Your safety vs. enviro lobby: the straw that breaks the camel's back?

Wes Vernon
January 11, 2007


Suppose someone told you 25% of this nation's oil production is threatened by polar bears? Would you deem that person a bit daft?

Well, brace yourselves, because that is exactly what is happening. The Endangered Species Act (ESA) — enacted in 1973 because of pressure from the environmentalist lobby — has now led the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to recommend listing the polar bear as being threatened with extinction in the foreseeable future.

Most normal Americans are fed up with laws, lawsuits, and threats of lawsuits from environmentalist special interest groups that have disrupted the economy, threatened to throw people out of work, shut down small businesses, or even more importantly, threatened our security because of some desert rat. This polar bear frivolity could be the straw that breaks the camel's back.

This column would not address the problem simply to take issue with the hypothetical and dubious argument (see below) over whether the polar bears are threatened. But this issue could affect our access to oil. That in turn could affect our survival as a nation. And anyone who thinks we can blithely count on the flow of oil from the tin-pot Marxist marxist regimes like Venezuela or Islamic terorist states might as well accord equal respect to the powers of the tooth fairy.

A group called the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) and other enviro outfits have sued the federal government over the polar bears, using the "global warming scare" as the basis for their argument. Under the ESA, once a plant or animal is listed as "threatened," the agency must — as they say — "do something."

Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne says under the law, he had no choice but to order the study. Senator James Inhofe says that is why the law needs to be changed. In other words, this is another instance that gets to the issue of "The law is an ass."

But wait! As the CBD bemoans the sudden disappearance of polar bears from the group's ice-cold snowbound surroundings in Arizona, where is the evidence to justify a study of whether polar bears are in fact threatened?

Senator Inhofe, a Republican from Oklahoma, in a speech on the Senate floor, smashed that claim to smithereens.

There are 19 polar bear populations in the world, the senator (former Chairman and now Ranking Member of the Environment and Public Works Committee) noted. Seven of them have no population data of any kind. The other data suggests that five populations are stable. Two of them declined in population because of overhunting, but those same two have since increased their numbers because of new hunting restrictions.

Moreover, the senator adds there are almost twice as many polar bears in the world now as there were 40 years ago. The Fish and Wildlife Service itself estimates current population at 20,000 to 25,000 bears, as opposed to 5,000 to 10,000 in the fifties and sixties. The population increase — again — is traced to hunting regulations. The claim that the polar bear is disappearing off the face of the earth is based on the count from a single polar bear population in the western Hudson Bay of Canada, where the populations decreased by 259 over 17 years. That's 1 out of 19 polar bear populations.

So why would environmentalists sue the government to pursue this red herring? Ideology, and the politics of global warming. If you follow the enviro agenda to its logical conclusion, we humans who dare to inhabit this otherwise pure earth should be given 24 hours to get out.

There is no real evidence that "global warming" is anything more than natural temperature variations. Those climate changes existed long before we populated the earth. Fossil fuel emissions have very little to do with it.

"Global warming" is not the only left-wing agenda that drives this concern for the non-disappearing polar bears supposedly stranded out yonder on melting icebergs.

Other issues include an eviro ideology-driven assault on property rights, as well as luring money into the coffers of leaders of the "green lobby." The more holy causes they can scare up, the better it is for their fundraising. Many a Park Avenue elitist derives beaucoup jollies from his penthouse apartment in a Manhattan skyscraper canyon demanding that some hard-working logger or miner or farmer out there in "flyover country" be deprived of his living to make way for some pure green pasture or other landscape that the elite may visit once or twice in their lives.

Says Senator Inhofe: "I don't believe our Federal conservation policy should be dictated by hypothetical computer projections, because the stakes of listing a decision under ESA could be extremely high. The listing of the polar bear is no exception."

The Oklahoman adds: "The ESA is the most effective tool to usurp local land use control and undermine private property rights. As landowners and businesses have known for decades, when you want to stop a development project or just about any other activity, find a species on that land to protect and things will slow down and many times they stop. It could be the bearing beetle, the Arkansas shiner. Now it could be the polar bear."

The senator, of course, is right. And again, the real overriding issue is security against attack by terrorists. What happens when Middle Eastern governments controlled by radical Islamists or nut cases decide to shut off their exports of oil to us? Then where will we turn for our survival? What do we do? Call an environmentalist to take up arms and bail us out?

Career bureaucrats can find a way to blame oil for global warming in this polar bear case, as in others, regardless of the objective evidence. To "do something," on their part, might call into question oil and gas exploration in Alaska. Do desk-bound bureaucrats in D.C. care if oil drilling accounts for 85% of the state's revenue or 25% of America's domestic oil production? What do they care if we are at the mercy of oil blackmail? You can bet that every America-hating tin-pot the world over is salivating at the prospect the day will come.

And make no mistake: Terrorists and anti-American Marxists the world over are counting on the "environmentalist" lobby in downtown Washington, staffed with six-figure salaried well-fed elitists, to do their work for them and see to it that we do not have access to our own oil supplies. If the polar bear is the peg they can use to fulfill their dreams of an America on its knees, so be it.

As Senator Inhofe puts it, "[T]his conclusion [that the polar bear may eventually decline and go extinct]...is not based on field data, but hypothetical modeling, and that is considered perfectly acceptable under the Endangered Species Act."

Which is why the Endangered Species Act should be changed.

Superlib Barbara Boxer, who assumed the chairmanship of the Environment and Senate Public Works Committee in the new Congress, is in hock to the America-hating environmentalists. But you can be sure Ranking Member Jim Inhofe will raise the security issue at every opportunity.

You can help by communicating with your own senators requesting that the law be changed to bring about some common sense policy. You might even communicate with Boxer. After all, if we assume she would not want America to be grabbed by the throat in a game of international oil blackmail, surely she would be willing to listen...Right? We can always hope.

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