The Wall Street Journal-20080128-The Polar Bear Express
Return to: The_Wall_Street_Journal-20080128
The Polar Bear Express
Full Text (606 words)Global warming is becoming a new unified field theory for environmentalists, a crisis so urgent and profound that it even justifies leaping the democratic process. Consider the political campaign to prod the Bush Administration to list the polar bear as an endangered species -- even though many proponents admit it isn't endangered at all.
This game began with a 2005 lawsuit against the Interior Department from pressure groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council. Their demand was that the polar bear be designated as "threatened" -- that is, at risk for extinction in the foreseeable future -- under the 1973 Endangered Species Act.
No one disputes that higher temperatures in the bear's Arctic habitat have disrupted the sea ice that bears use to catch food and breed. The problem is that polar bear populations have been rising over the last four decades, and may now be at an historic high. This is the result of conservation management, including international agreements on trophy hunting and federal safeguards like the Marine Mammal Protection Act.
The warmists say current numbers count for little because climate- change models anticipate even more Arctic melting. These projections are speculative, however, and tend to underestimate the dynamism of the environment. Animals adapt to changing conditions, which might mean a shift in population patterns to areas where pack ice is more robust year-round. And the reduction in ice cover may be the result of cyclical wind circulation patterns and natural variability, not exclusively warming trends.
The scientific questions are complex -- and that ought to rule out premature, simplistic answers. Naturally, it's having the opposite effect, which suggests that this is really about the politics of global warming. The more honest activists basically concede that a listing is a P.R. ploy to "raise awareness," or achieve other ends, or something.
Even if the Interior Department does rule in favor (a decision is expected in the next few weeks), it's not clear how the Endangered Species Act could help. Usually its remedies involve "critical habitat," which means prohibiting the development or even use of much private land to protect a species, like the spotted owl. But there's no way to designate the same for disappearing sea ice; and besides, all the existing protections of polar bear habitat would still apply, and couldn't be extended much further anyway.
The logical -- and dangerous -- leap here is that the greens are attempting to rewrite the Endangered Species Act without actual legislation. If the "iconic" polar bear is classified as threatened, and the harm is formally attributed to warming caused by humans, then their gambit could lead to all sorts of regulatory mischief. Never mind that even drastic world-wide reductions in carbon emissions over the next decade or so wouldn't have the slightest affect on ice melt.
Another political goal is to use an "endangered" bear listing to tie up in the courts a modest sale of oil and gas leases in the Chukchi Sea 25 to 200 miles off the coast of Alaska, scheduled for February 6. One of the more promising energy frontiers of the Outer Continental Shelf, the acreage is estimated to contain 15 billion barrels of oil and 76 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. The leases come with painstaking stipulations to mitigate any possible environmental harm to species like the polar bear.
But it's hard to imagine any precautions that would satisfy the greens, short of a total ban on offshore drilling. No doubt that will be confirmed when all this ends up in court, but the least the Bush Administration can do now is avoid handing additional ammunition to the litigants.
