Today, Senator Mike Crapo introduced Senate bill, S. 2110 -- the "Collaboration and Recovery of Endangered Species Act."
The bill is bad in itself. But worse, if it passes, it goes to a House-Senate reconciliation committee where all the worst provisions of the House version (Pombo's HR 3824) could be added back in.
The endangered species crisis is huge. Federal agencies are not following the basic law, as written. And now, there's a concerted attempt to rewrite the law.
This stuns me. What is so sacred about ... anything we're doing that it justifies attacking this protection against the animals that are clinging to survival by, say, 78 individuals (like the southern resident killer whales that live in the Puget Sound near Seattle)?
What's wrong with Crapo's bill? For one thing, it eliminates mandatory deadlines for putting species on the endangered species list or for designating critical habitat. If a species isn't on the endangered species list, it gets no protections. Without deadlines, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service could sit around all year and never put any species on the list.
Under Crapo's bill, listing a species as threatened or endangered would be entirely at the discretion of the Secretary of the Interior (Gale Norton, who's now stumping for Bush on oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.)
Already, hundreds of species may go extinct just from delays in being put on the list, due to governmental foot dragging -- under our current system, with deadlines.
Just yesterday, the Center for Biological Diversity, the NRDC, and Greenpeace submitted a complaint to get the polar bear listed as an endangered species -- they could only do this because the law as currently written has deadlines, which have now been violated.
In addition:
"Senator Crapo's proposal alone would be a disaster for endangered species conservation," said Melissa Waage, legislative advocate for the Center for Biological Diversity. "But the bill introduced today is part of an even bigger plan to gut the Endangered Species Act by teaming up with Rep. Pombo to adopt the worst provisions of Pombo's House bill behind closed doors."
The reconciliation committee will actually be led by Representative Pombo (R-CA) and Senator Inhofe (R-OK) -- two people who have a voting score of 0 according to the League of Conservation Voters. In that committee, they could pass through the worst provisions of Pombo's anti-Endangered Species Act bill, H.R. 3824.
It's late, so I can't add as many details as I'd like here. But here are some links:
- A more thorough explanation of the problems with Crapo's bill can be found at the Center for Biological Diversity's press release. (They seem to be the only environmental group with a press release out yet.)
- Some great diaries about the species problem and Pombo's original bill have been posted on Kos in the past.
- And a thorough compilation of media reports on species extinction -- the possible fate of a quarter of all mammals, gorillas and chimpanzees, a million species -- is at http://www.massextinction.net.
P.S. One to watch: Barack Obama. He's provided some excellent leadership on environmental issues like lead pollution. But he's also been reported as saying, when he first brought up bird flu to his staff, that they thought he was one of "these environmentalists that cares about endangered species." (Mistakenly, I guess?) Hopefully that's not
exactly what he meant.
UPDATED. The bill has now been referred to the Senate Finance Committee. Maybe Orrin Hatch (R-UT) will stop it. ;) No, actually, here's where I'd love to hear from some policy wonks -- what does this mean? They schedule hearings? Any way to find out the schedule for that? Another question -- this joint committee -- will they have to bring the bill back to the floor for a vote after they presumably put some of Pombo's language back in the bill?