Dale
Hall, Director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, tesified in congress that the listing would provide
"very little added protection." Secretary Kempthorne echoed that opinion while announcing his listing
decision. According to the Secretary, the ESA will provide no greater protections than are already afforded the
polar bear under the Marine Mammal Protection Act. Secretary Kempthorne also pointed out that the listing would
not address the very threat he cites for the listing in the first place: "[T]he listing will not stop global
climate change or prevent any sea ice from melting."
It is also telling that the Canadian government, which oversees 14 of the 19 polar bear populations, has not
listed the bear as "threatened" or "endangered." As for computer models of future events, on
which the Secretary rests his case, they are by definition speculative and error prone as evidence by one model
that was critizied by researchers at Wharton and Harvard for "extrapolat[ing] nearly 100 years into the
future on the basis of only five years data" which itself was of "doubtful validity."
Rather than compel the listing, based on these facts, the Act prohibited the listing.
Polar Bear Melodrama - Polar bears are not
the fragile, vulnerable creatures of liberal iconography. They have thrived in the Arctic for thousands of years,
both through periods when their sea-ice habitat was smaller, and larger, than it is now. They will continue to adapt
– and the Endangered Species Act can't make the slightest difference.
Such realities haven't prevented green showboaters from claiming victory after the Bush Administration designated
the polar bear as a "threatened" species yesterday. And it is a kind of victory, though the ruling itself
is mostly symbolic – at least for now. However, this is really the triumph of bad legislation over the democratic
process.
As Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne noted, the 1973 Endangered Species Act is "perhaps the least flexible law
Congress has ever enacted." In 2005, green litigants took advantage of this rigidity, suing the government to
force it to label the polar bear at risk for extinction. Since the 1980s, the sea ice that the bears use to hunt and
breed has been receding. Although the population has increased from a low of 12,000 in the 1960s to roughly 25,000
today – perhaps a record high – computer projections anticipate that Arctic pack ice will continue to melt over
the next half-century. This could, maybe, someday, lead to population declines.
The lawsuits were hardly motivated by concern for polar bear welfare. Instead, environmentalists asserted that the
ice is thinning because of human-induced global warming. A formal endangered listing is one more arrow in their
legal quiver as they try to run U.S. climate policy through the judiciary.
They'll argue that emissions from power plants, refineries, automobiles – anything that produces carbon – would
contribute to warming, thus contributing to habitat destruction, and thus should be restricted by the Endangered
Species Act. This logic could be used to rewrite existing environmental policy to accommodate greenhouse gasses,
purposes for which they were never intended but with economy-wide repercussions. (Wall Street Journal)
The
Global Warming Tutorial Media Should be Required to Take - Do you ever get the feeling the reason most people in
the media have bought into Nobel Laureate Al Gore's global warming myth is that they are largely uneducated in
matters of science, and regardless of the volume of information available at their fingertips via the Internet, such
pompous folks are too lazy to take the time to do any research that might challenge their dogma?
US FDA Defends Safety Of Baby Bottle
Chemical - WASHINGTON - The US Food and Drug Administration said on Wednesday said it sees no reason to tell
consumers to stop using products such as baby bottles made with a controversial chemical found in many plastic
items.
Norris Alderson, the FDA's associate commissioner for science, said although the regulatory agency is reviewing
safety concerns about the chemical bisphenol A, or BPA, "a large body of available evidence" shows that
products such as liquid or food containers made with it are safe.
First it’s a scarlet
D, then O, H, C... - Did you hear that San Antonio Metro Health District has decided to create a surveillance
program of the lab results on its residents to identify diabetics who aren’t keeping their indices to
government-approved levels? Health officials there are initiating a program to make it mandatory that all
laboratories electronically turn over hemoglobin A1c results (along with the people’s names, addresses and dates
of birth) to its government agency for a database of diabetics.