DOI sends polar bear rule to White House

The U.S. Department of the Interior has sent its proposed rule for the protection of polar bear habitat to the White House Office of Management and Budget, Greenwire has reported, according to a New York Times article published Oct. 6.

With the polar bear now listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, an agency within Interior, must determine the critical habitat for the bears and specify how that habitat will be protected.

But there is considerable interest in how that critical habitat and its protections might be specified — the polar bear is a marine mammal that spends much of its time on the Arctic sea ice. Interior recognizes that the retreat of the sea ice as a result of global warming constitutes the main threat to the future of the bears, given their dependence on the ice in hunting for the seals that form their main diet.

Given the difficulty of using the ESA to regulate climate change and the greenhouse gases thought to be the main culprit in global warming, Interior under the Bush administration attempted to decouple the ESA from the climate change issue — under a special ESA rule for the polar bear listing, a rule upheld by the Obama administration, carbon dioxide emissions outside the polar bear’s territorial range cannot be considered as a “take” of the bears.

—Alan Bailey

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