$5 Per Gallon Gasoline! Reason: Endangered Species Act

That shouldn’t make a lick of sense unless of course scientists were to discover some rare and endangered species living deep beneath the earth where oil and natural gas reserves lie. But this is what has become of our beloved Endangered Species Act, a legal document devised in 1973 that was intended to help prevent the man-made destruction of animal and plant life.

Last year the Bush administration decided to list the polar bear as a species that is threatened – meaning that there is a possibility that if we don’t pay close attention to this animal, certain circumstances could put the bear in danger of going extinct. We don’t want that but was it necessary?

I guess it depends on whose science we opt to use and how much politicking comes into play. It appears that the Bush administration attempted to play politics instead of opting for science and fighting the battle based on that.

After the listing was announced, the Bush people tried to pull a double whammy political back 2 and one half somersault. They crafted an executive order that said lawsuits couldn’t be filed to stop energy production, or any other carbon emitting project, based on perceived global warming threats to polar bears. This of course makes about as much sense as pouring gasoline on a fire. The reason Bush and Kempthorne claimed for listing the polar bear was because of shrinking Arctic ice caused by global warming. Politics as usual.

Now with Obama in office and having recently overturned that sneaky little attempt by Kempthorne to prevent lawsuits, the door has been left wide open, welcoming with open arms any and every lawsuit known to mankind that might have an affect on polar bears. How creative can you get?

Hugh Hewitt seems to think that some in the media are beginning to catch on that environmentalists are very serious when they claim that they will regulate energy and control their standard of environmental issues by using the ESA, along with the polar bear as the ultimate weapon.

Hewitt is a far more glass-half-full kind of guy than I am. I don’t think the media is catching on at all but I completely agree with him and have been yelling about this for some time, that environmentalists have discovered what a useful and powerful tool the ESA has become.

In his article at TownHall yesterday, Hewitt lays some of the blame on industries that are staring down the barrel of environmental restrictions that will force the price of energy through the roof or put them out of business. The industries’ “hear no evil, see no evil”, as he puts it, approach to dealing with this issue, has left control in the hands the environmentalists’ lawyers who will decide how much stifling of economic expansion and energy development will occur.

Instead it has ceded the legal initiative to the very capable lawyers at the Center for Biological Diversity and other groups, and the rollout of the prevent-global-warming-via-the-ESA strategy is beginning. The impact on energy production across the U.S. will be to sharply curtail new exploration and production and to greatly increase the cost of existing production. Every time a federal permit is proposed that will facilitate energy production –or any carbon-releasing activity for that matter– environmental activists will argue that an ESA mandated permitting process is required.

In past dealings with the federal government on ESA issues, it appears that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service does whatever it wishes and then stands back and lets the chips fall where they may. In my opinion, the mistake the Bush administration made in dealing with the polar bear was that it didn’t present its case scientifically and staunchly support that decision with the science they used. They decided to play games. This leaves us with tons of questions. What was the determining factor, politics or science? Does USFWS even know what they are doing? Did they ever really have any intention of protecting the polar bear? Are they deliberately playing into the hands of the environmentalists? Or, perhaps they thought it would be fun to leave the next administration the headache to deal with?

Playing stupid games with the ESA and then ignorantly thinking a little executive order here and there will make everybody happy, just has never made much sense to me. Look at the USFWS’ track record with other ESA issues, like the wolf. They keep trying to convince people they want to remove the wolf from ESA protection but they have employed some real boneheaded maneuvers in that endeavor and still the wolf remains protected and the people suffer.

USFWS seems either unwilling or incapable of defending its positions on ESA with science – at least to a point that any of us feel they have deep convictions about any of it. The feds have had ample opportunities to rabidly present their scientific evidence in the courts – God knows we spend enough money fighting lawsuits – but all we’ve seen of late is a tail-between-the-legs approach. Why should we believe the feds will do much more than declare a species in trouble or recovered and then let the courts sort it all out.

This is one of the problems we face with the ESA. Government intrusion hurts business, the economy, free enterprise all the way down to the individual landowner. Administering the ESA is an intrusion of government to begin with but now, environmentalists pull the strings because they have the money to spend on court cases and those of us taking it on the chin either will not fight it or don’t have the means.

Last week I made this statement in regards to the U.S. Senate’s vote to overturn the Bush administration’s restrictions on lawsuits to stop energy development based on loss of polar bear sea ice caused by global warming.

What essentially has happened is that the polar bear is now the largest, most powerful instrument that has ever existed and it lies at the disposal of the environmental community.

If Hugh Hewitt is correct, then the Center for Biological Diversity now is in near complete control over the Endangered Species Act and the polar bear weapon to effectively have its way with our economy, energy development and economic growth.

The federal government is content to let their policies be decided in court to the highest bidders leaving the people in some sort of economic limbo, quite powerless.

What was once a Congressional act to save a few plants and animals has grown into a powerful instrument being used for just about everything except its original intention. And yet, any suggestion to amend the ESA creates a definitive uproar in opposition. Now it is clear why. Those controlling the ESA have a lot of power and with that power they control you and me. Politics as usual.

Tom Remington