Polar bear lined up as warming victim
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The Bush administration is nearing a decision that would acknowledge officially the environmental damage of global warming and name its first potential victim: the polar bear.
The Interior Department might act soon on its year-old proposal to make the polar bear the first species to be listed as threatened with extinction because of melting ice from a warming planet.
Both sides agree that conservationists finally have the poster species they have sought to use the Endangered Species Act as a lever to force federal limits on the greenhouse gases linked to global warming and possibly to battle smokestack industry projects far from the Arctic.
"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others," said Kassie Siegel, an attorney with the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity. "And then there is the polar bear."
Even Frank Luntz, the political consultant who advised President Bush six years ago to focus on discrediting the science of global warming and refer to it as "climate change," has recognized the bear's potency. In an interview on the environmental Web site Grist.org, he said the public has a "soft side" for the bear.
Federal government scientists have presented increasingly compelling evidence that the top predator at the top of the world is doomed if the polar regions get warmer and sea ice continues to melt as forecast. Two-thirds of the population could be gone by mid-century if current trends continue, experts say. Bears are beholden to sea ice, where they perch so they can pounce on seals, their primary food.
Images pop up regularly of scrawny, exhausted bears dragging themselves onto ice floes looking like bones covered in sodden white rugs. So do reports of struggling bears swimming wearily in open water. It's a shocking contrast to the pop-culture image: smiling animated bears guzzling Coke in commercials, fat lounging bears drawing crowds at zoos or fluffy Polyester stand-ins adorning children's bedrooms.
"These are soft and cuddly, giving bears," said Anthony Leiserowitz, a public opinion researcher and director of the Yale Project on Climate Change. "We give them to each other on Valentine's Day and tuck them in with our children at night."
But the energy industry is worried. At least one part of the environmental community believes the bear's listing would provide the leverage to stop a coal-fired power plant thousands of miles away.
Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., who is known for his skepticism about global-warming measures, asked U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director H. Dale Hall last week whether listing the polar bear could be used to halt the construction of a power plant in Oklahoma City.
"The Endangered Species Act is not the vehicle to reach out and demand all of the things that need to happen to address climate change," Mr. Hall said, to Mr. Inhofe's apparent satisfaction.
Andrew E. Wetzler, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council's endangered species project, said Hall misunderstands the legal principles underlying the act, which was fortified by a recent Supreme Court ruling that carbon dioxide can be regulated as a pollutant.
If the builders of a coal-fired plant needed a federal permit, they probably would have to show how its emissions would not erode the polar bear's habitat or jeopardize its survival, Mr. Wetzler said.
Several conservation groups have filed a lawsuit and threatened a second one to force the listing of the bear. Already, they have sued to nullify oil exploration leases in the Chukchi Sea, arguing that the bear's plight got short shrift during environmental reviews.
Meanwhile, opposing forces representing the oil and gas industry, manufacturing and property-rights advocates have begun threatening counter-suits over the potential listing.
"This is going to be the mother of all test cases," said Alison Rieser, a lawyer and ocean policy professor at the University of Hawaii. "The legal question is whether the emissions of a proposed power plant can be tied to the cumulative effect of carbon dioxide, which is adversely affecting sea ice -- critical polar bear habitat."
In September, the U.S. Geological Survey released a set of studies that analyzed existing climate models and came up with a dire forecast: The habitat of two-thirds of the bears would disappear by 2050, as much of its range melted away for ever longer periods each summer.
Bears are expert hunters on sea ice but so unsuccessful on land that they spend their summers fasting, losing more than 2 pounds a day, until the ice re-forms in the fall.
"If the fast gets to be much longer, they won't make it," said Steven C. Amstrup, a leading polar bear expert in Alaska and principal author of the Geological Survey reports. He and other scientists believe that the Arctic, which is warming much faster than anywhere else, is changing too rapidly for the bears to adapt and find another source of food.
For the most part, Al Gore and others pushing for action on global warming have relied on statistical charts and a scissor lift to show off computerized projections. Yet even the film "An Inconvenient Truth" included an animated bear swimming in open water without an ice floe big enough to stand on.
Said Cass R. Sunstein, a University of Chicago law professor who studies perceived costs and benefits of addressing climate change. "This is an animal that is adorable and dignified and apparently desperate. ... So the thought that by the virtue of our actions that we are endangering them is potentially a big symbol for those concerned about climate change."
First Published February 10, 2008 12:00 am
