Obama sides with Bush, Palin in limiting protections for polar bears
The Obama Administration announced today that it would embrace a last-minute “midnight rule” created by President Bush that emasculates protections for the imperiled polar bear under the Endangered Species Act.
The rule adopted by Obama — and celebrated by Alaska Governor Sarah Palin — bars the government from using the polar bear’s protected status to regulate greenhouse gas emissions as an extinction threat if those emissions originate outside the animal’s Arctic habitat. However, as the official listing of the polar bear acknowledged, it is exactly those remote emissions — and the climate change they cause — that are destroying the polar bear’s sea-ice habitat and driving the creatures into extinction. The Bush rule, then, not only violates the intent of the Endangered Species Act, environmentalists have argued, but also dooms the polar bear as a wild species.
In making the announcement, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar promised continued, vigorous action to rescue the polar bear. But he said the Bush rule made sense, as the Obama Administration intends to use different methods of combatting global warming.
“We must do all we can to help the polar bear recover, recognizing that the greatest threat to the polar bear is the melting of Arctic sea ice caused by climate change,” Salazar said. “However, the Endangered Species Act is not the proper mechanism for controlling our nation’s carbon emissions.”
This was the same argument the Bush Administration employed in crafting the special polar bear rule, asserting that it would be wrong to use the act as a “back door” method of regulating climate change. But environmentalists have argued that the broad intent of the Endangered Species Act unequivocally requires a response to all human-caused extinction threats, including global warming, and that the powerful law should be viewed as a valuable tool and opportunity to tackle the climate crisis.
Congress passed legislation giving Obama authority to overturn this and other Bush midnight rules with the stroke of a pen — authority that expires May 9. Eight senators (including both California senators, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer), 41 congressman, 130 conservation groups, and more than 1300 scientists wrote Obama,urging him to overturn the special polar bear rule. But Salazar had been telegraphing for months that the rule would likely be left in place, a move he said today would ”avoid uncertainty and confusion about the management of the species.”
Activists at the Center for Biological Diversity, which led the effort to secure protections for polar bears and forced the Bush Administration to acknowledge global warming as an extinction threat, wasted no time in harshly decrying the decision. “For Salazar to adopt Bush’s polar bear extinction plan is confirming the worst fears of his tenure as Secretary of Interior,” said Noah Greenwald, biodiversity program director for the Center for Biological Diversity. ”Secretary Salazar would apparently prefer to please Sarah Palin than protect polar bears.”
Last week, Greenwald and other environmentalists celebrated the administration’s decision to rescind another Bush midnight rule that had removed global warming completely from the purview of the Endangered Species Act.
“It makes little sense for Salazar to rescind Bush’s national policy barring consideration of global warming impacts to endangered species in general, but keep that exact policy in place for the one species most endangered by global warming—the polar bear,” Greenwald complained.
A coalition of environmental groups has already gone to court to overturn the Bush rule as a violation of the Endangered Species Act — a legal battle that will continue, according to Greenwald, who asserts that greenhouse gases should be treated like any other pollutant that can harm an endangered species. Several groups have joined the government’s side in the lawsuit, which means the Obama Admnistration will have as allies Palin, the oil industry, and numerous trade associations representing major greenhouse gas emitters.
Cross-posted at Stop Global Warming at Change.org
Tags: Endangered Species Act, Global Warming, Ken Salazar, Midnight Rules, polar bear, President Obama
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May 8, 2009 at 6:29 pm
But if we allow Global Warming to kill the polar bears, Sarah Palin will have nothing but wolves to slaughter. I doubt this decision by the Obama Administration will up his approval ratings with Republicans, but I’m fairly certain that there will be Democrats who won’t be able to stand behind Obama on this. Count me as one of them.
May 8, 2009 at 7:57 pm
On balance, Obama’s environmental appointments and policies have been well-received by environmentalists. This polar bear rule is a sore spot, however, because it was part of larger strategy employed by the Bush Administration in which executive orders were made with the intention of undermining, rather than enforcing, laws passed by Congress. Environmental laws were not the only ones targeted by this practice, but they were a main area of attack, and the Endangered Species Act was a particularly ripe target. Some Bush orders, such as the special polar bear rule, appear to violate the very laws they were supposed to be enforcing. Now the Obama Administration is in the position of having to defend this Bush practice in court — a practice that, as a candidate, Obama decried as an abuse of presidential powers.
May 9, 2009 at 2:59 pm
There is another way to approach this issue. Here it is:
John Kostyack, executive director for wildlife conservation and global warming at the National Wildlife Federation, criticized the decision to retain the rule, but admitted that ‘there was no way that the Fish and Wildlife Service, the Interior Department agency responsible for carrying out the Endangered Species Act, could handle the burden of trying to police emissions.
In addition to conventional threats, a vital focus for wildlife managers should be figuring out how to help vulnerable species adapt to climate stresses, he said.
“The last thing we want to do,” he said, “is saddle them with solving the causes of global warming, too.”’
Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/09/science/earth/09bear.html
This is a more direct way of saving the polar ecosystem: “US Wants Mandatory Cuts In Greenhouse Gases Across The Globe In Major Environmental Policy Shift”
Link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/29/us-wants-mandatory-cuts-i_n_193112.html
Forcing the slowdown/shutdown of factories throughout America by listing the polar bear as endangered would would throw tens of millions of Americans out of work simultaneously, destabilize our economy overnight and throw the world into deep depression. And it’s not clear it would even work, because unless we convince other nations to make mandatory cuts in greenhouse gases, the
polar ice will keep melting.
May 9, 2009 at 3:15 pm
Here is more reason for why The Obama administration did what they did:
WASHINGTON – The Obama administration will retain a Bush-era rule for polar bears, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced Friday, in a move that angered activists who noted the rule limits what can be done to protect the species from global warming.
The administration had faced a weekend deadline to decide whether it should allow government agencies to cite the federal Endangered Species Act, which protects the bear, to impose limits on greenhouse gases from power plants, factories and automobiles even if the emissions occur thousands of miles from where the polar bear lives.
Read more: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30635672 /
May 9, 2009 at 4:33 pm
Alexandra, please don’t fall for this notion that obeying the the law, in this case, the Endangered Species Act, would shut down factories or cripple the Fish and Wildlife Service. Those are right-wing talking points, and they are patently untrue.
Right now, the ESA requires an environmental review for all proposed federal projects and permits that may harm an endangered species. These reviews are done as a matter of routine, and there is a system in place for doing them. All sorts of pollutants and other environmental impacts are covered, and the law requires that these negative impacts be mitigated whenever possible in order to protect endangered species. This mechanism has been in place and served us well for decades.
Adding greenhouse gases to the long list of pollutants already studied for proposed projects would not shut down anything. But it would require government and industry to mitigate those emissions by using the cleanest practices and technology available. This is supposed to be our national goal, as stated by President Obama. So protecting the polar bear (and sea ice, and coastlines, etc) can also save our climate and our way of life.
In other words, we have a law in place (absent the Bush midnight rule) that can help us accomplish what we all know we need — a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. And we have that law in place at a time when Congress is utterly failing to act with a new climate change program of its own.
Why not go with what we’ve got? Why embrace a Bush Administration law intended to impede action against climate change? We could use the ESA, as well as the Clean Air Act, to move forward now, instead of waiting for Congress to produce a watered down piece of legislation that is unlikely to far enough anyway.
May 9, 2009 at 4:41 pm
I think it is instructive to see who is praising this decision:
Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is hailing the Interior secretary’s decision as… “a clear victory for Alaska.”
June 28, 2009 at 10:13 pm
Once again, President Obama is playing chess while others are fiddling with checkers.
“In private telephone conversations and last-minute public appeals, Obama leaned heavily on House Democratic holdouts to support the first energy legislation ever designed to curb global warming.” Link: http://tinyurl.com/m6clfa
This legislation, if passed by the Senate after conference without a filibuster, will save more polar bears than a toothless endangered species EPA listing could ever do.
October 24, 2009 at 5:06 pm
You’ll have to update this topic soon and change the hyperbolic title because I doubt Palin approves of this move by the Obama administration:
Interior Department proposes protected land for polar bears
By Abby Haight, The Oregonian
October 23, 2009, 10:59AM
Polar bears could get new protection under an Obama administration proposal to set aside about 200,540 square miles of Alaska’s coast as critical habitat for the bears, which are listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.
The proposed range includes areas of oil and gas exploration. The Endangered Species Act orders federal agencies to make sure that the activities they authorize or carry out don’t jeopardize the protected species.
The proposal, announced Thursday, is open to a 60-day public comment period. The Department of the Interior plans to make a final ruling by June 30.
Polar bears were added to the Endangered Species Act in 2008.
http://www.oregonlive.com/environment/index.ssf/2009/10/interior_department_proposes_p.html