Conservatives fighting adding Polar Bears to Endangered Species list

[dkf]

Washington Dispatch: Any day now the polar bear could be listed under the Endangered Species Act. Conservative groups are already plotting their response—and lawsuits are just the tip of the iceberg.

By Daniel Schulman

May 8, 2008

TOOLS

In late January, Jim Sims, the president and CEO of the Western Business Roundtable, an industry trade group that represents mining and energy interests, told his colleagues to prepare for the worst: The polar bear was almost certain to receive "threatened" status under the Endangered Species Act. "The negative implications of this to business and industry breathtaking," he wrote in an email, obtained by Mother Jones. But, he said, his and other groups had devised a plan to fight and "quite possibly reverse" the imminent ruling. Part of that strategy involved a legal challenge to the listing.

....

Should the polar bear receive ESA protection in a decision expected by early next week, legal challenges, full-press lobbying, and media campaigns designed to portray the listing as a devastating financial blow to a country already in economic turmoil are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. "You're going to start seeing lawsuits like dandelions in a field the day after the regulations are filed," Sims told me. Innis says, "I will join anyone who wants to fights this thing. There is nothing that's impacting us more than $4 gasoline. It's going to impact so heavily minorities and poor people. This should be the major talking point in the presidential campaign."

Since 2005, when the Arizona-based Center for Biological Diversity petitioned the Fish and Wildlife Service to list the polar bear as a threatened species, a broad coalition of industry and conservative groups have watched, with increasing dread, as the petition slowly worked its way through the Interior Department, helped along by lawsuits filed by environmental groups. Almost since the ink dried on the ESA more than thirty years ago, conservatives have bridled at its strictures, viewing the law as an affront to free-market principles and an impediment to businesses seeking to develop land or extract natural resources. But, even in this context, the polar bear's possible ESA listing has elevated the debate to a fever pitch. "Compared to this decision, the Spotted Owl and Snail Darter cases were pimples on an elephant," Chuck Cushman, the founder of the American Land Rights Association, told recipients of his email list this winter in an "all out call to action" that implored supporters to "deluge the White House and Interior Department with calls, faxes and emails." By this he meant that, unlike typical ESA listings, protections for the polar bear could extend well beyond its natural habitat in the US, along the Beaufort and Chukchi seas of northern and western Alaska. Based on scientific studies showing that global warming is rapidly deteriorating the Arctic sea ice that polar bears call home, the CBD's endangered species petition was among the first to tie greenhouse gas emissions to the fate of a species.

http://www.motherjones.com/washington_dispatch/2008/05/polar-bears-endangered-species-global-warming.html

[MikeNearMcChord]

1. And these morons wonder why people are walking away from them.

Let's make conservatives an extinct species!