by Richard Morrison
May 14, 2008

Washington, D.C., May 14, 2008—Today the US Department of the Interior took the controversial step of listing the polar bear as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act, despite lack of a sound scientific basis and potentially enormous consequences for the U.S. economy. Listing the polar bear has long been a goal of global warming activists who claim that a warmer world will shrink the bears’ habitat.

Advocates of the new listing claim that to remove the bears from their threatened status, the federal government must first enact restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions, which will then, it is imagined, influence the global climate to such an extent as to stop shifts in Arctic ice cover. Listing the bear will enable activist groups to use litigation to force the nation into a regulatory nightmare of limits on energy use.

“We regret the listing,” said Competitive Enterprise Institute Director of Energy & Global Warming Policy Myron Ebell. “We don’t think putting ‘high bars’ on it will work. We hope there will be immediate litigation to challenge the listing on procedural and substantive grounds.”

Today’s listing does require a “high bar” for evidence that particular greenhouse gas sources are causing actual harm to a particular population of polar bears. But “the ‘high bar’ just delays the day when global warming activists will be able to impose their policy of energy suppression,” said CEI Senior Fellow Iain Murray. “Secretary Kempthorne obviously knows that this listing will have dire consequences, but his attempts to erect barriers to them will have all the strength of tissue paper. If anything, this listing shows the need for urgent reform of the Endangered Species Act.”

CEI is a non-profit, non-partisan public policy group dedicated to the principles of free enterprise and limited government. For more information about CEI, please visit our website at www.cei.org.