Arctic Fairy Tale By Roy Spencer
The Bear on May 17 2008 at 7:08 am | Filed under: Environmentalism
The polar bear isn’t threatened, but Big Oil should be.
The decision on Wednesday by the U.S. Interior Department to declare the polar bear a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act is a major victory for environmentalists who have been looking for a back-door legal mechanism to limit carbon-dioxide emissions.
The decision was made after nine U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) studies looked into the possibility that the polar bear might be faced with extinction late in this century. Polar bears need a sea ice environment for most of the year to thrive. But summer sea extent has been receding for the last 30 years that we have been monitoring it with satellites, and as a result, two of the 13 subpopulations of polar bear have seen population declines. The other eleven subpopulations have been stable or growing. In all, the total polar-bear population is believed to be at or near a record high — 20,000 to 25,000.
So how is it that the eventual extinction of the polar bear has been forecast in the face of record-high numbers? Well, as in the case of global-warming projections, experts relied on computer models that predict continued global warming and continued melting of summer Arctic sea ice.
And the scientists had some help. Hollywood did their part by producing the heartwarming movie Arctic Tale, which followed a polar bear family struggling to survive on a fixed budget and without a father around to help out. Queen Latifah did her part by channeling the polar bears’ thoughts for us, since the last person who tried to interview a polar bear was eaten.
SideBear: How do you declare a species endangered when its numbers are increasing?
Related
Endangered energy acts
Fresh assaults on the future of energy supplies land daily. The U. S. government yesterday declared polar bears to be a “threatened species,” a move that does nothing for polar bears but poses a major risk to future energy development in Alaska and the North. In Canada, a federal court threw a roadblock yesterday in front of Imperial Oil’s $8-billion Kearl oilsands project in a case that has come to focus on carbon emissions.
Neither the polar bear nor the Kearl decision alone has an immediate impact on the supply or price of oil. But both have wide ramifications, giving environmental activists fresh foundations from which to delay, freeze, stall and ultimately permanently halt oil and gas exploration and development projects.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
