Sounds like a dumb question but isn’t that the logic behind the original listing by the Bush administration of the polar bear to the “threatened” status under the Endangered Species Act? For the first time in history, government used faulty computer models and speculation to administer the Act and the result was a polar bear being protected from ice that might melt in the future because of climate change some think is caused by man. That’s sound science?
And so, when the recent listing of polar bear critical habitat (step 2 in administering the Act after species listing) came about, we can only assume that this action will result in more ice, right? Of course not and this is further proof of the ridiculousness of the Bush administration’s event in the first place.
Hugh Hewitt, a lawyer working with Endangered Species Act cases, put it this way in a recent article about the polar bears and the designation of critical habitat.
There is no scientific connection, of course, between the lands designated as critical habitat for the bear and the loss of ice which propelled the polar bear on to the list. Designating the critical habitat will in no way hinder the loss of more ice or speed the return of lost ice. According to the Service when the bear was listed, climate change was the culprit, and climate change cannot be affected by the oil exploration in the critical habitat area or even the consumption of the oil produced there. No serious scientist would even begin to argue differently.
Of course by the designation of critical habitat virtually any and all activity in that area must now undergo another layer of bureaucratic paper shuffling and scrutiny by the Environmental Protection Agency. Hewitt was attempting to warn all of us long before the Bush administration decided to list the polar bear, how such a listing would have a devastating effect on us all.
Whenever a species is listed as “endangered” or “threatened,” the ESA demands that its “critical habitat” be designated. It happened recently not just with the polar bear, but also with Buena Vista Lake Shrew and the arroyo toad. It happens all the time in fact. Very few land owners know of the designation and won’t know of it until the time comes to use their land in a way that requires a permit of some sort from the federal government. At that point the stop sign goes up and the demand letter arrives from the feds –and that’s the best case. A critical habitat designation can delay a project for years or completely halt it –even when the species in question does not live on the land involved.
The inanity of all this is that nothing changes for the polar bear. It is my opinion, and that of respected scientists, that the polar bear is not in any danger of going extinct. We have gone off half cocked over a washed up politician’s fanciful agenda of lining his bank account while promoting the end of the earth due to man’s evil influence on our climate. Mind you, no actual scientific proof shows us that man-made carbon dioxide is having any real effect on the earth, only man-made computer models – much the same ones that can’t predict your local weather beyond 48 hours.
Suppose, if you would, that the polar bear actually was threatened in some fashion, if you can be honest with yourself long enough to ask, what will any of the actions taken by the federal government do for the polar bear?
This has been my argument about the Endangered Species Act. Never mind what it was created to do, it just is not doing it. Instead it is being manipulated to bolster the power structure of the federal government and grant environmental groups victory for their pet projects, none of which amount to a hill of beans in protecting our species.
Tom Remington
