Polar politics

OPINION:

When environmentalists chose the polar bear as the symbol of their cause it was probably one of the smarter things they ever did. It would take a heart of stone to remain indifferent to the prospect of seeing these impossibly cuddly carnivores extinguished.

Only a few years ago, the German polar bear cub in the Berlin Zoo captured Europe’s imagination and created a continent-wide obsession. Polar bears have that power over humans — at least as seen from a safe distance or captured on film. (If encountered close up, they are actually one of the few creatures on the planet capable of hunting and killing humans, and are likely to do so.)

Now the polar bears are about to enter the world of politics, much as the bald eagle did in the 1970s. On Thursday, May 15, the Environmental Protection Agency is supposed to decide whether to place the polar bear on the endangered species list, according to a decision by the California Supreme Court.

The ruling will act as a teaser for the debate over the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act (S.2191). The bill represents an extraordinary threat to the U.S. economy. It places severe restrictions on energy use and energy costs, and imposes strict upper limits on the emission of greenhouse gases (which allegedly are melting the polar ice and killing off the polar bears).

It requires industries that emit these gases to obtain federally-created permits for doing so, which will be expensive. The annual cost of emissions permits to energy producers will be at least $100 billion by 2020 and could exceed $300 billion by 2030, leading to annual job losses of more than half a million before 2030.

Equally troubling is the fact that the next president of the United States will probably have the chance to vote on this deeply problematic piece of legislation. Whether that will be Sen. John McCain, Sen. Barack Obama or Sen. Hillary Clinton, the next president will probably vote in favor of it.

The White House meanwhile remains adamantly opposed. Though President Bush has now bought into the “climate change” agenda, according to his speech on the subject in mid-April, he opposes the Lieberman-Warner Bill because of its draconian economic consequences for the U.S. economy.

But bears may have good reason — as do human beings — to be concerned about the intended and unintended consequences of an endangered species listing.

In his new book, “The Really Inconvenient Truths: Seven Environmental Catastrophes Liberals Don’t Want You to Know About Because They Helped Cause Them,” Iain Murray, senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, writes that among the many ways liberals threaten the environment and endanger the species they claim to protect by depending on faulty or insufficient data.

In the case of polar bears, the two bear populations that do appear to be in decline are in areas that have experienced global cooling between 1955 and 1995. Of the 13 polar-bear populations in Canada, 11 are increasing, according to official Canadian sources.

Furthermore, the much-publicized case of the drowning polar bears, given such publicity by global guru and former Vice President Al Gore in “Earth in the Balance,” turns out to be one family of four bears stranded on a melting iceberg in the Barrow Sea. The family was photographed by an Australian student, who took the photo that has captured the passions of environmentalists around the world and caused Mr. Gore to argue that polar bears are drowning in increasing numbers, according to “scientific studies.”

According to the student, Amanda Byrd, who is by no means an environmental scientist, the bears “were on the ice when we found them and on the ice when we left. They were healthy, fat and seemed comfortable on their iceberg.”

Like in many other such cases, the blame for the alleged predicament of the polar bears falls on global warming from rising greenhouse levels, which is supposed to cause the Arctic icecap to melt by 2040.

These calculations of course do not take into account of the fact that the temperature of the earth has not been rising for the past 10 years, nor that the portions of the polar ice cap that are melting (as some are, but not all of it) could be doing so for other reasons, such as changing currents.

And so dubious science may cause vast policy changes that will certainly affect the American economy adversely. As for the polar bears — who knows what, if any, effects it will have on them?