WASHINGTON — The Obama Administration has decided to keep a Bush-era policy on polar bears — declining to crack down on greenhouse-gas polluters on the grounds that their emissions are helping shrink the bears’ habitat on Arctic sea ice, officials announced Friday.
The reason, officials said: the problem of climate change is so big, and so complicated, that it would essentially overwhelm the bureaucracy created to protect threatened and endangered species.
As a result, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said, the bears will continue to be listed as “threatened.” But the government will not use the 1973 Endangered Species Act to attack the main problem that threatens them.
“The Endangered Species Act is not the appropriate tool for us to deal with what is a global issue,” Salazar said. Instead, he said, the Obama administration would continue to push for a cap on U.S. greenhouse gas emissions through legislation.
The polar bear, which environmental groups have made the furry face of climate change, presents a kind of problem that will come up again. Scientists say climate change is affecting animals all over the world, altering their habitats underneath them or slowly shifting ecosystems out of sync.
But, federal officials said, the Endangered Species Act was written for a different kind of threat. In cases where an animal is threatened by logging, trapping, or land development, it is used to identify — and punish — individual actions that harm them.
That framework cannot be applied to climate change, they said, because the sources of that problem are global.
“Can we actually link an effect to any listed species to an incremental increase in greenhouse gases that would come out of any particular smokestack?” said Rick Sayers, of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. At this point, he said, the answer is no.
Federal officials said they would still try to protect the bear from human threats in the Arctic itself.
They also said that, for bureaucratic reasons, it would not have accomplished much to reject the decision the Bush administration made on the issue last fall.
Friday’s decision was criticized by environmental groups: John Kostyack, of Defenders of Wildlife, conceded that it would have been difficult to tackle a massive problem like greenhouse gases through the endangered species bureaucracy. But he said that should not be a reason formally to let polluters off the hook.
Each smokestack is “just like buying another pack of cigarettes,” Kostyack said. “You’re adding to the risk of the species.”
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