AP/Jonathan Hayward

No bears for oil

Why hasn't the polar bear been granted federal protection? Maybe because the Bush administration plans a last-minute handout of oil leases on its habitat.

By Katharine Mieszkowski

Read more: Environment, Alaska, Politics, Science, News, Animals, Global Warming, Katharine Mieszkowski, Environment & Science

Jan. 17, 2008 | By 2050, two-thirds of the world's polar bears will have vanished, as a result of global warming melting their icy habitat, according to scientists at the U.S. Geological Survey. There may no longer be any polar bears at all living in Alaska, their only home in the United States. Still, this stark prediction, revealed in September 2007, after a yearlong review of the impact of melting sea ice on the Alaskan bears, hasn't inspired the Bush administration to list the bear as even a threatened species, much less an endangered one, under the Endangered Species Act.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, responsible for listing mammals as threatened or endangered, has been one of the most politically compromised scientific divisions in the Bush administration. It didn't consider extending federal protections to polar bears until it was petitioned, and subsequently sued, to do so by a coalition of environmental groups back in 2005. Now it admits that polar bears are "likely to become endangered in the foreseeable future," and explained recent delays by citing the complexity of the decision: It has never before had to designate a species as threatened because of global warming.

But critics say that Fish and Wildlife hasn't made a ruling yet because another agency within the Department of Interior, the Minerals Management Service, is on the verge of handing out oil and gas leases in vast swaths of the polar bears' remaining habitat. The Endangered Species Act prevents the federal government from taking actions that harm protected species. "At the same time the administration is illegally delaying a decision on the polar bear listing, it is also racing to sell some of the polar bear's most important habitat in the Chukchi Sea for oil and gas development," said Andrew Wetzler, director of the Endangered Species Project at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

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On Thursday, the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming will hold a hearing on the polar bear listing and controversial oil leases. Rep. Edward J. Markey, D-Mass., who chairs the committee, said in a statement: "The Bush administration is once again putting the oil cart before the polar bear. On the one hand, the Interior Department is dragging its feet on protecting the polar bear, while opening up new oil and gas drilling in sensitive polar bear habitats on the other."

Details of the oil development were announced earlier this month. The Minerals Management Service plans to lease 30 million acres for oil and gas drilling in the Chukchi Sea, where about one-fifth of the world's remaining polar bears live. The lease sale will take place on Feb. 6, which could allow it to go through before any plans to protect the polar bears get in the way. "Short of sending Dick Cheney to Alaska to personally club baby polar bears to death, there's not too much that the administration can do that is worse for polar bears than oil and gas development in their habitat," says Kassie Siegel, director of the climate, air and energy program for the Center for Biological Diversity.

The summer of 2007 saw record melting of sea ice in the Arctic, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, shrinking more than 1 million acres. That's more melting than the average summer melt in the last quarter century. NASA climate scientists now predict that the Arctic could be ice-free by as soon as the summer of 2013, based on projections using satellite imagery. That's bad news for polar bears, which eat primarily ringed seals and bearded seals that the bears hunt from the ice. "The Arctic is melting, polar bears are drowning and starving, and so it's outrageous they are rushing to lease polar bear habitat for fossil-fuel development," says Siegel.

By the Minerals Management Service's own estimate, if the drilling takes place, there's a 40 percent chance of a large oil spill within the area over the life of the project. When polar bears come into contact with spilled oil, it sticks to their fur, which the bears attempt to clean off by licking themselves, ingesting the oil. That can make them sick or even kill them. It's also unusually difficult to clean up an oil spill that occurs amid the fragmented sea ice where the bears live. But even without a spill, the ships, airplanes and industrial equipment associated with fossil-fuel extraction would represent another source of stress to the already faltering bear population. And that's not even considering the impacts that the greenhouse gas from the extracted natural gas and oil would have on the bears' melting habitat when they reached the market, and were consumed, spewing more carbon dioxide.

Next page: Bush has the worst record on endangered species in history