Polar Bear Fade

Bill points out the obvious. The polar bear PR machine has struck its tent and has gone into hiding.

This is hardly a surprise since their shrill bleating had no basis in scientific fact. The only real option was to cut loses before they began to look even sillier.

For the record, populations are at a high and likely need to be actively hunted. This has been true for come time. Small wonder that those who know different, such as Canadian and Alaskan politicians were totally frigid to the whole idea and did everything possible to fend of the nonsense.

Anyway, Bill here says it quite well.

Polar Bear BS

By: Bill Steigerwald

FrontPageMagazine.com Tuesday, August 18, 2009

http://www.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=35967

Environmentalists and the media have successfully bamboozled half the populace and every school child in America into believing large numbers of polar bears are starving and drowning in the Arctic because of global warming.

But it's obviously not even close to being true. How do we know this?

Because if even just one emaciated drowned polar bear's body had been fished from Arctic waters in the last five years, we'd have seen its sorry carcass a thousand times on TV and on the covers of Time and Vanity Fair.

By now the poor dead bear would have been given a trademarked first name, marketed as the official victim of Exxon Mobil-caused climate change and starred in three Pixar movies.

Alas, not a single drowned polar bear corpse has come along. Until one does, professional polar bear-saving groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council will have to scare up money and new members with traditional direct-mail campaigns like "Polar Bear SOS!"

NRDC's latest effort to save the iconic, majestic, magnificent, precious polar bear cleverly combines the environmental left's blind hatred of Sarah Palin with the general public's mindless love for cuddly polar bears.

With six pages of exclamation points, underlined sentences, boldfaced type fonts and apocalyptic predictions about imminent planetary and polar bear doom, it looked like a direct-mail parody when I first pulled it from my mailbox the first week of August.

It was the real thing, however.

NRDC celebrity senior attorney Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spent two pages warning that unless we act swiftly and join NRDC or send it money, "Governor Palin" and "some of America's biggest polluters could help push America's polar bears to the very brink of extinction" by 2050.

NRDC -- which has an $87 million annual budget, 1.2 million members and a staff of 400 busy lawyers, scientists and lobbyists - can get a little loony when it's shaking down its target audience of unquestioning "caring Americans."

For example, Kennedy's cry for help was backed up by four pages of polar bear pathos from Frances Beinecke, the group's distraught $300,000-plus-per-year president.

Evidently chosen as NRDC's emoticon-in-chief because she can channel the distress signals of polar bears all the way from the melting Arctic ice packs, she presumed -- incorrectly in my case - that it probably pained the reader as deeply as it pained her to imagine:

"... The last gasp of a polar bear before it drowns in the vast waters of the Arctic, unable to reach the increasingly distant ice floes it needs to find food."

"... The muffled cries of newborn polar bear cubs as they are buried alive when their snowy den collapses from unseasonable rains."

"... The exhaustion of a mother polar bear and her young as they succumb to starvation after enduring longer and longer periods without food."

Beinecke's Arctic soap opera blathered and blubbered on and on, ultimately leaving the impression that it was a proven fact many polar bears were starving, drowning and even eating each other in heretofore unseen numbers because global warming is melting more and more of the sea ice they live on and hunt from.

Beinecke didn't use her great imagination to interview any polar bears for NRDC's unintentionally hilarious package of tear-jerky propaganda.

But since it's apparently OK to make up anything you want about polar bears, let's imagine how a wise old bear might react to his proud species being defamed by NRDC as helpless victims and having their allegedly endangered lives exploited for money-raising purposes.

"Dear NRDC," the average Grandpa polar bear might write. "Thanks a lot for your love and concern. But please don't worry so much about us. In fact, please leave us alone.

"We and the Arctic sea ice are doing just fine. We've lived on the frozen top of the world for 250,000 years. We've survived two ice ages and a meteor that killed off the wooly mammoths.

"We've seen a lot of climate change and a lot of pack ice come and go over the eons. Believe us, it's natural. It's cyclical. It's unpredictable. But we'll adapt, as we always have.

"We are not endangered. We are not going to go extinct in 30 years -- or 10,000 years. There are at least 25,000 of us living quite well up here and, trust me, we're going to survive the coming ice age with a lot less trouble than you will."

Bill Steigerwald is the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review's associate editor. Call him at (412) 320-7983. E-mail him at:

bsteigerwald@tribweb.com.

Exploiting Polar Bears

Declaring the polar bear as endangered never made any sense whatsoever. Now we discover that it provides a convenient straw man to promote the anti development agendas everywhere else of the radical left.

I do not understand why we even bother to provide these marginalized ideologues such a blanket label as if there ever were a underlying rational for their intellectual position. Like the radical right they represent that portion of the body politic whose real ideology is driven by a hatred of the status quo and their own marginalization in it. They really are the tail end of the third standard deviation. This is not a good thing. Once upon a time it found and promoted Hitler.

The situation with the polar bears is just plain silly. Not as bad as having congress declaring that the earths is flat, but close enough.

The polar bear faces two possible threats. The most serious is been hunted to extinction by man. It was not feasible in the nineteenth century and now we simply do not care anymore. That leaves us with a loss of their food supply. Again, we are not competing for their seal diet, nor are anything else and it looks very secure.

Even if the temperature of the Arctic rose dramatically, the Arctic winter does not go away. There will be a huge area of viable habitat always. The bear is able to function successfully deep into Hudson Bay, which tells us that the only thing that matters is at least six months of pack ice.

By the by, if the 110,000 year cycle through the Sirius hot zone holds up, then they have survived worse at least ten times.

March 2, 2009

Global Warming: Using the Polar Bear to Impose Costly Measures

by Ben Lieberman

http://www.heritage.org/Research/EnergyandEnvironment/wm2319.cfm

WebMemo #2319

In 2008, the Bush Administration, responding to litigation from an environmental group, listed the polar bear under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). Bush Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne also made some changes to the implementation of the ESA in order to limit the adverse consequences. But now, the omnibus appropriations bill, first passed by the House and now being debated in the Senate, seeks to reverse these common sense limitations.

If successful, this revised polar bear policy would greatly threaten economic growth and serve as a powerful anti-stimulus measure, not just in the polar bears' Alaskan habitat but throughout the United States. These rule changes are a costly and unnecessary form of backdoor global warming policy and have no business in a massive spending bill that is headed for quick passage with limited debate. With such drastic implications for the nation, the Senate should, at a minimum, fully debate the pros and cons of such a policy.

History of the ESA: More Economic Harm Than Environmental Good

Enacted in 1973, the ESA authorizes the Department of the Interior (DOI) to create a list of species considered endangered or threatened. Once a new species is listed, the statute requires DOI, working with other federal agencies, to formulate a recovery plan that includes any and all actions deemed necessary to protect the species and its habitat. Broad citizen suit provisions allow environmental activist groups to force DOI to enjoin any activity alleged to be in violation of the provisions of the ESA, to list additional species, or to expand provisions for already-listed species.

Notwithstanding its laudable goal of protecting species, the ESA has proven to be a flawed approach that has only gotten worse after three decades of judicial interpretation. Some 1,300 species are listed, but very few have actually recovered to the point of being de-listed, and only 5 percent are more than 50 percent recovered.[1]

While doing little to protect species, the ESA's provisions have been highly successful in curtailing economic activity in the vicinity of the designated habitat for the 1,300 species.

The ESA, Global Warming, and Polar Bears

Such ulterior motives are clearly a part of the push to list the polar bear. Its global numbers have actually doubled, from an estimated 8,000–10,000 in 1965–1970 to 20,000–25,000 today.[2] Unfortunately, the requirements for listing have never been rigorous. In the case of polar bears, listing was based on speculation that, according to computer models, continued global warming will reduce the future amount of Arctic summer ice upon which the bears rely.[3] In this way, the ESA is being used to implement global warming policy.

Among its many requirements, the ESA states that "each federal agency shall, in consultation with and with the assistance of the Secretary, insure that any action authorized, funded, or carried out by such agency is not likely to jeopardize the continued existence of any endangered species or threatened species or result in the destruction or adverse modification of habitat."[4] These so-called Section 7 consultations routinely add delays to economic activities near endangered species and sometimes block them entirely.

Most directly, the polar bear listing could curtail energy production in Alaska. This would be unfortunate, as Alaskan oil and natural gas potential is tremendous. A 2008 U.S. Geological Survey study estimated there are 40 billion barrels of undiscovered oil above the Arctic circle—which would nearly double America's proven reserves—as well as tremendous volumes of natural gas.[5]

The impacts of the polar bear listing stretch well beyond Alaska, though locking up Alaskan energy would be bad enough. Carbon dioxide, the ubiquitous byproduct of fossil fuel combustion, is the agent DOI blames for the warming that supposedly shrinks the ice and thus harms the bears. Consequently, any activity producing or using energy—building a new bridge in Alabama, opening a factory or power plant in Arizona, expanding a dairy operation in New York, constructing a school in Idaho—could invoke the Section 7 consultation process. Bottom line: Environmental activists could use the ESA to hold up any of thousands of projects across the U.S. This would include many if not all of the "shovel ready" projects that are funded in the stimulus package.

Anticipating these adverse economic impacts, Secretary Kempthorne took several steps to address them. This included a rule to limit the Section 7 consultations to those where the cause and effect between the activity in question and the harm to species is not tenuous (thus excluding carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions from any individual source) and a rule specifically exempting new global warming considerations with regard to the polar bear listing.

Congressional Attempts to Undo These Regulations

Now, Section 429 of the House-passed Omnibus Appropriations Act would allow DOI to reverse these rules for the polar bear listing and, worse, to do so without the customary notice and comment rulemaking. In other words, the provisions here would allow DOI to make the change and do so with even less transparency and accountability than usual.

If this is done, then every activity that involves energy—from expanding a power plant to starting a farm—could get caught up in ESA red tape. The long-term economic impacts would be severe, and ironically the shorter-term effects would undercut the thrust of the stimulus package to spur an economic recovery.

Consider all new construction projects as well as efforts to create or expand all but the very smallest of businesses—the very kinds of things that are both a part of the stimulus package and that in any event are necessary for economic growth. Assuming the proposed changes are enacted, then all of the federal agencies involved in one way or another in such projects—for example, the Environmental Protection Agency for the many things that require EPA permits—will have to engage in Section 7 consultations with the Department of the Interior over the global warming implications. At the very least, such projects will be held up by bureaucratic delays, thereby creating opportunities for environmental groups and others to initiate litigation against them. Aside from delays, which could stretch into years in some cases, some projects could end up being scaled back in an effort to mitigate the supposed adverse impact, and others could be stopped entirely.

Beyond being bad policy in itself, the very fact that this complicated and far-reaching change is being done in an omnibus bill with precious little opportunity for debate strongly urges that these provisions should not be rushed into law.

Backdoor Extremism

The American people do not need a costly backdoor global warming policy implemented through the misuse of preexisting ESA authority never intended for that purpose. But at no time is such a policy more harmful than in the midst of a severe recession. The adverse economic impacts of ill-advised global warming measures are clear and are a big part of the reason why Congress has yet to directly enact any such measures. Doing it indirectly via the ESA and quietly tucking it into the massive omnibus appropriations bill now moving through the Senate would be just as damaging. The Senate should allow and encourage a full debate on this pernicious policy rather than cramming this legislation through with little to no discussion of the economic perils it would bring to the nation's future.
Ben Lieberman is Senior Policy Analyst in Energy and the Environment in the Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation.