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Bear Suit

No, not that kind. No drunken fun involved. Greenies are suing the Bush admin over polar bears, saying a lack of economically devasting and absurd policies that attempt to change the weather have placed the government in violation of the endangered species act. But here, they can tell you: “Do You Kill Polar Bears By Turning on the Ignition?”

No points for guessing the answer at  The Daily Green: 

As promised, environmental groups have sued the Bush Administration over the loopholes it wrote into the protections it will offer the polar bear as a threatened species.

The polar bear’s legal saga is highly symbolic, because the predator’s icy Arctic habitat is melting in the face of global warming. But the lawsuits are all about hard facts.

That could be a problem.

Environmental groups petitioned in 2005 to have the polar bear protected by the Endangered Species Act. Last week, after losing repeated court cases on various aspects of the decision-making process, the Bush Administration acknowledged that climate change endangered the creature, and listed it as threatened. But officials said it would not justify federal permitting decisions based on the Endangered Species Act, despite the fact that greenhouse gas emissions are the root cause of man-made global warming.

See what I mean about facts being a problem?

The Center for Biological Diversity, Greenpeace, and the Natural Resources Defense Council have challenged those caveats, written as a “special rule” tacked on to the threatened species designation. The administration’s argument is that the incremental buildup of greenhouse gas pollution in the atmosphere cannot be considered a “taking” of a polar bear, in the sense that “taking” typically means directly killing or destroying habitat through development. Environmentalists argue that each tailpipe and smokestack contributes a bit to the ultimate “taking” so the Endangered Species Act requires government to regulate them.

And there’s your answer. Every time you turn your ignition, you kill a bear. Or some theoretical portion of a bear. Maybe, eventually, as soon as we get past this damned bear population boom, anyway. It’s a heck of a legal argument, made better by its sound basis in a principled disregard for facts. If it works, it could be the legal breakthrough needed to render the human race illegal. That’d be huge.

Topics: warmglob

  Posted by Jules Crittenden at 9:23 pm on Tuesday, May 20, 2008

One Response to “Bear Suit”

1. RebeccaH Says:
   May 20th, 2008 at 10:13 pm

   I’m feeling a shopping spree coming on. Maybe I’ll go out and kill a few bears tomorrow.

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