Alaska towns say hello to renewable energy

Newsminer.com:

For now, most of rural Alaska gets its electricity from burning diesel. But if things go according to plan, communities around the state will soon be making power from everything but fossil fuel. Read more

Pebble Mine questions state Habitat Division move

Juneau Empire:

The Pebble Mine’s would-be developers are concerned about the state Habitat Division’s current home in the Department of Natural Resources, according to a letter they wrote to Gov. Sarah Palin. “There is a perception that Gov. (Frank) Murkowski weakened state regulatory oversight when he moved the Habitat Division out of the Department of Fish and Game and into the Department of Natural Resources,” wrote Bruce Jenkins, interim general manager of Pebble Mines Corp., which wants to open a multi-metal mine in the Bristol Bay region of Southwest Alaska. Murkowski’s administration moved the Habitat Division to promote development of natural resources. In her election campaign, Palin criticized the move, but she has not restored the division to Fish and Game. House Bill 41, proposed last year and now being considered by the Alaska Legislature, would return the Habitat Division to its former home.

Read the rest here: Juneau Empire

Alaska disputes polar bears need special protection

Ken Taylor has had easier jobs than this one. It’s not like the good old days chasing rhinos, climbing into bear dens and wrestling beluga whales in shallow water.

These days, sitting at a desk as deputy commissioner of fish and game, the veteran wildlife biologist has to muster the best science he can find to argue that Alaska’s polar bears are in good shape and need no special protection from hypothetical doomsday scenarios.

This requires Taylor to stand up to the prevailing wisdom about global warming in most of the world’s scientific community and the public — not to mention some pretty strong opinions in his own department.

But Taylor, point man on polar bears in Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s administration, argues that the scientific justification simply isn’t there — at least not yet — to declare the polar bear “threatened” and touch off a cascade of effects under the Endangered Species Act. A decision on the bears is expected from the U.S. Department of the Interior in the next few weeks.

45-year projection a stretch

“From my perspective, it’s very difficult to put a population on the list that’s healthy, based on a projection 45 years into the future,” Taylor says. “That’s really stretching scientific credibility.”

The state’s own scientific credibility hasn’t been helped by the fact that the Fish and Game Department no longer has any polar bear experts of its own. Nor did it help that, when state officials found a scientific study reinforcing their polar bear stance, a congressional committee called a hearing to decry “phony science” and Exxon Mobil-funded “climate deniers.”

Still, Taylor has helped produce two reports in the past year arguing against an endangered-species listing.

The state argues that there’s too much uncertainty about the future of the Arctic ice sheet on which the polar bears depend. Explanations for global warming other than greenhouse-gas emissions, such as sunspots and variations in the Earth’s orbit, need to be considered, the state says.

And despite experts who call the idea “fanciful,” the state argues that polar bears forced onto land might be able to adapt quickly by eating birds, caribou and other terrestrial species.

“The country is being hit with sky-is-falling-type articles,” said Taylor. “Very little attention is being given to those who say it’s overblown.”

Palin is leading the state’s fight. In an op-ed column in The New York Times earlier this month, she said there is “insufficient evidence” to justify such a listing — an opinion she said was based on “a comprehensive review” of the science by state wildlife officials.

With limited peer-reviewed science available that concludes the bears are doing fine, however, the state devotes most of its space to challenging everyone else’s work.

That pits Taylor and his staff — and several national consultants from the warming-is-overblown camp — against polar bear biologists with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. Geological Survey and leading international authorities in the World Conservation Union’s Polar Bear Specialist Group, not to mention the climatologists of the Nobel-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Studies by those scientists contend that Alaska’s polar bear populations are already showing signs of stress and decline linked to summer melting of their ice habitat.

Ice shrinkage models suggest that two-thirds of the world’s polar bears will be gone by the year 2050. Scientists now say the Arctic ice may be melting even faster than that.

The Palin administration’s effort to block action by raising uncertainty has moved the state to the dubious margins of scientific credibility, according to environmentalists.

“They’re not presenting a fair picture of the science,” said Deborah Williams, a former Interior Department official who now heads the climate nonprofit Alaska Conservation Solutions. “It’s a terrible disservice, to release something so irresponsibly biased.”

National environmental groups sued to prompt the federal endangered-species review. They say the state is giving credibility to industry-funded dissenters whose studies are designed to confuse the public and the press.

“The deniers somehow manage to get a very small number of such papers published, and then those who oppose greenhouse gas regulation or protection of the polar bear seize upon them and promote them and ignore the fact that virtually the entire scientific community disagrees with them,” said Kassie Siegel, the climate program director for the Center for Biological Diversity.

State’s credibility at stake

At stake is the state’s credibility in other areas where a balanced view of science is important, such as predator control and oil-spill cleanups, said Rick Steiner, a professor with the University of Alaska Marine Advisory Program. A federal listing of the polar bear as threatened could have far-reaching consequences, depending on the management plan drawn up to protect the bears.

State officials have expressed concern about effects a threatened-species listing could have on international hunting agreements and future oil and gas development in the Arctic.

Sen. Ted Stevens echoed those concerns this month, saying bear protections could interfere with construction of a gas pipeline from the North Slope.

Rep. Don Young and Sen. Lisa Murkowski have also spoken against the listing, which has been cited by opponents of a pending federal oil lease sale in Alaska’s Chukchi Sea.

Past oil drilling on northern lands has not hurt the polar bears, according to federal studies. Environmentalists counter that current interest in offshore Arctic drilling presents new risks, including oil spills into water.

An even bigger question, spreading far beyond Alaska, is: How will a management plan protect the bears from anticipated habitat loss? Will it focus on new protections for the last few bears on land? Or will it provide new leverage over federal permits for projects in the Lower 48, raising challenges on everything from new freeways to coal-fired power plants — all in an effort to curb greenhouse gases?

“When I voted for the creation of the Endangered Species Act in 1973, I never envisioned that gas and coal plants in the deserts of Arizona could be adversely affected by the listing of polar bears in the Alaskan Arctic,” Young said this month.

The Center for Biological Diversity and other environmental groups say this is just the result they hope for: using the polar bear to address global climate issues. Anything less and the bears are doomed, they say.

Federal officials say there is nothing in the law to preclude listing species threatened by climate change. They say this is the first time such a listing might be made.

Both sides in the debate agree that polar bear population data are scarce.

Follow news about the environment and wildlife at azstarnet.com/environment

Source: Arizona Daily Star

Polar Bear Politics

Source: Slate
Listing polar bears under the Endangered Species Act won’t do much good, but we should do it anyway.
By Holly Doremus
Posted Thursday, Jan. 17, 2008, at 12:24 PM ET

Just over a year ago, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed to list the polar bear as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. Last week, the service missed the deadline to finalize or withdraw that proposal. Environmental groups have already filed a notice of intent to sue if Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne delays much longer.

But it’s not immediately obvious that listing the polar bear makes sense. In the short term, populations are at reasonably high levels and holding steady. In the longer term, designating polar bears for protection won’t stop climate change and therefore won’t save their Arctic sea ice habitat. Given these harsh facts, is this battle to list the polar bear right away worth the fight?

There isn’t much debate over the dangers posed to the polar bear. The Arctic sea ice has diminished noticeably in recent years, and climate models predict further losses to come.

It’s true that polar bears are doing better than most species when they reach the protected list. The population worldwide is estimated at 20,000 to 25,000 and appears to be stable under current conditions. (For comparison, a 1993 study published in Conservation Biology reported a median population size of 4,000 for animals that had been listed as threatened species.) But population numbers don’t tell the whole story, and current conditions are unlikely to persist. The key conclusion in the Fish and Wildlife Service’s proposal to list the bear as threatened—that anticipated reductions in sea ice will put the polar bear at grave risk of extinction by the middle of this century—is supported by extensive peer review and by a series of reports issued last fall by the U.S. Geological Survey. Furthermore, species are “endangered” under the ESA if they are currently in danger of extinction, and they are “threatened” if they are likely to reach endangered status in the foreseeable future. (Click here [PDF] to read the relevant section of the law.) To determine whether those definitions are met, the service must look beyond current population numbers to how those numbers are likely to change.

That’s what happened with the snail darter, the famous little fish that temporarily halted construction of the Tellico Dam. When it was listed as endangered in 1975, the snail darter was thriving in the lower Little Tennessee River. That stretch of the Little Tennessee, though, was scheduled to be drowned under the Tellico Reservoir. (Congress exempted the dam from the ESA nevertheless. The fish later turned up in a few nearby streams and persists today as a threatened species.) The threat to polar bears is developing on a longer timeline than the threat to snail darters, but the reasoning is the same: Human actions now are predictably committing the bear to future peril.

A second objection to the proposed listing is that it will not save the bear. For all its vaunted strength, the ESA does not provide an effective mechanism for controlling greenhouse-gas emissions. First, the ESA has no purchase against emissions that originate outside the United States. Second, even within the United States, greenhouse-gas emissions come from a multitude of sources. The ESA was designed to deal with actions directly connected to an affected species, such as overharvest or habitat development. It is ill-equipped to deal with the individual decisions that are responsible for a large proportion of U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions.

The service would never try to regulate individual electricity use, and it is inconceivable that a citizen suit against someone who drives a Hummer would succeed. Large emitters like the major utilities are therefore the more likely targets for legal action. (They’re already defending themselves against a tort suit brought by a coalition of states claiming that their carbon emissions are harming people and the environment.) But the Supreme Court suggested in 1995 that establishing an ESA violation requires proof of harm to an individual animal. Proving that a utility’s emissions harmed a polar bear would be a daunting task for environmental plaintiffs. Even the largest emitters are not to blame for global warming in the unambiguous way that hunting or land development can harm species.

At best, the ESA can be used to compel major emitters to seek a permit allowing their emissions and to force consultation with the service over emissions caused or authorized by a federal agency. In that case, the service would have to identify an acceptable level of emissions and decide whether everything practicable had been done to reduce the impacts on listed species. What sorts of answers the service would come up with, and what good they would do the polar bear, is anyone’s guess.

None of this provides a sound legal argument against listing, however. The service is not required to prove that naming the polar bear as a threatened species will solve all its problems. Invoking the ESA may have beneficial effects even if it does not directly save sea ice. For example, the listing of the California gnatcatcher prompted the Golden State to adopt new conservation laws, and the prospect of listing the coho salmon led Oregon to devise a new salmon conservation plan. Listing of the charismatic polar bear might increase political support for new regulatory measures. The polar bear faces other threats that the ESA is better suited to address, such as the impacts of oil exploration and production activities. Listing will add a legal weapon for combating arctic oil development.

Of course, there are political risks to pushing the limits of the ESA—namely, the fear that if conservation measures outstrip their political support, Congress might repeal or cripple the ESA. That fear motivated the spirit of compromise that dominated ESA implementation under Bill Clinton. A few years ago, environmental groups sued over the operation of a federal irrigation project that was drying up large stretches of the Rio Grande. They prevailed in court, winning a judgment requiring the Bureau of Reclamation to consult with the Fish and Wildlife Service. But the irrigation project had plenty of friends, including the city of Albuquerque, which was looking to it for drinking water. Congress effectively reversed the court victory by ordering the bureau not to divert any water from people to fish. There was even talk of removing all water projects from the ambit of the ESA.

Such political risks seem low in this case, however. The polar bear surely has more political sway than a little-known minnow, big polluters are less sympathetic than farmers and municipal water users, and Congress is more sympathetic to environmental protection than it used to be.

The arguments against listing the polar bear don’t stand up either legally or as a matter of policy. The polar bear fits the law’s definition of a threatened species. Although the ESA cannot solve the problem of global warming, it might help push the nation toward a more effective solution. Listing is not likely to result in wholesale rebellion against the ESA, and it might help the bear in small ways, by forcing offshore oil interests in the arctic to take better account of their environmental impacts. Secretary Kempthorne should follow the law and add the polar bear to the protected list.

Holly Doremus is a professor of law at the University of California-Davis and a member-scholar of the Center for Progressive Reform.

Letters in Response to Palin’s Op-Ed piece in the NYT

Source: The New York Times

January 9, 2008
Letters

As the Ice Melts, Can the Polar Bears Survive?
To the Editor:

Re “Bearing Up” (Op-Ed, Jan. 5):

In contrast to the arguments made by Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, the scientific literature is very clear that polar bear survival is highly threatened in the wild.

Because polar bears are at the top of the marine food chain, their bodies accumulate persistent organic pollutants that disrupt their reproductive systems. They are also endangered by a loss of habitat, as energy companies encroach on more and more of their territory for oil and gas operations.

But most important, they are beginning to starve, because the sea ice they depend on for hunting seals, their main food, is melting at a very rapid rate because of global warming.

We must recognize the shortsighted nature of Governor Palin’s appeal not to list the polar bear as endangered. While Alaska is increasingly devastated by global warming — melting glaciers, permafrost and sea ice, as well as the severe impacts on wildlife, ecosystems and people — she seems to be working not to protect the polar bear or ultimately the citizens of her state, but to make sure nothing gets in the way of energy company plans for expansion.

Eric Chivian
Boston, Jan. 7, 2008

The writer is director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment, Harvard Medical School.

•

To the Editor:

The argument made by Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska — that the Fish and Wildlife Service should not list the polar bear as threatened under the Endangered Species Act because science doesn’t support doing so — doesn’t persuade.

While Governor Palin correctly describes bear population increases since 1973, when the circumpolar states signed a treaty in response to overhunting, she discounts the mounting evidence that these populations are nonetheless at risk.

Polar bear specialists have shown that diminishing summer sea ice has led to health risks and mortality for the bears, as well as a general population decrease. Some populations could vanish within 100 years.

Though hunting still plays a role and led to a bilateral treaty with Russia, ratified last September, climate change is the major threat to polar bears today.

Governor Palin thinks the proposed listing is a backdoor way of forcing the federal government to change course on global warming policy, but it does no such thing. Instead, it simply seeks to protect bears in the absence of a better national approach to climate change.

If Governor Palin is serious about wanting wildlife policy linked to science, she should examine the studies that her state wildlife officials seem to have ignored. They all say the same thing: polar bears need our help.

James Tierney
Brookline, Mass., Jan. 8, 2008

•

To the Editor:

I find it interesting that Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska does not mention that placing the polar bear on the endangered species list would trigger protections that could prevent oil drilling in one of its important habitats, as a Jan. 2 editorial pointed out.

Even at 79 years old and with an admittedly faulty memory, I remember that editorial, but apparently the governor hopes other readers won’t remember!

Jeanne M. Storm
Chester, Vt., Jan. 5, 2008

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