“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.

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is hailing the Interior secretary’s decision as… “a clear victory for Alaska.”

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.

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 /

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.