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.