(Adds comment from EarthJustice in eighth paragraph.)
By Siobhan Hughes Of DOW JONES NEWSWIRES WASHINGTON -(Dow Jones)- The Bush administration on Thursday eliminated one step in the effort to protect endangered species, allowing federal agencies to bypass consultation with government scientists about whether new projects will harm threatened wildlife.
The U.S. Interior Department issued a rule that allows agencies to avoid consulting with the Fish and Wildlife Service or the National Marine Fisheries Service if the agencies conclude that any actions they fund wouldn't harm an endangered species. It will take effect early next year, shortly before President-elect Barack Obama takes office, though his administration could reverse the regulation.
Environmentalists have been up in arms over the rule since it was proposed in August, but the Bush administration says that the changes are narrowly targeted and came out of concern that the Endangered Species Act would be used as a vehicle to curb greenhouse-gas emissions.
"We made it very clear that the Endangered Species Act was never intended to be a back door for climate-change policy," Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne said. "We said that we would make modest modifications...and we were very transparent about that."
The Interior Department this year listed the polar bear as an endangered species because the Arctic sea ice on which the bears depend is receding. But the administration stopped short of using the designation to address the global warming that is widely blamed for the melting, on the grounds that tracing emissions from any particular power plant or other source to the plight of the polar bear would be impossible.
"We do not believe the science is there to make the causal link," Kempthorne said.
Bush administration officials said that some 234,000 comments flowed into the department about the proposed rule, most opposed to it. But officials stood their ground and went forward anyway, saying that less consultation would allow for better use of government resources.
"All this does is say that the action agency has the full responsibility to both make that decision and defend that decision without having to send it to us and take our staff people off something they're working on," said Dale Hall, the director of the Fish and Wildlife Service.
That is a problem for environmental groups.
"Agencies get it wrong all the time; they claim not likely to adversely affect and are simply wrong," said Janette Brimmer, an attorney for Earthjustice, an environmental group. She said that her group has already won a lawsuit in which it argued that "the Endangered Species Act does not allow the White House to hand over endangered species authority to agencies that lack the expertise or the political will to protect wildlife."
The Bush administration has been adopting a series of last-minute rule changes that environmentalists say are damaging and could tie up the Obama administration in its early days. Besides the changes to the Endangered Species Act, the Bush administration has also opened up two million acres of public land in the western U.S. to oil-shale exploration, and signed off on changes that would make it easier for companies that blast off mountaintops to get at the coal underneath to dump their waste near rivers and streams.
"President-elect Obama will review all eleventh-hour regulations and will address them once he is president," spokesman Nick Shapiro said.
"This White House has been running roughshod over fundamental natural resources policies since day one, and I shed no tears at watching them hit the trail," said House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Nick Rahall, D-W.V., in a statement. "I look forward to working with the Obama Administration to correct course and promote a positive resource conservation agenda."
-By Siobhan Hughes, Dow Jones Newswires; 202-862-6654; Siobhan.Hughes@dowjones.com
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Publié le 11 Décembre 2008 Copyright © 2008 Dowjones