Lutz had tried for years to strip Thompson of his personal zoo, but the one animal-cruelty charge the department managed to make stick — concerning the fate of some starved cows and a buffalo — hadn’t had the desired effect. The truth was that Thompson was doing nothing illegal, at least not according to the laws of Ohio. So long as he wasn’t charging admission, he could have all the animals he wanted, virtually unregulated. But Thompson was less fortunate in his handling of another of his hoards, an arsenal of more than one hundred guns. With the assistance of the ATF, Lutz had seen Thompson charged with the possession of illegal firearms after a sting had found some with their serial numbers carefully filed off.

At GQ, Chris Heath goes into more detail on both the regulatory, cultural and ethical issues involved in what I think is a less action-movie-y but more comprehensive piece:

One of the surprising facts about owning animals like these in America right now is that while keeping them may not be cheap, buying them frequently is. Tom Stalf at the Columbus Zoo suggests to me that you can buy a lion for $300—cheaper than many pedigree dogs…Just as “good” private owners explain why they should exist and why “bad” private owners should not, sanctuaries may suggest that they should endure while private owners are phased out, and zoos can loftily assume there are clear reasons that they should be cherished while most kinds of non-zoo ownership should be frowned upon. I can see a logic in some kind of extreme libertarian position (people should be able to do what they want with animals unless they are clearly shown to be doing harm) and, conversely, in a hard-core animal-rights position (no animals should be used for any human purpose whatsoever), but the arguments for everything in between seem murky. Frequently these are based on a confident assessment of the animals’ happiness (a thorny notion), and on the pragmatic need to save animals from a place worse than where they are. (Everyone knows somewhere else worse.)

I’m not a wildlife expert, so I’m not the one to lay out a set of standards here. But I’m not clear what the argument should be for why the requirements for both animals’ and humans’ safety and well-being should be different depending on whether the animals’ owners are zoos or private individuals. In both cases, it seems like we should try to guarantee that the animals have adequate room to move around, a steady, healthy food source, and that the humans in proximity to them who are not their owners are guaranteed a level of safety. Such regulations seem like they’d end up imposing reasonable restrictions on the number of wild animals any one person could own and support. It’s one thing to say that someone has the right to take the risk that an animal who lives with them will rip them to pieces: it’s another entirely to say that their friends and neighbors have to accept being exposed to that risk.

In areas where the pythons have established themselves, marsh rabbits and foxes can no longer be found. Sightings of raccoons are down 99 percent, opossums 98.9 percent and white-tailed deer 94 percent according to a paper out Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. [...]

The first reports of Burmese pythons in the Florida Everglades began in the 1980s; a breeding population wasn’t confirmed there until 2000.

Since then, the numbers of pythons sighted and captured in the Everglades has risen dramatically. According to Linda Friar with Everglades National Park, park personnel have captured or killed 1,825 pythons since 2000.

Now researchers have shown that just as python populations established themselves, the native mammals of the regions began to decline — severely.

“What if the stock market had declined that much? Think of the adjectives you’d use for that,” said Gordon Rodda, an invasive-species specialist with the U.S. Geological Survey.

The Obama administration has actually moved on new regulations meant to limit the damage wrought by these snakes, finalizing a rule making it illegal to import or move Burmese pythons across state lines. “We must do all we can to battle its spread and to prevent further human contributions of invasive snakes that cause economic and environmental damage,” Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said.

House Republicans, notably, derided this regulation as damaging to small businesses and job creation, going so far as to bring a snake breeder to testify before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, who said the rule could “devastate a small but thriving sector of the economy.” A House Republican report even derided the regulation as “a solution in search of a problem.” But that problem is all too real in Florida, where Snakes on a Plane is closer to a horrifying reality show than it is to a job creation plan.

The tragedy exposes the dangers of wildlife trafficking, in which private collectors actively trade in exotic animals all over the states “in a vibrant and poorly regulated market.” According to the Humane Society, Ohio has long been “the center of the exotic-auction industry.” Ohio’s former Gov. Ted Strickland (D) attempted to “crack down” on the market by issuing an executive order that banned new private ownership of exotic animals. Issued on Jan. 6, 2011, it was one of his last acts as governor and lasted 90 days. His replacement, GOP Gov. John Kasich let it expire. Only now, after the bloodbath, does Kasich see it as “a problem”:

But when Kasich took office he failed to extend the ban. Kasich’s spokesman Rob Nichols called the order “unenforceable.”

A state task force, however, is expected to issue new recommendations in 30 days.

“For 200 years, we haven’t had anything,” Nichols told The Post, acknowledging a new law is needed. ‘It’s a problem.”

If Kasich had extended the emergency ban, “the state would have had the authority to remove [the owner's] animals” as the owner, 62-year old Tommy Thompson, had been convicted of animal cruelty. Thompson shot himself after releasing the animals yesterday.

Only eight states — Alabama, Idaho, Nevada, North Carolina, South Carolina, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Ohio — do not have rules regarding exotic pet ownership. It is this “lack of laws and regulation” that “allowed this situation to happen,” said concerned Ohio citizen Liz Dumler. She launched a campaign on Change.org calling on Kasich to ban the sale and already thousands of people have signed on in less than 24 hours. “The deaths of these innocent animals shouldn’t be in vain,” she said.

"I have had it with these mother f***ing regulations on these mother f***ing snakes!"

Yesterday, taking their anti-regulatory zeal to absurd new heights, House Republicans claimed that a proposed rule from the Interior Department that would “designate the Burmese python and eight other snake species as ‘injurious’” — therefore “make it illegal to import them or transport them across state lines” — is a threat to job creation. They even brought a snake breeder to testify before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, who said that the rule could “devastate a small but thriving sector of the economy.”

This is simply the latest salvo from the GOP against regulation, as it seeks to undo everything from labor protections to environmental safeguards (with several Republicans calling for the complete dismantling of the Environmental Protection Agency). Republicans have also been fighting the implementation of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law, on the grounds that tighter regulation of the banking sector will kill jobs.

At the same time, Republicans are mounting growing opposition to the Obama administration jobs plan, which includes a payroll tax cut for workers, infrastructure funding, school modernization and aid to states to prevent more public sector layoffs. Here is a table outlining the GOP and Democratic priorities given the current debate in Washington:

Obviously, reality is a bit more complicated than this. But as ThinkProgress’ Ian Millhiser has explained, the GOP has put forth a plan that would “permanently shut down the federal government’s ability to regulate.” For all intents and purposes, their job creation plan can be summed up as this: lower taxes on the wealthy and corporations coupled with letting corporations do what they please.

Meanwhile, economists have found that the administration’s job creation plan will boost GDP growth and create millions of jobs next year. A poll from National Journal shows that Americans prefer Obama’s job creation ideas to the GOP’s.

The vast quantities of oil and dispersants that have flooded the Gulf of Mexico are now disappearing into the water column, leading scientists to worry about the long-term toxic effects. One species of particular concern is the Gulf sturgeon, a remarkable “living dinosaur” of a fish that can reach 1000 pounds, and can cause serious injury with its armor-plated skin as it leaps through the air. However, these anadromous fish — which, like salmon, spawn in rivers but live as adults in the ocean — are no match for man’s destructive power. Once living throughout the eastern Gulf, the fish is now a threatened species because of river damming, pollution, and overfishing, with a range limited from the Suwannee River in Florida to the Pearl River in Mississippi and Louisiana. According to Frank Parauka, a fishery biologist with the the U. S. Fish & Wildlife Service, there are about 10,000 Gulf sturgeon left.

When the Bush administration made plans to open up more of the Gulf of Mexico to drilling — including the eventual site of the Deepwater Horizon disaster — the Minerals Management Service predicted that there would be “minimal” impacts on the Gulf sturgeon, even in the case of “accidental spills”:

Impacts on Gulf sturgeon associated with routine operations and accidental spills under the proposed action are expected to be minimal, because there is relatively little overlap between the locations that could be affected by activities and the distribution of Gulf sturgeon. [p. 57]

In fact, nearly all of the estuarine regions that are key to Gulf sturgeon survival have been affected by the BP oil disaster. Ichthyologist Stephen Ross, who has been tracking Gulf sturgeon in the marine environment for years, has found that the adult fish live among the Mississippi barrier islands in the cold months of the year, and that juveniles probably live there all year long. In an email interview with the Wonk Room, Ross explained that the threat to the sturgeon from the subsurface (benthic) oiling of the barrier islands and gulf coast could be “devastating”:

First, subadult and adult Gulf Sturgeon accomplish their entire annual food intake during the time they are in coastal waters (October-March), so any impact that altered the benthic food base would be devastating to Gulf Sturgeon. Second, we are pretty sure that juvenile Gulf Sturgeon inhabit the coastal estuaries throughout the year. Consequently, penetration of oil into the inshore areas would also be a major problem– of course, not just for Gulf Sturgeon but for all aquatic and marsh organisms.

Gulf sturgeon do not forage when they are in the rivers. They enter the estuarine habitat after fasting for months and completely depend on resources obtained when they are in saline waters. Comparing the maps for the Gulf sturgeon critical habitat and the oil’s impact, only the far eastern reaches of the sturgeon’s feeding range appears to be untouched by BP’s toxic slick.

It is unclear that sufficient steps are being taken to monitor the potential impact of the BP oil disaster on the Gulf sturgeon critical habitat. Repeated requests for information from the disaster response’s Unified Command — the joint effort led by the Coast Guard and BP contractors — gleaned a muddled story. U.S. Fish and Wildlife spokesman Tom Buckley didn’t know “what’s being done now to assess impacts.” Even though oil had been spewing into the gulf for months, he added that “it’s pretty early for that.”

The responsibility for assessing the disaster’s impact falls within the Natural Resource Damage Assessment process under the purview of the Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, although according to Buckley, “there probably isn’t one person sitting at the top of the heap.” Both agencies also manage the recovery plan for the Gulf sturgeon.

Chet F. Rakocinski, a benthic ecologist at Gulf Coast Research Laboratory, University of Southern Mississippi told the Wonk Room it seemed that “federal agencies have been blindsided by the event.” Although his team of scientists had done preliminary sampling of the Gulf Islands, Rakocinski expressed frustration at the lack of scientific leadership, direction, and funding from the government to respond quickly to the disaster, praising only the work of the National Science Foundation’s rapid response program.

“I don’t know where the information is being kept of the magnitude and frequency of oil coming in,” Rakocinski said, mirroring the complaints of other scientists that crucial information about the scope of the disaster is being shared with BP’s private contractors but not the general scientific community.

FWS biologist Frank Parauka has been monitoring the threatened species for decades under Endangered Species Act authority. He told the Wonk Room that a five-year status review of the sturgeon’s Endangered Species Act recovery plan had just been completed when the Deepwater Horizon rig blew. The recovery plan’s update will of course have to take into account the potential harm of BP’s oil to the sturgeon’s habitat, and he has recommended that new benthic surveys be done before the winter.

Although Parauka is “not involved in the NRDA,” he has “heard that NRDA is picking up samples” and that the wildlife refuges under the National Park Service are doing surveys. “There are a lot of legalities involved in this,” Parauka explained. “We haven’t really gotten into the area of who’s responsible for doing these projects.” NOAA National Marine Fisheries Service scientist Stephania Bolden tells the Wonk Room she is “not aware of anyone monitoring the effects of the oil spill on Gulf sturgeon,” but she is “worried about what environment they will find” as they move downstream this fall.

Via Brad DeLong you won’t want to miss Keith Chen, Laurie Santos, and Venkat Lakshminarayanan, “How Basic Are Behavioral Biases?: Evidence from Capuchin Monkey Trading Behavior.”

Basically they cooked up an ingenuous experiment to see if capuchin monkeys exhibited the same kind of irrational reference effects and loss aversion that Kahneman & Tversky have demonstrated in humans. The answer is, in short, yes. This suggests that these kind of behavioral biases are very deeply rooted since the last common ancestor between humans and monkeys was many millions of years ago. It’s not really a terribly surprising result once you think about it, but definitely a clever line of inquiry.

The merits of this particular case aside, I think Henry Farrell is right to say that a win for Canada would probably spell big trouble for WTO fans. When foes of trade liberalization are able to make adorable baby seals the face of their cause, it’s hard to oppose them. This makes me wonder why the seal issue is being handled as a trade policy matter in the first place. In other words, why ban the import of seal products rather than simply ban selling seal products? Clearly the EU’s concern here is with the existence of a commercial market for dead seals rather than with the transnational flow of seals per se.

That’s The New Yorker‘s Rick Hertzberg, one of our very best columnists as well as the nation’s leading advocate of the National Popular Vote. NPV is an extremely good idea and especially if you live in a non-battleground state you ought to get in touch with your state legislators and ask them why they aren’t embracing an idea that could really enhance your state’s clout.

For any given federal expenditure of funds, there’s an argument to be had over whether the deadweight loss to the economy caused by the taxation required to generate the funds exceeds the benefit obtained by the expenditure. But this is a technical argument that’s difficult to win decisively. And at the same time, the government rarely spends money on anything that’s genuinely pointless—though presidents do sometime propose the idea of a manned mission to Mars. Consequently, even though everyone’s against “out of control spending” and “pork” and everyone knows that “fiscal responsibility” is good, it’s difficult to criticize specific actual expenditures in a persuasive way. One popular thing the GOP has been doing to get around this problem in recent months is to criticize made-up programs. So the right is against a $30 million mouse earmark that they’re pretending Nancy Pelosi put in the stimulus, they’re against an $8 billion scheme to build a Disneyland-Vegas mag-lev train that they’re pretending Harry Reid put in the stimulus, and now they’ve invented a tattoo removal program that they’re pretending is in the omnibus appropriations bill.

Their other big idea is feigned stupidity. Michael Steele pretended not to know what a fish passage barrier removal program is. Turns out that these are programs designed to remove barriers to the passage of fish. So that fish species don’t vanish from certain habits and wreck entire ecosystems. Bobby Jindal was inspired to denounce “something called volcano monitoring”. Volcano monitoring is when you monitor volcanos to try to understand when they might erupt. And now we get this Tweet from John McCain:

Not having ever worked in beaver management before, I couldn’t say in detail how a beaver-management program would work. But again the basic concept here is really pretty clear. But if McCain is really confused, he could look it up. Brendan Nyhan suggests that we may need to let the GOP know about Let Me Google That For You. If anyone out there wants to know why beavers could be a problem for a given area, or about different ways that you can manage the beaver population and minimize beaver-related problems I would direct them to the Beaver Control and Management Information page on the Internet Center for Wildlife Damage Management. I found that right away using Google.

By the time this deal expires, actual penguins may be driven to extinction. The global warming pollution from fossil fuel companies like Consol has wreaked dramatic changes to the penguins’ habitat in the southern hemisphere. Ninety percent of Antarctica’s glaciers are in retreat. The Antarctic ice sheet is losing 36 cubic miles of ice a year. Scientists have found that global warming is threatening the Galapagos, king, emperor, Adelie, and the other thirteen species of penguins on the planet.

But the Pittsburgh Penguins are ebullient. Said Penguins president David Morehouse:

Inside on the ice, on the scoreboard, on the dasher boards, Consol Energy will have a major presence, and they’re going to be a major partner with us going forward.

Unless we halt the unregulated burning of coal immediately, we may doom ourselves to an ice-free planet. And then worrying about the fate of other species will seem like a luxury.

(H/T The Green Agenda)

Left unchecked, by 2050 global warming will have committed about one-third of all species to extinction. Global warming-related diseases have already caused the extinction of dozens of species of cloud-forest-dwelling amphibians. A third of all corals are today threatened with extinction by the changes to the world’s oceans — toxic pollution, rising waters, warming temperatures, and increasing acidification.

To limit further damage and prevent an ecological catastrophe, developing nations — home to the world’s greatest reserves of biodiversity — “are calling for industrialized nations to agree to cuts of more than 40 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020 and more than 95 per cent by 2050″ of greenhouse gas emissions, far greater than President-elect Obama’s commitment to cut U.S. emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. Yesterday, the U.S. Energy Information Administration reported that 2007 U.S. emissions were 17% greater than 1990 levels.

[T]he student was bitten on the arms and legs. Two foreign visitors who saw the attack ran to get help from workers at a nearby refreshment stand, who notified park officials, the employee said.
The student was pale as he was taken away by medics but appeared clear-headed, he said.

“Yang Yang was so cute and I just wanted to cuddle him. I didn’t expect he would attack,” the 20-year-old student, surnamed Liu, said in a local hospital, according to the official Xinhua News Agency.

Attacks aside, pandas are super-cute. A photo from my last trip to the zoo:

No attacks that afternoon.

Scientists working in China have announced the completion of the project to sequence the entire giant panda genome. That’s perhaps good news for panda fans such as myself everywhere. At the same time, one has to worry about the possibility of China arming itself with advanced, genetically enhanced panda warriors. Initially, they’ll disarm and confuse their opponents with massive cuteness. But then, just as enemy soldiers are busy trying to take snapshots, they enter panda attack mode.

Something along the lines of Kung Fu Panda is definitely something to be concerned about.

In official submissions to the US government’s consultation on the status of the polar bear, Palin and her team referred to at least six scientists who have questioned either the existence of warming as a largely man-made phenomenon or its severity. One paper was partly funded by the US oil company Exxon Mobil.

Palin’s complaint to the Department of Interior cited the pre-publication Exxon Mobil paper — “Polar bears of western Hudson Bay and climate change” — six times, and even attached a copy. “Polar bears” was eventually published by the obscure Journal of Ecological Complexity, with funding not only by Exxon Mobil, but also the American Petroleum Institute (Big Oil’s lobbying shop), and the Koch Industries money machine:

This paper was authored by Alaskan scientist Markus Dyck, Timothy Ball, Sallie Baliunas, Willie Soon, and David Legates. All but Dyck are notorious climate skeptics with extensive ties to the Exxon-Bush right wing machine. As polar bear biologist Andrew Derocher told the Alaska Daily News, “I would venture to guess that, beyond Markus Dyck, none of them had ever seen a polar bear.”

Yet another unpublished crackpot article — by retired scientist Syun-Ichi Akasofu, a hardcore global warming denier — is cited to support Palin’s absurd claim about global warming: “There is also no agreement among experts on how these changes fit into longer-term analysis of past and projected future climate conditions.”

As John McCain said at the Clinton Global Intitative on September 25: “We now know that fossil fuel emissions, by retaining heat within the atmosphere, threaten disastrous changes in climate.” However, yesterday he said, “I’ve already turned to Governor Palin, particularly on energy issues.”

McCain turns to Palin for energy policy, and Palin turns to … Exxon Mobil.

UPDATE: Greenpeace asks about the money:

No reporters have questioned Exxon or API about funding this research and no one has gotten the scientists themselves on the record as to how much money they got from Exxon and friends and the marching orders attached to that funding.

When you see a piece of legislation, like the current version of the financial rescue package, full of seemingly unrelated handouts to this group and that, the common practice is to say “larded it up”. What many people in this day and age don’t realize, however, is that “larding” is a real cooking technique used for tough cuts and (especially) very lean pieces of meat. Especially game or, for example, moose. RecipeTips explains how it’s done:

The process of injecting fat into the interior of meat, generally by using a larding instrument to accomplish the task. Larding is a method used to add fat to very lean and/or tough pieces of meat. The added fat acts to moisten, enhance the flavor and tenderize meat as it cooks. Typically, a strip of lard, referred to as a lardon, is cut from bacon or pork and chilled to harden the substance. Many meat stores sell lardon for larding however, if the lard is to be cut from existing meat, slice the cuts on the diagonal to produce the most effective cuts for insertion. The fat may be seasoned with herbs, wine, salt, pepper, or other seasonings for added flavoring. The meat is then pierced across the meat’s grain with the tool and the fat is either drawn through or pushed into the meat.

A lard needle may consist of a slender, heavy guage steel needle, similar to a sewing needle, except much larger and heavier, that is used for threading a string through the meat that can be used for drawing a narrow strip of chilled fat into and through the pierced meat. This type of needle is most often used for smaller cuts of meat.

Keep that in mind in case any moose recipes come up during the debate tonight.

Drowning in the gaps left by melting Arctic ice, the polar bears of Alaska have become one of the first creatures to make the endangered species list because of global warming. This was a double blow to Big Oil, as the industry’s pollution is responsible for climate change, and the polar bear seas are sitting on billions of dollars worth of oil and gas. So Gov. Sarah “Pipeline” Palin (R-AK), literally married to the oil industry, is facing down the half-ton carnivore in her legal sights — proving herself more environmentally extreme than Texas oilman Bush.

When the Bush administration reluctantly proposed listing the polar bear as a threatened species early this year, Pipeline Palin sided with the oil and gas industry and countered with a New York Times Op-Ed opposing the federal listing and then, once the administration went through this May, with a lawsuit against its implementation.

Now, it’s hard to believe that anyone not holed up in a militia compound could adopt a position more unfriendly to the Endangered Species Act than Bush and Cheney, but Palin made it clear that the administration was going a bit soft and green on the matter. What’s more, she maintained:

My decision is based on a comprehensive review by state wildlife officials of scientific information from a broad range of climate, ice and polar bear experts.

When University of Alaska professor Rick Steiner sought a copy of that review, the Anchorage Daily News reported, he was informed that the documents he requested would cost $468,784. (Apparently the cost of photocopies has gone up since the Freedom of Information Act was enacted.) Steiner subsequently obtained e-mail records indicating that Alaska state biologists actually supported the listing. He told the Anchorage Daily News:

Even the petroleum-loving Bush administration couldn’t find a way around the science on this issue.

The clear scientific evidence of global warming’s effects was airily dismissed by Palin as “uncertain modeling of possible effects.” In a June, 2008 interview with conservative pundit Glenn Beck, Palin maintained that polar bears are “very, very healthy,” and that “the number of polar bears has risen dramatically in the last 30 years.” In fact, Congressional testimony on the polar bear cites a 17 percent drop in the Southern Beaufort Sea populations since the 1980s, with reductions in skull size, cub survival and adult male weight.

Those declines coincide with the catastropic loss of sea ice on which the bears live — a direct result of climate change, which Palin also dismisses.

In August, Pipeline Palin sued the Fish and Wildlife Service over the polar bear listing. It appears that the person Sen. McCain (R-AZ) plans to put in charge of government reform has pulled a page from the Bush playbook — when faced with findings unfavorable to Big Oil, simply deny the data, silence the scientists, and jam up the courts.

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Ta-Nehisi Coates says Sarah Palin is “elitism bait” and arguing that “the entire Sarah Palin pick comes down to one thing–the hope that George Clooney, Scarlett Johansson, or (God forbid) Will.I.Am. will make a joke about moose-burgers.” Perhaps. But here’s the thing — nobody more out of touch with middle American than I am, and I’ve eaten moose. That’s because, fundamentally, the moose is a snobby, northeastern elitist animal. As per Wikipedia:

In North America, the Moose range includes almost all of Canada, most of central and western Alaska, much of New England and upstate New York, the upper Rocky Mountains, Northeastern Minnesota, and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and Isle Royale in Lake Superior.

Basically you can find moose in places where no people live (viz: Alaska, Michigan’s UP) and in New England where I’ve had my moose burger. Crucial swing regions of the country — the rust belt, the southwest, the border south — are totally moose-free zones. By contrast, anyone who’s gone to summer campaign in Maine (which is to say northeastern elitists) will at some point have been sitting in a non-moving van waiting for a moose to stop blocking a narrow road. Moose are also found Scandinavia, land of social democracy, where they call them “elk” (confusingly, the animals Americans cal “elk” is different from the one Europeans call “elk”; their “elk” is our “moose.”

They are likely to become endangered in the near future.

The Department of Interior, under Secretary Dirk Kempthorne, fought for several years in the courts since 2005 to avoid making a decision on whether the precipitous decline in Arctic sea ice due to global warming is making the polar bear an endangered species. Fish and Wildlife Service director Dale Hall testified in January that there was no significant scientific uncertainty in the endangerment posed by global warming to polar bears — the only legal justification under the Endangered Species Act for a delay.

Kempthone’s decision to follow the science is in marked contrast to Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Stephen Johnson’s action to override his staff in refusing to regulate tailpipe greenhouse gas emissions.

However, Kempthorne also argued vigorously that his decison does not compel the Bush administration to construct a plan to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, repeating President Bush’s entirely spurious claim that would be a “wholly inappropriate use” of the Endangered Species Act. The Interior news release announces, “Rule will allow continuation of vital energy production in Alaska.” In justifying his declaration that the ESA places no new restrictions on Arctic drilling, Kempthorne claimed that the Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA) is “more stringent” than the ESA. However, the court ruling that compelled him to issue today’s rule states that “the protections afforded under the ESA far surpass those provided by the MMPA.”

Despite his protestations, Kempthorne’s decision clearly calls into question the legality of the sale of oil and gas drilling rights in polar bear habitat on February 6, while the polar bear decision was being illegally delayed.

Kempthorne whined that the Endangered Species Act is “one of the most inflexible” pieces of legislation because it didn’t allow him to consider whether protecting species like the polar bear from extinction would cost too much.

The most painful irony of the situation is that the melting of the ice that is pointing the polar bear to extinction is also making the Arctic more accessible to drilling. Like lemmings off a cliff, the oil industry and its right-wing allies are rushing to extract these fossil fuels and further increase global warming emissions. The fate of the polar bear should be of concern for those who believe in our moral responsibility to be good stewards of this planet. But of equal consideration is their role as the canaries in the climatic coal mine. The consequences of an unfrozen Arctic would be utterly catastrophic — not just to Arctic species, but also to humanity.

UPDATE: From the Department of Interior press release on the 368-page rule:

To make sure the ESA is not misused to regulate global climate change, Kempthorne promised the following actions:

• The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is proposing a 4(d) rule that states that if an activity is permissible under the stricter standards of the Marine Mammal Protection Act, it is also permissible under the ESA with respect to the polar bear. This rule, effective immediately, will ensure the protection of the bear while allowing us to continue to develop our natural resources in the arctic region in an environmentally sound way.
• Director Hall will issue guidance to staff that the best scientific data available today cannot make a causal connection between harm to listed species or their habitats and greenhouse gas emissions from a specific facility, or resource development project or government action.
• The Department will issue a Solicitor’s Opinion further clarifying these points.
• The Department will propose common sense modifications to the existing ESA regulatory language to prevent abuse of this listing to erect a back-door climate policy outside our normal system of political accountability.

In short, the Bush administration is announcing that even though the Endangered Species Act forced them to admit global warming is threatening species with extinction, it is going to attempt to rewrite the Endangered Species Act to ignore global warming in the future.

UPDATE II: Andy Revkin at Dot Earth concludes, “So this leaves everything as it was, in a way, with the bears facing a transforming ecosystem and environmentalists successful in their litigation, but not necessarily empowered by the listing.” At Climate Progress Joe Romm calls the decision “bye-polar disorder.”

UPDATE III: Sierra Club spokesman Josh Dorner tells the Wonk Room, “This is the regulatory equivalent of a signing statement — only this one gets to be challenged in court.”

UPDATE IV: Via Warming Law, Lisa Heinzerling at the Georgetown Law Faculty Blog explains why the Endangered Species Act is known as the “pit bull” on environmental laws, and that the Department of Interior “rule turns the pit bull into a poodle” and contrasts it with the Environmental Protection Agency’s interpretation of the Clean Air Act:

At the same moment the Department of the Interior is turning interpretive somersaults to avoid regulating greenhouse gas emitters through the Endangered Species Act, EPA is clinging to an unnecessarily literal interpretation of the Clean Air Act to justify its own failure to regulate. These two agencies have thus found different paths to the same end: complete inaction on the defining environmental issue of our time.