On one hand, we have a sensible decision, on the other, no good deed goes unpunished. – Anthony
U.S. global warming rules won’t change to help polar bears
By Jim Tankersley
Reporting from Washington — The Interior Department on Friday let stand a Bush administration policy barring the federal government from using the precarious state of the U.S. polar bear population as a reason to crack down on global warming, upsetting environmentalists and cheering oil and gas companies.
…
“The single greatest threat to the polar bear is the melting of Arctic Sea ice due to climate change,” Salazar said in a conference call announcing the decision. But the Endangered Species Act “is not the appropriate tool for us to deal with what is a global issue,” he added.
Like Bush administration officials before them, Interior officials said it would be impossible to directly link any one factory or power plant to the decline in polar ice, and thus impractical to regulate their emissions.
Environmental groups promised to sue.
“It just doesn’t make any sense to recognize that the polar bear is threatened and then exempt the primary threat to the species,” said Noah Greenwald, biodiversity program director for the Center for Biological Diversity.
…
Energy industry groups celebrated Friday, as did many Republicans.
“The Endangered Species Act is not the proper mechanism for controlling our nation’s carbon emissions,” said Jack Gerard, president of the American Petroleum Institute.
…
President George W. Bush’s Interior Department listed the polar bear as threatened last year. But shortly before Bush left office, the agency issued a rule prohibiting the government from using the bear’s status under the Endangered Species Act to curb greenhouse gas emissions, closing what Bush officials called a “back door” to climate regulation.
Salazar pledged to reconsider the rule when he took office in January. On Friday, he said that revoking the rule would lead to “uncertainty and confusion” in the department’s efforts to protect polar bears.
Instead, he said, the U.S. must tackle climate change with a comprehensive set of emissions limits, such as the one President Obama is pushing Congress to enact this year.
…
Yet Salazar sided with Bush on another high-profile species issue, moving ahead with a plan to remove gray wolves from the endangered list in the Great Lakes region and parts of the Mountain West.
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It truely is all about money, isn’t it. One of the provisions in the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming bill on Cap & Trade (Tax) is the right for organizations like WWF and others to sue CO2 emitters for “PROJECTED FUTURE HARMS” due to predicted global warming.
…an unashamed tribute to you, and your untiring efforts at http://mickysmuses.blogspot.com/
I do enjoy balanced reportage.
Seems to me that the greatest danger to precarious polar bears is being swept out into the Atlantic with the rest of the multi-year ice caught in the Polar Drift current.
🙂 Sorry its sort of free association, it has to do with bears and the Alaska gov and its funny… http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/05/05/palin-backers-mock-romney_n_196884.html
On topic, did anyone happen to mention that when they ‘repopulated’ wolves in the NW they imported a large wolf then was natural for the area. They have had no trouble populating but the ranchers and hunters are getting a bit ticked. Just another example of man screwing up trying to fix nature. Im still not seeing drown polarbear corpses..
I can’t help but think that the supertanker of AGW is at least slowing if not yet stopping. Slightly encouraging, but a long way to go.
Seems that sanity is slowly becoming fashionable again.
That photo was taken at the famous world Polar Bear Diving Championships 2004 !!.
It is a good thing if they sue as a court of law will examine evidence and be able to distinguish between that and ideology. The more this stuff ends up in the courts the better I think.
Kind Regards
Michael
If you can sue for projected future harms due to seeohtwo, then, you’d better lock up every boy and girl child born forevermore.
Because if you didn’t, every parent could be sued for producing progeny which MIGHT in the future be a murderer, a rapist or a torturer.
Shouldn’t you?
Because believe you me, SOME of the girls and boys born today, tomorrow and forever more WILL become one of those malign species.
Won’t they?
Let the Greenies have their day in court, a legal examination of Polar Bear numbers and causes of any population declines will be highly embarrasing for the melting ice theory.
Now all they need do is to close that other back door that the environmentalists use, the Clean Air Act. That’s what Congress should be doing, clean up the Clean Air Act so such a mundane emission as CO2 isn’t labeled a pollutant.
Gary Plyler (23:17:55) :
It truely is all about money, isn’t it. One of the provisions in the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming bill on Cap & Trade (Tax) is the right for organizations like WWF and others to sue CO2 emitters for “PROJECTED FUTURE HARMS” due to predicted global warming.
Oh Boy! So I can have a computer toy say it will get hotter, then project my beer budget rising exponentially due to the heat, and sue for PROJECTED FUTURE CIRRHOSIS!
Thus getting the money that will let me sit around drinking the beer and proving my case…
I Like It!
Amerrricka! Wadda Country!
Why do you call them “environmental groups”?
Everybody knows these are just front groups for a certain political faction that abhors free enterprise and individual freedom.
Just call them TAX & REGULATE MOBS.
Adam Gallon,
“highly embarrasing” to normal folks, but not to an activist judge.
The polar bear population at the end of the 2nd World War was circa 5,000 and is now at 22,000 – 25,000…some even reckon the figure could be as high as 40,000.
The sun sycle has changed and we appear to be heading for severe cooling…more Maunder than Dalton according to another article on WUWT today.
There has been no overall warming for several years…
Global Sea Ice is at a 20 year high with temps dipping worldwide and yet we are evidently going into catastrophic “Global Warming”.
As another post has said let the Greenies have their day in court…bring it on.
Yes, a brief bit of clarity on the all too fast march toward Eco-driven insanity.
As a scientist, one thing that worries me is what the public will think of science when the predictions fall flat. AGW is the biggest public display of ‘science’ and when it crashes it will reflect poorly on all of us. Worse than that, apart from the many believers and those whose science brushes into AGW (telling how their favorite virus, animal, or forest will be affected by AGW), it strikes me how few scientists are actually out there ‘proving’ (ie publishing) that AGW is real. Throw out Hansen, Mann, and a few handfuls of others and we’d be back to the seemingly hand-drawn IPCC 1990 graph that showed we likely haven’t topped the temps of the MWP. The longer and more entrenched AGW becomes the harder that fall will be and the more it will shatter the public confidence in all science.
MatE brings up a good point, if AGW is ever proven completely wrong, especially in a political sense ie. it was all about the money(hidden tax) will other theories come under more scrutiny and doubt. For example: The Big Bang Theory(I didn’t hear it) ; Evolution(I never have an urge to climb trees) ; Men on the Moon(why didn’t they bring back some cheese?) The list could go on and on. Seriously, what does it say about the Scientific Community when so many of them jump on a bandwagon and stay there after the horse pulling it breaks a leg and the wagon loses 2 wheels? To me it seriously challenges the quality of their scientific training and/or intelligence.
If they sue it will be against the government’s action, not to prove or disprove AGW. This means the issue will likely be very narrowly framed. If you recall, Mass. v EPA, 549 US 497 549 U.S. 497 that upheld the EPA’s can regulate tailpipe emissions and that “greenhouse gases fit well within the Clean Air Act’s capacious definition of air pollutant.” All it does, really, is note the EPA can regulate and that at least some plaintiffs have standing to sue. It did not rule on AGW. But Stevens, in the majority, did toss out that quote above about greenhouse gasses as pollutants.
Essentially it means you’ll have a pro-AGW group(s) suing as plaintiffs against a government agency that agrees with them. The issue will be whether the EPA needs to regulate pollutants endangering polar bears (that’s another case winding it’s way through the courts). After the pro-AGW wins in court, the EPA will crank up the regulatory machinery. You all seem familiar with how that process works. The Greenies will win, in the end, and regulations will be issued (imho). Then, when they’ve started will likely be the time for a person(s) damaged by them to sue and only then may the facts of the AGW foundation be challenged in court. And the way the courts will be by then after the “only liberals need apply” to open vacancies approach don’t be surprised if the courts rule in favor of the Greenies. And they may also rule that alchemy is real science since they’ll be ruling based on politics.
The decision by the EPA merely kicks things down the road at bit but it does not end the bear case and it will not introduce the bare facts of AGW (couldn’t resist the pun). What is does show is the Obama Administration must feel like they’ll take political hits if the EPA steps out on this without being “forced”. Especially since Congress is writhing over the cap-and-trade bill(s). They can always fall back to the EPA if they lose that. My guess is you’ll see a flurry of EPA action sometime after November 2010.
“precarious state of the U.S. polar bear population”
I guess as a Canadian, I have to say “what U.S. polar bear population’? The couple dozen in US zoos? The 6 or 12 north of Alaska? … :)~ 🙂
OT – Catlin crew will be heading home soon
“The UK Ops team are also in constant dialogue with Kenn Borek Air. It will, after all, be the pilots’ decision as to when exactly the team will be extracted. When the time comes (quite possibly within the next 7-10 days), KBA will on this occasion use two Twin Otter aircraft, instead of the usual one. Of these two planes, one will be carrying nothing but fuel, allowing the aircraft to venture far out onto the ocean.”
Be prepared fot the press hailing it an unprecendeted success that proves (once again) AGW conclusively.
The photo of the day is Pen doing ‘science’
Shrinking glaciers are apparently a sign of global warming. Growing glaciers are apparently a sign of global warming also.
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/05/05/himalayas-glaciers.html
And to support AGW there’s a link to an outdated video relating to alleged Alaskan warming. Wilkins Ice shelf break up, 2008 and now alleged Alaskan warming 2008, both linked to or touted as current events? Seems like the AGW argument is becoming old news.
Was the Iditarod race start line hindered by lack of snow this year? The video made much of the fact the start line had to be moved further north in 2008.
Is there ANY evidence for a “precarious state” of the US polar bear population? Are they precariously about to have a population explosion? Now THAT could be a problem.
Noah Wylie says they’re about to go extinct, he wouldn’t lie, would he?
Michael and Adam Gallon:
“Michael (00:54:51) :
It is a good thing if they sue as a court of law will examine evidence and be able to distinguish between that and ideology. The more this stuff ends up in the courts the better I think.”
“Adam Gallon (01:52:16) :
Let the Greenies have their day in court, a legal examination of Polar Bear numbers and causes of any population declines will be highly embarrasing for the melting ice theory.”
Gentlemen, you seem to have an over-ambitious belief in the logic and efficacy of our legal system.
Having your “Day in Court” means precisely nothing, in these dark days of the politically correct tyranny of the majority, and their selected judicial lap-dogs.
We are all so screwed, and the only feasible answer is to kill all the lawyers.
(By way of full disclosure, Kaboom admits that he might be a lawyer.)
I congratulate all the Polar Bears.
Thanks to the US Government they will stay out of the hands of the environmentalists.
I must think of the 1946 atomic bomb test at Bikini.
After only 50 years, the people are back, the corals restored and life as abundant as it was before the test.
Nature is resilliant.
The process which Darwin called “survival of the fittest” which we could translate into “development through competition” does not fit the green socialist agenda.
They want the picture perfect post card of nature and freeze it in time.
Any human influence is bad.
All people must be the same. The same education, the same opportunities, (as the other life forms) and the Green Socialists at the wheel controlling everything.
Where and how trees grow, where and how (many) people will live, what they do, wear, eat, drink, make a living and what they think…
In the mean time they want to control our weather, our climate and the temperature of the oceans. Anyhow, they believe they can!
This is not very “natural”, especially if the arguments are unscientific and falsification
of evidence serves a political goal aimed at “TOTAL CONTROL” of our planet, human kind and it’s resources.
The human race and our technology, our incredible property to solve problems and to adapt must not be halted by a sick unreal doctrine that is aimed to role back our industrial development. I say it’s unnatural to do so.
I am grateful the US Government has taken the right decision for us and for the polar bears.
The only threat to Polar Bears is hunting, not our society, our industries or our way of life.
I really hope nature is left alone and we get back to the times when animals were free, without colored paint spots, tags, gps collars, battery packs and satellite trackers.
Now we can concentrate on three other attempts to put green shackles on humanity,
Cap&Trade, Emission Regulation of CO2 via the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act by EPA and the recent plan to renew and adapt the Montreal Protocol.
Yes, if the democratic way does not work, we simply go over the heads of the people and decide for them.
Democracy has become a nuisance anyhow. Just like Capitalism.
We all know that democracy and capitalism is the best guarantee for our survival.
It’s the human interpretation of Darwin’s Evolution Theory and it will even bring us trough an Ice Age.
For me, another Canuck, the interesting part of this story was the score – Bush mentioned 7 times, Obama just two.