Aid for polar bears? Well, maybe ...

| The New Mexican

5/16/2008 - 5/16/08

With eight months remaining of an eight-year administration oblivious to industry's impact on the planet, Americans must take environmental comfort where we can. This week's recognition by Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne that the polar bear is a threatened species certainly comes under that category.

Kempthorne's a Westerner — mayor of Boise, then senator from and governor of Idaho; he knows what pressures wildlife are under, even in the vast emptiness of the American Arctic. But he's also been a promoter of the chemical-industrial FMC Corporation, so his sympathies aren't entirely with nature.

Thus the Cabinet-level backhand that followed his announcement: The decision, he declared, does not "open the door" for enviros to force adoption of limits on the greenhouse-gas emissions leading to the warming of our planet — including the seas of the Arctic, where the breakup of ice packs, as Kempthorne now admits, has robbed ursus maritimus of most of its seal-hunting ground.

There might be more than 100,000 of the animals wandering the north, although some researchers say there are only a quarter as many. But as the secretary acknowledged Wednesday, they could go from threatened to endangered in as few as 45 years. His action commits the federal government to drafting a recovery plan — and federal agencies contemplating action further endangering the bears must consult with Interior first.

But don't think that means anything, said the secretary and his director of the Fish and Wildlife Service, in a surrealistic manner reminiscent of the classic novel Catch-22, because it doesn't.

Oh, yes it does, says an optimistic Kassie Siegel of the Tucson-based Center for Biological Diversity; "the law says what it says, not what the administration wishes it says."

Siegel notes, optimistically, that this is the strongest statement to date from the Bush administration about global warming. But statements come cheap — so New Mexicans Tom Udall and Jeff Bingaman should continue urging their House and Senate colleagues to do more about global warming — and stall the impending giveaway of undersea oil leases in the Arctic.

The best news out of Kempthorne's announcement is that his successor is likely to take the decree more seriously than he is. Besides global warming, the next administration might factor in the dangers to bears and other wildlife from gas-and-oil operations in the far north, which are likely to get a green light — at least until Inauguration Day.