ESA requires real repairs
Editorial, Capital Press Agriculture Weekly, September 16, 2010 [here]
For the past year and a half, Congress and the Obama administration have become the Mr. Fix-its of politics. They’ve strapped on their legislative toolbelts and gone to work in the name of “change.”
They fixed health care — even though it wasn’t needed — and they fixed Wall Street just in time for those fat executive bonus checks to go out.
But one law that is profoundly broken — and has been since Richard Nixon signed it in 1973 — has been totally ignored: the Endangered Species Act.
The ESA doesn’t accomplish its stated goal — helping to bring back species from the brink of extinction. Since it was passed, 25 species of plants and animals have been delisted — most because they were put there by mistake. In all 1,375 plants and animals have been put on the list as threatened or endangered.
But not helping endangered species is the least of the act’s shortcomings.
The ESA is the Gordian knot of laws. It creates problems that cannot be solved. In the Klamath Basin, the Columbia and Snake rivers, the Sacramento Delta, and the forests, rangeland and farms of the West environmental extremists use the ESA as a blunt legal instrument to stop economic activity.
Though the excuse used by the extremists and their lawyers is to “save” salmon, suckers, smelt, wolves, owls, sage grouse and worms, the real, albeit unstated, goal is to stop economic activity they don’t support or to shake the federal money tree, or both.
All Americans have a stake in the ESA. Billions of taxpayer dollars and billions more of private dollars are spent in the legal and regulatory Kabuki dance whose goal is not to preserve wildlife and plants but to keep the dance going. Environmental lawyers get money from the federal government if they win, so the incentive is to keep suing, appealing and suing some more. …
The Endangered Species Act does not protect species. What it does is costs the federal, state and local governments billions of dollars, hobbles the economy and has either decimated or threatens to decimate the livelihoods of ranchers, farmers, loggers and other Americans.
If Congress and this administration want to fix something, they should look where the problem is greatest: the Endangered Species Act. … [more]