Polar Bears "Threatened" Species

In a victory for environmentalists, Polar Bears were named a "threatened" species by the U.S. Dept. of the Interior, according to the Washington Post.

Under the law, the federal government is now required to draft a recovery plan for the species, which entails assessing the population and its habitat. The ruling also compels federal agencies to consult with the Interior Department when considering decisions that could further imperil the polar bears.
Administration officials, however, sought to minimize the policy consequences of the decision -- the first time the Endangered Species Act has been invoked to protect an animal principally threatened by global warming. Kempthorne made clear that the decision would not justify regulating emissions from power plants, vehicles or other human activities.
Dale Hall, who directs the Fish and Wildlife Service, which decides how to protect listed species, said such regulations would be justified only if the administration could prove a direct connection between the emissions and the polar bears' predicament.
"We have to be able to connect the dots," Hall said. "We don't have the science today to be able to do that."
But environmentalists, who by and large praised the decision, said the administration would have no choice but to curb greenhouse gases.
"The law says what it says, not what the administration wishes it says," said Kassie Siegel, climate program director at the Arizona-based Center for Biological Diversity. "This is great news for polar bears. . . . It's also a watershed moment, the strongest statement we've had to date from this administration about global warming."
Interfaith Power and Light is a religious response to global warming with chapters in 26 states and Greater Washington, D.C. Find a link to your local chapter at http://www.theregenerationproject.org/State.Check out the National IPL Blog.
Find discounts on energy saving products at http://www.shopipl.org/

Polar Bears Casulties of Our Oil Addiction?

Is the Bush Administration willing to sacrifice Polar Bears to continue to feed our oil addiction? That's the contention of this article in Salon (see excerpt below)

By 2050, two-thirds of the world's polar bears will have vanished, as a result of global warming melting their icy habitat, according to scientists at the U.S. Geological Survey. There may no longer be any polar bears at all living in Alaska, their only home in the United States. Still, this stark prediction, revealed in September 2007, after a yearlong review of the impact of melting sea ice on the Alaskan bears, hasn't inspired the Bush administration to list the bear as even a threatened species, much less an endangered one, under the Endangered Species Act.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, responsible for listing mammals as threatened or endangered, has been one of the most politically compromised scientific divisions in the Bush administration. It didn't consider extending federal protections to polar bears until it was petitioned, and subsequently sued, to do so by a coalition of environmental groups back in 2005. Now it admits that polar bears are "likely to become endangered in the foreseeable future," and explained recent delays by citing the complexity of the decision: It has never before had to designate a species as threatened because of global warming.
But critics say that Fish and Wildlife hasn't made a ruling yet because another agency within the Department of Interior, the Minerals Management Service, is on the verge of handing out oil and gas leases in vast swaths of the polar bears' remaining habitat. The Endangered Species Act prevents the federal government from taking actions that harm protected species. "At the same time the administration is illegally delaying a decision on the polar bear listing, it is also racing to sell some of the polar bear's most important habitat in the Chukchi Sea for oil and gas development," said Andrew Wetzler, director of the Endangered Species Project at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
On Thursday, the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming will hold a hearing on the polar bear listing and controversial oil leases. Rep. Edward J. Markey, D-Mass., who chairs the committee, said in a statement: "The Bush administration is once again putting the oil cart before the polar bear. On the one hand, the Interior Department is dragging its feet on protecting the polar bear, while opening up new oil and gas drilling in sensitive polar bear habitats on the other."
Details of the oil development were announced earlier this month. The Minerals Management Service plans to lease 30 million acres for oil and gas drilling in the Chukchi Sea, where about one-fifth of the world's remaining polar bears live. The lease sale will take place on Feb. 6, which could allow it to go through before any plans to protect the polar bears get in the way. "Short of sending Dick Cheney to Alaska to personally club baby polar bears to death, there's not too much that the administration can do that is worse for polar bears than oil and gas development in their habitat," says Kassie Siegel, director of the climate, air and energy program for the Center for Biological Diversity.

Interfaith Power and Light is a religious response to global warming with chapters in 25 states and Greater Washington, D.C. Find a link to your local chapter at http://www.theregenerationproject.org/State.

Find discounts on energy saving products at http://www.shopipl.org/

Movie Aims to Put a Face on Global Warming

The film Arctic Tale aims to put a face on global warming. Read about it in this excerpt of a New York Times article:

THERE is something unnerving about watching a polar bear stalk across floating sea ice high in the Arctic and doing so from the frigid waters directly beneath the bear, the world’s largest four-legged predator.
Overhead, through ice so thin that it is transparent, plate-size paws set down, one after the other, as the half-ton animal pursues its prey.
Gripping moments like this abound in “Arctic Tale,” a new film exploring challenges facing polar bears and walruses, two familiar denizens of the icy, but warming, seas at the top of the world. But “Arctic Tale” is not a typical addition to a lengthening line of somber documentaries on dangerous or endangered wildlife.
Instead, Adam Ravetch and Sarah Robertson, a husband and wife who have spent the better part of two decades filming the Arctic’s hulking, reclusive and sometimes deadly mammals for television nature shows, sifted through more than 800 hours of their own footage and that of other filmmakers to assemble a fictional, family-friendly coming-of-age tale.
The film follows this unorthodox gambit to tell of the entwined lives and travails of two composite characters, Nanu, a young bear, and Seela, a walrus. Their stories are related, fable style, by Queen Latifah, and include scenes ranging from the wrenching, when a bear cub falters and fades in a relentless blizzard, to the comic, when a heap of basking walruses erupt into a flatulent chorus after bingeing on clams. (An adult can eat 4,000 a day.)
“Arctic Tale” is clearly aimed at the same audiences that flocked in unexpected numbers to “An Inconvenient Truth,” which chronicled Al Gore’s climate campaign, and “March of the Penguins,” which followed the life cycle of rugged inhabitants from the other frozen end of the world. But Adam Leipzig, the president of National Geographic Films, which produced the film, said the project was conceived two years ago, before either documentary became a hit. The idea, he said, was to make a wildlife film “that really holds up as a movie.” (Paramount Classics will release the film on Friday in New York and Los Angeles, and nationwide in mid-August.)

Visit the movie website to sign up for a free screening in your area late July-early August.
Interfaith Power and Light is a religious response to global warming with chapters in 22 states and Greater Washington, D.C. Find a link to your local chapter at http://www.theregenerationproject.org/State.htm

All Quiet on the Polar Bear Front

According to the New York Times,

Internal memorandums circulated in the Alaskan division of the Federal Fish and Wildlife Service appear to require government biologists or other employees traveling in countries around the Arctic not to discuss climate change, polar bears or sea ice if they are not designated to do so.

In December, the Bush administration, facing a deadline under a suit by environmental groups, proposed listing polar bears throughout their range as threatened under the Endangered Species Act because the warming climate is causing a summertime retreat of sea ice that the bears use for seal hunting.
Environmentalists are trying to use such a listing to force the United States to restrict heat-trapping gases that scientists have linked to global warming as a way of limiting risks to the 22,000 or so bears in the far north.
It remains unclear whether such a listing will be issued. The Fish and Wildlife Service this week held the first of several hearings in Alaska and Washington on the question.

Over the past week, biologists and wildlife officials received a cover note and two sample memorandums to be used as a guide in preparing travel requests. Under the heading “Foreign Travel — New Requirement — Please Review and Comply, Importance: High,” the cover note said:
“Please be advised that all foreign travel requests (SF 1175 requests) and any future travel requests involving or potentially involving climate change, sea ice and/or polar bears will also require a memorandum from the regional director to the director indicating who’ll be the official spokesman on the trip and the one responding to questions on these issues, particularly polar bears.”

The sample memorandums, described as to be used in writing travel requests, indicate that the employee seeking permission to travel “understands the administration’s position on climate change, polar bears, and sea ice and will not be speaking on or responding to these issues.”

Electronic copies of the memorandums and cover note were forwarded to The New York Times by Deborah Williams, an environmental campaigner in Alaska and a former Interior Department official in the Clinton administration.
“This sure sounds like a Soviet-style directive to me,” Ms. Williams said.

IREJN is Connecticut's Interfaith Power and Light. Visit us at www.irejn.org.

Again with the Petitions--NRDC Save the Polar Bears

Yeah, I know, this is how organizations collect your email address and then send you tons 'o messages, but who can resist these cute little guys? Here is the petition page.

IREJN is Connecticut's Interfaith Power and Light. Visit us at www.irejn.org.

Disclaimer: This blogger is the owner of two pampered house rabbits and has a soft spot for furry critters.

Saving Polar Bears

A segment on NPR's Talk of the Nation delves into the question of saving Polar Bears, the first major species threatened by climate change.


Visit us at www.irejn.org

Twilght of the Polar Bear?

Here is an excerpt from an article in Scotsman.com:

THE world's polar bear population is continuing to decline, with only 19 population groups left in the world, wildlife campaigners said today.
This fall represents more than a quarter of the species' populations, according to new findings by the charity WWF.
The main cause is global warming and its negative impact on the animals' sea ice habitat. Contaminants, oil exploration and failure to curb hunting are also adding to the problem.
There are now up to 25,000 polar bears in the world living in 19 groups, of which five - located in Canada, Greenland and the US - are in decline.

Visit us at www.irejn.org