Endangered Specious
By INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY, Thursday, May 22, 2008 [here]
Environmentalism: Alaska says it will sue to challenge the listing of polar bears as a threatened species. The designation could block vital oil and gas development. But that was the whole point in the first place.
The state’s challenge was announced Wednesday by Gov. Sarah Palin. She argues there isn’t enough evidence to support such a listing. And there isn’t. She also maintains that polar bears are well-managed, noting that their population has increased dramatically in the last 30 years. She’s right on that as well.
Fact is, the world polar population is at a modern-day high and growing. Mitch Taylor, a polar bear biologist with Canada’s Federal Provincial Polar Bear Technical Committee, puts the current population at about 24,000, up 40% since 1974.
In winning the listing, environmentalists essentially argued that even if the number of bears isn’t declining, their environment is being degraded as global warming melts the Arctic ice they live on. It’s the environmentalists, however, who are on thin ice.
Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne made the ruling last week based on three findings: “First, sea ice is vital to polar bear survival. Second, the polar bear’s sea-ice habitat has dramatically melted in recent decades. Third, computer models suggest sea ice is likely to further recede in the future.”
Fourth, he’s wrong.
On April 24 the World Wildlife Fund published a study, based on last September’s data, showing Arctic ice has shrunk from 13 million square kilometers to just 3 million.
What the WWF omitted was that by March the Arctic ice had recovered to 14 million square kilometers and that ice-cover around the Bering Strait and Alaska was at the highest level ever recorded.
We dare to ask how the ice-loving polar bear survived much warmer pre-SUV periods than we are now experiencing, the most recent period being about 6,000 years ago, before Al Gore was born. The species has survived warming and cooling for millennia.
Taylor emphasizes polar bears’ adaptability, saying they evolved from grizzlies about 250,000 years ago and developed as a distinct species about 125,000 years ago, when natural climate change occurred.
“Reinterpreting the Endangered Species Act in this way is an unequivocal victory for extreme environmentalists who want to block all development in our state,” said Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska. And everywhere else, for that matter.
Similar arguments were made when Prudhoe Bay opened in the 1970s and we were told all manner of critters would be hurt. Except they weren’t.
The caribou herds have thrived. Oil platforms offshore have in effect become condos for fish and all forms of marine life. But this argument is now currently used to block development in the frozen tundra of ANWR.
Writing in the March/April issue of Foreign Affairs, Scott Borgerson, international affairs fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, noted: “The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and the Norwegian company StatoilHydro estimate that the Arctic holds as much as one-quarter of the world’s remaining undiscovered oil and gas deposits.”
Known Arctic reserves threatened by the ruling are staggering enough.
The bear designation jeopardizes a new lease in the Chukchi Sea off Alaska’s coast that — according to the government’s Mineral Management Service — could yield 15 billion barrels of oil and 76 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. Bidders already have agreed to pay the U.S. government $2.6 billion just to look there.
In 2001, the USGS estimated that the coastal plain of ANWR held 10.3 billion recoverable barrels, with up to 27.8 billion “in place,” meaning we can’t get at them with current technology. With enough profit to spend on research, someday oil companies could.
In August 1973, a biologist found a fish called the snail darter in the Little Tennessee River. It was used by environmentalists to block completion of the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Tellico Dam. But snail darters, kangaroo rats and the odd endangered insect aren’t as cute as polar bears.
Just as the caribou thrived at Prudhoe, the polar bear will adapt and thrive. The polar bears aren’t threatened. It is they who are threatening us — with $200-a-barrel oil.
