WASHINGTON - Even if polar bears are listed as threatened, the Endangered Species Act may not be the proper vehicle to slow global warming or, especially, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said today.
"The polar bear should not be the focus," director Dale Hall said after he testified at a U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee meeting. "The focus should be global climate change and global warming and how we address aspects of that, and that is greenhouse gas emissions. As a world community we need to be doing that, and in the United States, we need to be doing that."
The Fish and Wildlife Service is just days away from a decision on whether to list polar bears as endangered - a classification that would make the bears a photogenic worldwide symbol of the effects of climate change.
The agency was supposed to issue a decision at the beginning of January but postponed it because it needed more time to analyze studies from the U.S. Geological Survey. The USGS projections show that by midcentury, as many as two-thirds of the world's polar bears could disappear as their habitat disappears.
Today, Hall said he had concerns about the use of the Endangered Species Act to address what threatens polar bear habitat the most: rising global temperatures that have melted the polar ice habitat of the bears.
"You can use the polar bear as an educational tool on this," Hall said. "But climate change is a bit bigger than that. Those kind of symbolic relationships are good, but we must first make sure that the law is followed and that if a species is on the list, it deserves to be on the list. This is an issue that's much larger than just a listing on the endangered species list."
If polar bears were to be listed, they would be the first species to make the endangered species list because of the threat of global warming to its habitat.
Find Erika Bolstad online at adn.com/contact/ebolstad or call her in Washington, D.C., at 1-202-383-6104.
By ERIKA BOLSTAD