Posted by Brad Johnson on 11/03/2008 at 08:51PM
Sixty days have now passed since January 8, 2008, when the U.S.
Department of the Interior failed to meet its legal
deadline
to determine whether the polar bear is endangered by global warming,
triggering a joint
lawsuit over this
latest delay from the Center for Biological Diversity,
NRDC, and Greenpeace, pursuant to the notice
of
intent
filed in January.
In the intervening months, U.S. Fish and Wildlife director Dale Hall
took responsibility for the
delay,
but two weeks ago he told House
appropriators
that the decision had been given to Dirk Kempthorne, Secretary of the
Interior, for final review.
In addition, Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), chair of the House global warming
committee, today introduced legislation to block further activity in the
lease sale area. This legislation, which does not yet have a bill
number, is a revision of his proposed
legislation
from January, before the lease sale took place. The amended legislation
would now prevent the Secretary of the Interior from authorizing any
“related activity (including approving any seismic activity, offering
any new lease, or approving any exploration or development plan)” until
an ESA determination and critical habitat
designation is made.
Witnesses
Panel I
Panel II
- Andrew Wetzler, Natural Resources Defense Council
- Margaret Williams, World Wildlife Fund
- Brendan Kelly, University of Alaska
- Richard Glenn, Alaskan Arctic resident and sea ice geologist
- J. Scott Armstrong, University of Pennsylvania Wharton School
Senate Environment and Public Works Committee
406 Dirksen
30/01/2008 at 10:00AM
Posted by Brad Johnson on 17/01/2008 at 04:14PM
Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) has released the text of
legislation
which, if enacted, would forbid the sale of off-shore drilling rights
in the Chukchi
Sea,
which includes polar bear habitat, until the U.S. Fish and Wildlife
Service makes its long-delayed
determination
whether the polar bear is endangered and what its critical habitat is.
At today’s
hearing,
FWS director Dale Hill made it clear that he
recognizes that the polar bear is definitely losing habitat and has been
delaying his determination to make it “clear”; he also stated, “We need
to do something about climate change starting yesterday.”
Minerals Management Service Director Randall Luthi admitted that if the
lease auction goes forward, it would be impossible to revoke the leases
even if they are found to be in conflict with a later endangerment
listing of the polar bear.
Chairman Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) of the Select Committee on Energy
Independence and Global Warming will question members of the Bush
Administration regarding the delay of a decision to list polar bears
under the Endangered Species Act until after a controversial lease sale
for oil drilling off of Alaska. The hearing will also feature experts on
wildlife protection and oil drilling.
Earlier this week, the Interior Department announced it would miss the
statutory deadline to reach a decision on listing the polar bear under
the Endangered Species Act
(ESA),
saying it would take up to a month more to reach the decision. That
would put the listing decision one day after the sale of oil drilling
rights in Alaska’s Chukchi Sea, scheduled for February 6th. The Chukchi
Sea is a sensitive polar bear habitat.
In the most thorough study to date, the Interior Department determined
that under current trends, disappearing sea ice would result in a
two-thirds drop in the world population of polar bears resulting in the
disappearance of polar bears from Alaska by 2050.
PANEL I
- Mr. Dale Hall, Director, Fish and Wildlife Service
- Mr. Randall Luthi, Director, Minerals Management Service
- Dr. Steven Amstrup, Polar Bear Team Leader, U.S. Geological Survey
PANEL II
- Ms. Jamie Rappaport Clark, Executive Vice President, Defenders of
Wildlife
- Ms. Deborah Williams, President, Alaska Conservation Solutions
- Ms. Kassie Siegel, Director, Climate, Air and Energy Program, Center
for Biological Diversity
House Energy Independence and Global Warming Committee
2175 Rayburn
17/01/2008 at 09:30AM
Posted by Brad Johnson on 09/01/2008 at 11:38AM
On Monday the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
announced
it would miss today’s deadline on determining whether to list the polar
bear as an endangered species due to global warming-induced polar sea
ice loss. As noted in Hill Heat, last week the administration
announced its
intent
to sell off-shore drilling rights in polar bear habitat off Alaska.
Today the Center for Biological Diversity,
NRDC, and Greenpeace
announced
they have filed a notice of intent to
sue
the administration.
This would be the second lawsuit filed over
FWS delays; in 2005 the Center for Biological
Diversity v. Kempthorne lawsuit to compel the
FWS to respond to the request to start the
polar bear listing process (the FWS ended up
taking two years instead of the Endangered Species Act-mandated 90
days).
Posted by Brad Johnson on 03/01/2008 at 12:29PM
The U.S. Minerals Management Service (MMS)
will hold its first federal Outer Continental
Shelf oil and gas
lease sale since 1991 on February 6. It is leasing nearly 46,000 square
miles in the Chukchi Sea off the northwest coast of Alaska, with
estimated conventional reserves of 15 billion barrels of oil. Waters
within 25 miles of the coast are excluded from the lease area. This
announcement comes just six days before the January 9 deadline for the
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to decide whether to list the polar bear
as endangered
because of the global-warming induced decline of Arctic sea
ice,
some of which covers the Chukchi Sea.
The MMS believes that environmental concerns
will be sufficiently addressed by its
stipulations,
which do not consider the effects of climate change:
The sale area will not include nearshore waters ranging from about 25
to 50 miles from the coast, which includes the near-shore “polynya”
through which the bowhead and beluga whales, other marine mammals, and
marine birds migrate north in the spring, and in which local
communities subsistence hunt. Leases issued from the sale will include
stipulations to address environmental effects that may occur because
of exploration and development of the area’s oil and gas resources.
These stipulations call for protection of biological resources,
including protected marine mammals and birds and methods to minimize
interference with subsistence hunting and other subsistence harvesting
activities.
Environmental organizations are livid. The World Wildlife Fund
published a series of
statements
from Alaska Wilderness League, Center for Biological Diversity, Audubon,
and indigenous activists condemning the threat to the polar bear and
other marine life from the planned sale.
In the fine
print of
its final notice of
sale,
the MMS does note:
Lessees are advised that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is
proposing to list the polar bear (Ursus maritimus) as a threatened
species under the Endangered Species Act and has initiated a
comprehensive scientific review to assess the current status and
future of the species. The FWS anticipates
making a decision in early 2008 on whether to list polar bears under
the ESA. Please refer to
http://alaska.fws.gov/fisheries/mmm/polarbear/issues.htm for
additional information. If the polar bears are ultimately listed under
the ESA, then MMS
will consult with FWS under Section 7 of the
ESA, and may be required to apply additional
mitigation measures on OCS activities to
ensure appropriate protection.
Update: Sierra Club has launched a letter-writing
campaign
to “chill the drills” in what it calls the “Polar Bear Seas”.
This forum was aired on C-SPAN.
Is the Arctic sea ice cover melting faster than expected? If so, what
are the contributing factors and why was the rate of melting
unanticipated? How much sea ice cover has been lost in terms of extent
and volume? What are the implications of both the loss of sea ice and
the rate of loss? Is the Greenland ice sheet losing its mass faster than
anticipated? If so, what are the contributing factors and why was the
rate of loss unanticipated? What are the implications of continued
accelerated ice loss from the Greenland ice sheet with respect to Sea
Level Rise? Is the Antarctic Ice Sheet getting bigger or smaller and by
how much and how fast? Are there parts of the Antarctic ice sheet that
are gaining mass and parts that are losing mass? If so, what are the
contributing causes? What are the implications of continued ice mass
loss in Antarctica, especially the decay of ice shelves?
Speakers:
- Dr. Mark Serreze, Senior Research Scientist,
NOAA National Snow and Ice Data Center,
Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES),
University of Colorado, Boulder, CO
- Scott B. Luthcke, Geophysicist, NASA Goddard
Space Flight Center’s Planetary Geodynamics Laboratory, Greenbelt, MD
- Dr. Konrad Steffen, Professor of Climatology and Remote Sensing and
Director of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental
Sciences (CIRES), University of Colorado, Boulder, CO Program Summary
American Meteorological Society
106 Dirksen
26/11/2007 at 12:00PM
On Wednesday, October 17, 2007, the Investigations and Oversight
Subcommittee will hold a hearing on the impacts of global warming on the
Arctic. This hearing will provide the Committee with an opportunity to
hear from witnesses on three interrelated matters: (1) the current
situation in the Arctic, including the situation facing the polar bear,
(2) ways in which warming in the Arctic may accelerate global warming,
especially through the emission of more greenhouse gases, and (3)
interim steps that could be taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions
while the Congress weighs more elaborate carbon trade or tax proposals.
One of the themes that should emerge from this hearing is that, from a
layman’s perspective, the models used to project climate change and its
ramifications appear to be conservative in their projections. This is
because any phenomena that are not understood well enough to be
represented in models with confidence are excluded. These other
phenomena may accentuate or depress warming trends. In the case of the
Arctic, most of the phenomena that have been excluded from the models
are believed to accentuate warming and its effects. Few will depress it.
The modeling on polar bear survival, for example, uses projections from
the IPCC models to estimate future changes in
sea ice extent. Since the bears’ condition is very dependent upon both
the extent of the sea ice and the duration of ice-free periods,
projections of the bear survival are very dependent upon projections of
sea ice. This summer the sea ice extent is far less than projected by
the models.
The Center for Biological Diversity will appear to provide some advice
on steps that can be taken to reduce warming, with particular emphasis
on their efficacy in the Arctic. Among the steps they advocate are
programs to reduce methane emissions and “black carbon.” Black carbon is
soot that, in the Arctic, has a particularly pernicious effect. When it
is deposited on snow and ice it decreases its reflectivity and increases
its heat absorption leading to greater melting. As the Arctic comes
under more and more industrialization with other warming, one could
anticipate further production of black carbon. Methane is a powerful
greenhouse gas, with an estimated global warming potential 23 times
greater than carbon dioxide over a 100-year time frame. Methane is a
precursor to tropospheric ozone. In that form, it traps shortwave
radiation as it enters the earth’s atmosphere from the sun and then when
it is reflected back again by snow and ice. As a consequence, its impact
is strongest over the poles. Reducing global methane emissions would
provide a particular benefit to the Arctic.
- Dr. Richard
Alley,
Evan Pugh Professor of Geosciences, Pennsylvania State University,
Department of Geosciences
- Dr. Glenn
Juday,
Professor, University of Alaska at Fairbanks, School of Natural
Resources and Agricultural Sciences
- Dr. Sue
Haseltine,
Associate Director for Biology, U.S. Geological Survey, U.S.
Department of Interior
- Kassie R.
Siegel,
Director, Center for Biological Diversity, Climate, Air and Energy
Program
House Science, Space, and Technology Committee
Oversight Subcommittee
2318 Rayburn
17/10/2007 at 10:00AM