Enviros Prod Feds On Polar Bears, See Way To Attack Global Warming
Environmental groups Monday (March 10) sued to prod the federal government into listing polar bears 
as threatened due to the climate change-related loss of sea ice, which is vital to the animals' survival. Such a move could have far-reaching regulatory implications beyond the fact that the iconic bear would be the first mammal receiving Endangered Species Act protection because of global warming.
Some environmentalists and activists see the species law as providing a powerful tool for controlling greenhouse gas emissions in addition to playing its traditional role in protecting vulnerable animal and plant populations. The latest lawsuit comes amid a flurry of similar litigation and other moves to press government agencies and industry on alleged damage to animals as well as humans, including native Alaskan villagers.
"We already have laws that will help us do a lot on global warming, if we just enforce them," with perhaps the most important being the Endangered Species Act, said Kassia Siegel, an attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity, one of the plaintiffs in the polar bear case.
According to the newest lawsuit (which can be viewed here) filed in federal court in Oakland, the Bush administration missed a January deadline for making a final determination on the bear’s status. The Interior Department in 2006, under court pressure from environmental groups, announced a proposal to list the bears as threatened. A spokeswoman for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the branch of the Interior Department most directly involved, said it was not known when a final decision would be made.
But also on Monday, an official of the Interior Department’s inspector general’s office confirmed that a preliminary inquiry had been launched into the delay in making the decision. Such a probe had been requested by environmental groups.
“It is at the very, very earliest stages,” wrote Kris Kolesnik, associate inspector general for external affairs in an e-mail to Climate Law Update.
The new lawsuit painted the bears’ situation as dire:
"Polar bear populations are already declining due to global warming. Individual polar bears have drowned, starved, and even resorted to cannibalism as global warming transforms the Arctic. The U.S. Geological Service (“USGS”) projects that two thirds of the world’s polar bears will be extinct by 2050 if “business as usual,” emissions trends continue, and that the world’s remaining bears will face an over 40 percent risk of extinction by century’s end. The USGS projections may be overly optimistic, as they are based on modeling results of sea-ice decline that have underestimated the ice loss to date."
It also noted that while the bears’ global population is estimated at between 20,000 and 25,000 animals, numbers have been dwindling in certain regions, including the western Hudson Bay region and in the southern Beaufort Sea.
Endangered Species Act listing would trigger a number of protections for the animals. A big impact could come from a section of the law that requires other federal agencies to consult with the Interior Department when they are considering authorizing activities that might jeopardize protected species or adversely affect their habitat. In the case of an animal listed because of global warming, that could mean decisions as disparate as those relating to offshore oil drilling, highway construction, coal-fired power plants, federal fuel economy standards and industrial air pollution permits could be opened to new scrutiny, no matter where they are located, according to Siegel. The agencies would have to look at ways of reducing the harm to the animals, she said.
“Any federal agency that is authorizing a major source of greenhouse gas emissions would have to analyze the cumulative effects of those greenhouse gases on polar bears,” Siegel said. However, she said the law would give some discretion to the agencies to determine which projects would qualify.
The Natural Resources Defense Council and Greenpeace also are plaintiffs in the lawsuit. In the groups’ statement announcing the court action a Greenpeace official said the federal government recently had initiated lease sales to drill for oil in the Chukchi Sea, a part of the Arctic Ocean he called "pristine polar bear habitat." The official, Kert Davies, called on the Bush administration to cancel the sales and “immediately implement a plan for deep cuts in U.S. global warming pollution.”
Siegel, in an interview with Climate Law Update, said listing a species under the law would not provide the entire solution for global warming. However, she said: “We need to be analyzing solutions in all possible contexts.”
Determining such issues as when the inter-agency reviews would have to take place and in what manner they would be carried out would be “some of the bigger questions that have to be answered” if the bear is listed, said Wildlife Service spokeswoman Valerie Fellows.
Some environmental organizations, Felllows said, “have been very vocal about their intention to use [a polar bear listing] as a regulatory tool to control greenhouse gases.”
She characterized other considerations under the law, such as whether an animal is “taken” (i.e., harmed), in much narrower terms, and requiring a high level of scientific proof to demonstrate. The science, she said, "would have to be so evolved that you would have to point to the car that would be related to the animal that died."
Fellows would not speculate on when a final decision on the bear would be issued. In January, Wildlife Service noted it was studying the issue in light of information on sea ice trends and bear populations coming from another federal agency, the U.S. Geological Survey.
In 2006, the federal government’s National Marine Fisheries Service listed two species of coral for protection under the endangered species law, partly for reasons related to global warming. Environmentalists have also sued to push similar listings for numerous species of penguins (see news release and lawsuit here). In addition, they want to see climate-related protections for the Pacific walrus and, in California, the mountain-dwelling American pika (see press statement here), a small mammal.
Recently a lawsuit was filed in federal court in San Francisco against big energy companies for their alleged roles in causing global warming damage to Kivalina, a native Alaskan fishing village.
(Polar bear mother and cubs: Wikipedia photograph)
