Polar Bears Holding On, Barely

Once a lease is allowed of land for the exploration for oil and gas, there is no going back. There is activity allowed that will not ever be undone. For that reason, the Department of the Interior will allow a rape of polar bear habitat in haste, before actual endangered species status can be given to the polar bear which would prevent its acting against public interests.

Typical of this occupied White House, the cronies appointed to high offices in our executive branch are scurrying around trying to pass the public wealth off to business interests and friends in defiance of the oath of office they take. Foreign and domestic enemies are being given rights to public possession, in this case our lands.

The Bush administration is weeks away from a decision that most likely will designate polar bears as a threatened species, but it said Thursday that it won't budge on issuing new oil and gas leases in their shrinking Alaskan habitat.

A House of Representatives committee on global warming called on the Interior Department to hold off auctioning oil and gas leases in northwest Alaska's Chuckchi Sea until the department decides whether to list polar bears as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service postponed the decision last week for at least another 30 days, and a ruling isn't expected before the Feb. 6 oil and gas lease sale by the Minerals Management Service.
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"We wouldn't be proceeding with this sale if we weren't comfortable that we had enough knowledge, enough data to say that we can adequately see that the polar bear is protected ... if the department makes a decision to list the polar bear," said Randall Luthi, the director of the Minerals Management Service. "I'm serious about seeing that we do this right, and I believe we are doing it right."

But officials acknowledge that climate change has led to the loss of vast expanses of polar sea ice, which the bears need.

"We need to be doing something about climate change starting yesterday," said Dale Hall, the director of the Fish and Wildlife Service. "There needs to be a serious effort to try to control greenhouse gases, which is probably the only thing we have control over."

Polar bears are considered marine mammals because they depend on sea ice for hunting seals, but they den on land. As sea ice has retreated, polar bears must swim farther and expend more energy to reach it.

A U.S. Geological Survey study issued this summer found that in the next 50 years, shrinking sea ice will leave only a small population of polar bears in the islands of the Canadian Arctic. Two-thirds of the world's polar bears, including those along the coasts of Alaska and Russia, are projected to disappear. One-fifth of the estimated 20,000 to 25,000 polar bears in the world live on the coast of Alaska's Beaufort and Chukchi seas.

Once the drilling is allowed, the habitat is forever damaged, of course, and the tools of the war criminals are well aware that the environment will never be repaired. That makes it mandatory to accomplish the crime now, while they have control of the department which when properly staffed is supposed to protect public interests.

Meanwhile, the loss of ice in the polar regions has been proceeding more rapidly than predictions had shown it would have.

"In both cases, east and west, what concerns us is that we don't have a good understanding of what we call the basal processes — what's happening at the base of the ice sheet, the interface of the ice and the land or ocean beneath. And what we don't capture well in our climate models could lead to more rapid loss of ice than we've been predicting till now."
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The British research published last week estimated a loss of 132 billion tonnes of ice in 2006 from West Antarctica, up from 83 billion tonnes in 1996, and a loss of about 60 billion tonnes in 2006 from the Antarctic Peninsula.

Antarctica's ice, they concluded, is much more complex than scientists had previously appreciated. And while they are primarily preoccupied with understanding the changes apparent now in the west, they signal that the stability of the eastern icescape unfolding beneath our aircraft may not be as it seems. "Thinning of its potentially vulnerable marine sectors suggests this may change in the near future," the report concludes.

If the enemies of our environment can put measures in place now, while they hold the reins of power, the damage they do can potentially forever keep responsible protections from repairing the ravages they are instituting.

The offices of our representatives are holding on tightly to what powers they have kept, to keep our world from total destruction. Turning off the lights is not enough for us as individuals. We need to put more Dems in seats in Congress, while we have a world left.