The politics of most public policy issues often thrives or dies on the strength of its media attractiveness and the ability to develop good copy, with the appropriately warm and fuzzy subjects to love (or the reverse) has been central to the environmental movement’s strength in shaping public policy.
This article from The New Atlantis explores that as it regards the polar bear.
An excerpt.
“Lawyers at the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD), an Arizona-based environmental group, spent years looking for what Newsweek termed “an animal to save the world.” Their criteria: a charismatic animal dependent upon an Arctic ice habitat threatened by global warming so that the animal could be listed under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). With the right species, the CBD hoped to use the act to drive global warming policy in the United States and abroad.
“The Kittlitz’s murrelet didn’t cut it. Neither did an Arctic spider or a species of Caribbean coral. The polar bear, though, was another story. Citing research showing that the polar bear’s “sea ice habitat is literally melting away,” CBD attorneys in February 2005 filed a petition with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) to list Ursus maritimus as a “threatened” species. Under the ESA, a species is “threatened” if it “is likely to become an endangered species within the foreseeable future throughout all or a significant portion of its range.” A species is “endangered” if it is “in danger of extinction.” According to CBD, the “ongoing and projected” loss of Arctic sea ice, largely due to anthropogenic global warming, posed a readily foreseeable threat to the bear. “Only by implementing major cuts in greenhouse gas emissions in the very near future will a scenario be possible in which sufficient sea ice remains that the polar bear can persist as a species,” CBD maintained.
“Some three years and two lawsuits later, in May 2008, the FWS officially declared polar bears “threatened,” adding them to the nearly 2,000 species listed under the ESA. Citing record low levels of sea ice in the Arctic and global climate models that predict further declines, Dirk Kempthorne, the Secretary of the Department of the Interior (of which the FWS is a bureau), conceded that “the legal standards under the ESA compel me to list the polar bear as threatened.” Yet he also cautioned that the listing would do little to stem the loss of sea ice, and warned that it “should not open the door to use of the ESA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from automobiles, power plants, and other sources.” Such actions “would be a wholly inappropriate use of the ESA law,” he explained, and could not produce emission reductions sufficient to limit projections of future warming anyway.
“The polar bear’s ESA listing is unquestionably a public-relations victory for CBD and other environmental groups. It may not do much to help polar bear conservation, let alone cool the globe, but it may well bring greater urgency to climate activism. Saving polar bears may be a more saleable cause than abstract appeals to stabilize global climate. Now the Berlin Zoo’s polar bear, cute and cuddly Knut, can replace former Vice President and global scold Al Gore as the face of global warming. The polar bear is “the iconic example of the devastating impacts of global warming on the Earth’s biodiversity,” according to CBD attorneys.
“Soon, though, the polar bear may also become a symbol of how the Endangered Species Act can be exploited to impose substantial regulatory burdens without actually conserving species in the wild. Secretary Kempthorne is certainly correct that the ESA was not intended as a backdoor to regulating emissions. Congress enacted the ESA in 1973 to create a safety net for the nation’s most vulnerable species. Listing a species under the ESA is like admitting it into the “emergency room” so urgent measures may be taken. How well the act has fulfilled its intended purpose is a matter of perennial dispute. In thirty-five years, very few species listed under the act have actually gone extinct, but just as few have recovered sufficiently to be removed from intensive care.”
