NOT THE SHARPEST KNIVES IN THE DRAWER: Environmental Agency’s Specious Endangered Alaskan Species
In a Washington Post op-ed Gov. Sean Parnell (R-AK) asks the reader to “[i]magine a federal agency listing a species as threatened under the Endangered Species Act even though that species is stable and shows no evidence of decline” and then carving out a "designated critical habitat" for the species that - by its own admission – “will do nothing to benefit the species”:
This is exactly what is occurring in Alaska as the federal government strives to appease environmental advocacy groups. …
The area proposed for designation as critical habitat is remote, but these 187,166 square miles are also home to many Alaskans who would be severely affected by the designation.
Whether it's hunting for food, building a sea wall to protect a village from ocean erosion or constructing a septic system to replace unsanitary sewage lagoons, all manner of activity in an area designated as critical habitat gets caught in the regulatory machine of the federal bureaucracy.
Such a designation would also hobble the ability of Alaska Native Corporations to develop or use lands they were given through the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act.
The bottom line is that once a species is listed as threatened, any and every action that could potentially affect that species or its habitat could be shut down or delayed.
Perhaps most perplexing, the Interior Department has acknowledged that this critical-habitat designation will not result in significant added conservation benefits for polar bears. In addition, much of the area proposed as critical habitat is not land at all, but sea ice. This ice by nature shifts and melts, and it is likely that much of the area designated as critical habitat will soon be open water, miles away from the nearest polar bear, but still squarely on top of some of America's richest shallow-water oil and gas deposits.
Didn’t Obama once say something about his administration’s policies being science-based?
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