The day after New Years we learned that the Interior Department was rushing ahead with a plan to lease oil-drilling rights in the Arctic's Chukchi Sea. The Sea, lying to the north west of Alaska, is a critical habitat for around 16,000 polar bears and other threatened species.
The U.S. Minerals Management Service said Wednesday it will offer oil and gas exploration rights next month to 29.7 million acres in the remote Chukchi Sea off northwestern Alaska.
The decision to hold the February 6 lease sale, the first in the Chukchi since 1991, comes days before the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will decide whether to list the polar bear as threatened and has drawn fire from environmentalists seeking to limit oil development in the area...
U.S. Senator John Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat, criticized the lease sale plan and said the MMS should wait at least three years to investigate potential impacts to polar bears, being considered for Endangered Species Act protections because of habitat loss...
A decision on listing the polar bear is due next week.
However the decision by Fish and Wildlife (another Interior Department agency) turned out to be to continue to postpone making a decision - even though an official determination is required by law.
(Director of Fish and Wildlife, Dale) Hall announced January 9 he had postponed a decision on polar bears up to a month more.
Such a decision would be the first time the administration has linked a species' threat of extinction with climate change.
The Interior Department under Bush has experimented with various means to hollow out the Endangered Species Act. As I commented last year, somewhat sardonically...
...the point of the ESA is not, contrary to popular belief, to prevent the extinction of species! Rather, it is to manage the zones in which the species are being extirpated.
Certainly the postponement of the decision about protecting polar bears didn't stop the Interior Department's rush to lease the oil-drilling rights in their Chukchi habitat. It seems pretty obvious that the decision purposely was postponed until after the February 6 sale of the oil leases.
The Interior Department has been all too eager to sell mineral rights regardless of environmental considerations. But this latest sale, combined with the postponed decision on the polar bear, is enough to raise even an oil baron's eyebrows. Listing the bear as threatened would put the Chukchi lease sale on choppy waters; but what if the bear isn't listed until a few days after the sale takes place?
Democrats in the House were not amused with Interior's little game.
The directors of two Interior Department agencies said Thursday they're confident oil and gas exploration in the Chukchi Sea off Alaska can proceed without threatening polar bears that depend on the sea ice. The officials appeared before a House special committee on global warming that is examining why the department is postponing a decision on whether to further protect the bear, at the same time it is proceeding with oil lease sales in the Alaska sea.
Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., the committee chairman, asked for assurance that the decision on whether to list the bear under the Endangered Species Act will be made before the Feb. 6 scheduled oil lease sales. Dale Hall, director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, who on Jan. 9 postponed the polar bear listing decisions after a year of study, declined to give such assurance...
Randall Luthi, director of the Minerals Management Service, which is conducting the oil lease sales, said the bear already is adequately protected against harm from oil and gas development under the Marine Mammal Protection Act. And he said the lease sales include provisions to mitigate the impact on the bear...
Rep. Ray (sic - Jay) Inslee, D-Wash., told Luthi he was not convinced by his assurances. Inslee said his agency's own environmental review of the lease sales concluded a 33 percent to nearly 50 percent chance of a likely oil spill in the Chukchi Sea.
It's another case of scientific evidence threatening to get in the way of raping the environment. The standard response from the Bush administration in such circumstances has been to censor science. That's especially true when global warming is at issue.
In this case, Bush & Co. managed to reach overseas to censor an international group of Arctic scientists.
The United States has blocked the release of a landmark assessment of oil and gas activity in the Arctic as it prepares to sell off exploration licences for the frozen Chukchi Sea off Alaska, one of the last intact habitats of the polar bear.
Scientists at the release of the censored report in Norway said there was "huge frustration" that the US had derailed a science-based effort to manage the race for the vast energy reserves of the Arctic.
The long-awaited assessment was meant to bring together work by scientists in all eight Arctic nations to give an up-to-date picture of oil and gas exploitation in the high north. In addition to that it was supposed to give policy makers a clear set of recommendations on how to extract safely what are thought to be up to one quarter of the world's energy reserves.
This account comes from the Independent, which obtained a copy of the uncensored version of the report. According to the newspaper, the Arctic scientists' report originally "called on governments to conduct proper research on environmental impacts before signing off new oil and gas projects in ecologically sensitive areas such as the Chukchi."
One of the lead scientists at the Arctic Council, who again asked to remain anonymous, said: "The key message was to be more careful. To check more before you drill for oil and gas in the Arctic."
No wonder it had to be censored. Let's face it, the report never stood a chance. And the polar bears in the Chukchi Sea, what are their chances now?
Maybe you'll consider contacting the wily and unscrupulous Secretary of the Interior Department, Dirk Kempthorne, and giving him the benefit of your thoughts about this matter.
Update: Several commenters ask about the specific dangers to polar bears posed by oil drilling in the Arctic. In addition to the links above, see also this from the World Wildlife Fund: Oil activity in the North.