How this tripe ended up on the front page of Google News, I have no idea. But this letter to the editor from Lyle Laverty, Assistant Secretary of the Dept. of the Interior, completely misrepresents what the Bush Administration intends to do with the Endangered Species Act:
We welcome The Post's call for targeted changes to the Endangered Species Act on the grounds that the law is "the wrong tool" for coping with climate change ["Endangered Process; Proposed rule changes to the Endangered Species Act could do lasting harm in the natural world," editorial, Aug. 19].
The rules we recently proposed would achieve that targeted goal. There is no basis for concern that they will "undermine the law's fundamental work."
My response under the fold.
Laverty makes an interesting assertion, given that according to the original editorial, agencies responsible for highway construction and land development would no longer be required to gain approval from the Fish and Wildlife Service and "would be able to decide for themselves whether a project is likely to harm a species, and not just polar bears." I guess Laverty is right, if protecting endangered species isn't the fundamental work of the Endangered Species Act.
We maintain all current protections against actions that would harm endangered species. Only where scientists tell us it is not possible to establish a causal connection between a particular action and harm to a species -- such as a carbon dioxide emission from an individual plant in Idaho hurting polar bears in Alaska -- will we make small common-sense modifications to the law's rules.
So now the criterion for protecting species threatened by global warming is that the carbon in their lungs be traceable to a single emitter thousands of miles away? No wonder 279 new species near-extinction haven't been added to the list and 200 species out of the 1,326 already on the list are going the way of the dodo. With perfectionists like Laverty running the EPA, you can't blame them for taking their time and sitting on their hands while our national treasures become toxic waste dumps.
Our regulation clarifies that for projects that have no effects on listed species, insignificant effects or wholly beneficial effects, an agency may choose not to consult with the Fish and Wildlife Service or the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Who gets to define what effects are "insignificant" or "wholly beneficial" to a species? Paving the environment might be beneficial to one particular species, but probably not the species whose habitat is being destroyed and definitely not any species on that list.
In all but a small number of cases, consultation will continue as usual. And federal agencies will still face criminal and civil penalties if their actions harm endangered species. But where there is no direct harm, our biologists will be freed up -- so they can concentrate on conserving and recovering rare animals and plants.
Biologists will be freed up, all right. So free there will be lots of new resumes at Monster.com a few months after these changes take effect. I guess this is just further proof that dinosaurs aren't really extinct after all.
What really gets my goat is the fact that the DOI has the gall to argue that this nullification of the law, an ad hoc decision made without consultation from scientists or input from the general public, was based on sound scientific evidence rather than cynical partisanship. How could this rule change possibly involve common sense, when even a spokesperson for the Department couldn't explain how this change would affect pending cases?