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Selling out the polar bears ... or smart climate politics? 7

polar bear changeIn upholding the Bush-era decision on polar bears, is Obama shrewdly pushing a larger climate agenda?iStock PhotoThe Obama administration will uphold a controversial Bush-era decision that limits protection for polar bears under the Endangered Species Act (ESA), Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced today.

Polar bears will continue to be considered a threatened species because their arctic habitat is melting due to climate change. The decision essentially means ESA protections cannot apply to oil exploration and greenhouse gas emissions originating outside of the Arctic-—the main threats to the bears’ habitat.

For environmentalists, the decision means another disappointment from Salazar, a Coloradan with a ranching background whose environmental credentials were hotly debated when he was nominated for the post. Salazar upset wildlife defenders in March by upholding another Bush decision to take gray wolves off the endangered list in much of the northern Rocky Mountains and upper Midwest.

“For Salazar to adopt Bush’s polar bear extinction plan is confirming the worst fears of his tenure as Secretary of the Interior,” Center for Biological Diversity biodiversity program director Noah Greenwald said in an quickly released statement. “Secretary Salazar would apparently prefer to please Sarah Palin than to protect polar bears.”

“We’re very disappointed that Secretary Salazar decided not to cut through the red tape and restore protections for polar bears immediately,” Jamie Rappaport Clark, executive vice president of Defenders of Wildlife and a former director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said in a release. “The polar bear’s Arctic sea ice habitat is melting away, the Arctic seals which polar bears hunt for food are becoming increasingly scarce, and the cause is clearly global warming. In spite of this, Secretary Salazar is leaving in place a rule that says activities that cause global warming and therefore harm polar bears will never be considered violations of the Endangered Species Act under any circumstances. That made no sense under the Bush administration and it certainly makes no sense for the Obama administration.”

In his announcement, Salazar said polar bears would continue to receive federal protection under the ESA and the Marine Mammal Protection Act; the department’s main point is that the ESA isn’t the right way to address climate change.

“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.  Instead, we need a comprehensive energy and climate strategy that curbs climate change and its impacts -– including the loss of sea ice. Both President Obama and I are committed to achieving that goal.”

That spin was echoed by Sen. Mark Begich, Alaska’s newly elected Democrat. “I commend Secretary Salazar for protecting the polar bear while also recognizing it is not appropriate to use a federal law like the ESA to try to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. I support Secretary Salazar’s belief that we need a comprehensive energy and climate strategy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but the ESA should not be used as a back-door regulatory tool to achieve this goal,” he said in a statement.

The Obama administration had until tomorrow to overturn the Bush rule, known formally as a 4(d) exemption. Today’s news could be read as further proof the president prefers to tackle climate change through a comprehensive plan—with approval from Congress—rather than through a series of regulatory maneuvers.

Don’t expect the polar bear story to end here: Defenders of Wildlife, which has sued in the past to force bear protections, said today it “will be forced to continue its litigation challenging the rule.”

It’s been an eventful few weeks in wildlife protection. Last Tuesday Obama overturned another crucial Bush ESA rule, restoring the ability of government biologists to weigh in on how federal actions would impact plants and animals. On Monday the gray wolf delisting took effect, handing the animals over to state management, which includes hunting plans, in Montana and Idaho.

And on Wednesday the Fish and Wildlife Service said it would review the threat climate change poses to the American pika, a small Western mammal that thrives only in a narrow altitude range. The pika could be the first animal in the lower 48 states to animal to join the endangered species list primarily because of climate change; FWS will submit its findings by next February.

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Related Story: The Wolf and the Polar Bear (May 1, 2009)

Read more reactions from lawmakers and interest groups >>>

Jonathan Hiskes is a Grist staff writer. He reports, tweets, eats, asks questions, self-promotes, looks out windows, and wonders if it could be like this.

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  1. guade00 Posted 5:31 pm
    08 May 2009

    Now we know how big Obama's cojones really are. He'll take uncontroversial steps here and there to please us environmentalists to the extent he doesn't greatly disturb the oil and gas industry. But when it comes to the more ambitious measures--take the ESA-regulatory approach, e.g.--he's going to back down from what he sees as potentially inflammatory 2010 election campaign issues. Great, that's all the world needs, another hot-shot politician-cum-environmental milquetoast.
    This administration's line, that the ESA is "not the proper mechanism for controlling our nation's carbon emissions," is uncannily familiar to anyone who paid attention to the previous administration's climate clap-trap. On the contrary, we are so far down the road to morphing our atmosphere into some kind of Venusian oven, any measure is "proper," if not indispensable.

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  2. Tyler Durden Posted 11:32 pm
    08 May 2009

    Propelling ourselves around at unnatural speeds is not the proper way to live on the planet, but I don't see that stopping anyone.  This just another piece of evidence that real enviros and real progressive must stop supporting the Democrats, who in most important ways are just as bad as Republicans.  I never liked or supported Obama, but I was hoping he'd be better than I thought.  I have to admit to being pleasantly surprised on some issues, but when it comes to the most important, war and the environment, he's every bit as bad as I thought he'd be.
    And BTW, Salazar's a jerk, I strongly opposed his nomination.  Ranchers are hardcore anti-environmentalists, and Salazar is no exception.

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  3. roncram Posted 5:55 am
    09 May 2009

    The polar bears are not in trouble.  In the 1950s, polar bear population was 5,000.  Now it is about 20,000.  Don't be fooled by pictures of bears floating on ice.  They are not about to drown.  Polar bears are very strong swimmers who are often seen swimming tens of miles from land...er, ice.  They swim for a while and then float on their backs.  Obama is not rushing to protect them because they do not need protection.  It's that simple. BTW, Steven Chu really messed up when he was testifying before Congress.  Grist reported the story wrong.  Grist made it look like Joe Barton did not know what he was talking about.  Andy Revkin disagrees and sent one of his stories off to Chu to inform him of the facts. Here's the story he sent.http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/30/science/earth/30core.html I would have made this comment on the correct Grist story but comments were closed on it.

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  4. Tyler Durden Posted 9:52 am
    10 May 2009

    First, this is not just about polar bears.  If this probably illegal rule did not exist, all actions that effect listed species would be subject to Endangered Species Act restrictions, giving us a great tool to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.Second, you are dead wrong about polar bears not being in trouble.  Scientists predict that if global warming continues apace, polar bears will become extinct before the end of the century.  And despite polar bears being strong swimmers, they are already starting to drown due to having to swim unnaturally long distances because of ice melt caused by global warming.  Also, pointing to the 1950s as an example of a good level of species population is absurd.  If you want to look at what the biologically and ecologically sound polar bear population number would be, look to the time before Europeans began causing it to be reduced.

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  5. roncram Posted 10:23 pm
    10 May 2009

    First, based on the numbers I provided (which are not in dispute by anyone) most people with agree me that the polar bears are not in any immediate trouble.  However, scientists have predicted polar bears will decrease substantially in the future under certain conditions. Second, the scientists who offered these predictions did not follow scientific forecasting principles.  Scientific forecasting is a fairly new discipline.  The first peer-reviewed scientific forecasting journal began publishing about 25 years ago. Now four journals publish in the field. Two of the leaders of scientific forecasting were commissioned to audit the polar bears prediction and found the prediction to be worthless.  See http://www.forecastingprinciples.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=79&Itemid=131Summary:  The polar bears are not currently in trouble.  According to scientific forecasting principles, there is no reason to predict a large decrease in polar bear population.  Sea ice melt stopped in 2007 and a new cooler climate regime began in late 2007 when the PDO switched to its cool phase.  This switch to the cool phase was predicted in a peer-reviewed paper in 2002 written by Bratcher and Giese. A free full version of the paper is not available online but you can see their slide presentation at http://www.decvar.org/documents/CCR_workshop/bratcher.htm?PHPSESSID=df81bed52419c895efef9135099fb26e9   

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  6. Steven Earl Salmony Posted 5:45 am
    11 May 2009

    Thanks for all the clear voices calling for the preservation of life as we know it and our planetary home.More voices.......we need many more voices speaking out loudly and often.  Time is being wasted by those with wealth and power who adamantly defend unsustainable status quo overconsumption, overproduction and overpopulation activities of the human species that are overwhelming and threatening to ravage the Earth in our time.  Because these distinctly human activities could soon become patently unsustainable, necessary behavior change has to occur fast.  If more members of the human family do not speak out to vigorously resist what the leaders of the human community are demanding all of us do now as we strive to ravenously overconsume Earth's resources; to relentlessly hoard wealth; and to overproduce unnecessary stuff, then the planetary home we are inhabiting and overpopulating could be made uninhabitable for our children and life as we know it by 2012.

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  7. stopGW Posted 9:07 pm
    11 May 2009

    OBAMA THREW THE POLAR BEAR UNDER THE BUSbut the polar bear is also us.

    Kudos to Grist for leading with this story-- the biggest story in the news: one more significant step speeding step toward global warming.Obama is showing a
    terrible weakness for supporting BIG COAL, BIG OIL, BIG GAS. We already have seen since almost the first days of electioneering that Obama evinces a belief that there is such a thing as "Clean Coal".  He is from a BIG COAL state-- and they did elect him.  BIG COAL, BIG OIL and BIG GAS also did elect George W. Bush, from whose policies we are still emerging. Well-- almost.  Seems Obama agrees with the Bush Administration on the Polar Bear and its habitat.WHY THE POLAR BEAR IS "ALSO US"
    One effect of global warming which is not in dispute is that when the oceans get warm enough, massive amounts of the greenhouse gas methane  (23 times as effective as carbon dioxide) currently frozen below the surface, will suddenly escape into our atmosphere.Scroll down to "Arctic Methane Release" for details:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming#FeedbackThere is no such thing as clean coal
    http://thedirtylie.com/Listen to Duke Energy CEO talk about among other things how he expects America to pay for his company's research into the unfeasible alchemy: carbon sequestration-- so called "clean coal".  These companies and their management are only interested in their own paychecks and profits, and we let them run these deadly polluting carbon-fuel businesses at the cost of our own lives
    http://members.greenpeace.org/blog/greenpeaceusa_blog/2009/05/05/duke_energy_ceo_does_doublespeak_on_ccsThis decision-- not to protect the Polar Bear and its habitat-- coupled
    with others where Obama is in agreement that "clean coal" is feasible--
    are fatefully flawed steps toward ever-speeding global warming.Energy Czar Steven Chu is silent on this matter. What up?

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