Polar Bears At Risk Under Trump Environmental Law

was signed into law by President Richard Nixon. But now the Trump administration has announced changes that will profoundly weaken the Act. Polar bears and seals, whooping cranes, and belooga whales are some of the animals that are at risk. Joining me as pat parento and environmental law professor at Vermont Law School, Pat explain how the Trump overhaul will

change the Act. Well. Probably the most significant changes that admit of station is saying that they will now take economics into account at the stage at which you decide whether a species should be listed. The statute clearly prohibits that the case law over the last forty five years has reinforced that so the idea that you would include in your consideration the economic costs, of course, which are very speculative at the earliest stages. It's just flatly illegal.

The Trump administration is claiming that they don't intend to actually rely on the economic data when they make the decision, but nevertheless they're going to consider it and disclose it. And the law says that that agencies cannot consider irrelevant or improper factors when they're making decisions. And I would say that the consideration of economic costs has nothing to do with whether or not a species is in danger.

That's a purely scientific question. So I don't have any doubt that the courts are going to strike that particular aspect of the rule down. It's supposed to be about the science, not the price tag. What about the impact of climate change? Is that also being taken out of

the consideration. Yes, they're they're narrowing the definition of what's reasonably foreseeable, and they're requiring a higher level of proof um that climate change will in fact jeopardized species such as the polar bear, the ring seal, the bearded seal, the penguins, the wolverine. These are all species that are very much at risk from the changes the climate change is is creating within their habitats, whether they're in the

Arctic or in the high elevation habitat. Of species like the wolverine, we know beyond doubt that climate change is altering their habitats to the point where if it continues, they will go extinct. It's just a matter of time, and that time maybe decades, not not centuries. So the idea that you were going to raise the bar of proof of when and how climate change is going to drive these species to extinction again flies in the face of the policy and the language of the Endangered Species Act.

The Supreme Court in the in the famous Teleco Damn case said, the statute is the institutionalization of caution. And so the idea is that you act while there's still time to avoid extinction, not wait until the science is conclusive, by which time it's too late. The Environmental Species Act is a pretty popular law among the public, and, as

you mentioned, a landmark law. So what groups are going to benefit from this oil and gas industry, fossil fuel industry, to some extent, users of public lands, people that grays, livestock, uh timber, companies, mining companies, mostly extractive industries, that the real damage to endanger species habitat comes from these really large,

industrial scale extractive industries. UM Urban sprawl certainly contributes a significant amount of habitat loss as well pollution invasive species, but the really big hit on species habitat is coming from the consumption of natural resources that are way beyond the capacity of ecosystems to recover in time to save these species from extinction. We've talked before about lawsuits to try to save northern spotted owls and snail darters and

other creatures. In Massachusetts and California have said that they are going to file a lawsuit against this revision by the Trump administration. Is that an uphill battle or an easier case, Well, it's going to depend on each issue.

Like I said, on the economic question, I think there's a certainty that the courts will strike that down, that that at at best it's an irrelevant factor, and at worst, it's poisoning the decision making process and of course riling up all kinds of political opposition to Listing some of the other changes they've made, one in particular, where they're no longer going to automatically protect species that are listed as threatened as opposed to endangered. That's probably frankly within

their discretion. So that's going to be a hard one to challenge legally, But practically, what that means is species that are listed as threatened, and that's the way most of the species are currently being listed, will will not have the same protections that they have had historically unless and until the Fishing Wildlife Service adopts a rule that

defines what constitutes harm to the species. Problem with that is that the Fishing Wildlife Service doesn't have the budget to even keep up with the current workload that they have their way behind. They have been for years in

listing species and designating critical habitat and protecting them. So this is just another layer of bureaucratic workload for which they don't have the resources or the budget, and for which the Trump administration has proposed to cut the Fishing Wildlife Service budget for money by So the administration is

talking out of both sides of their mouth. On the one hand, they're saying they're trying to make this act more efficient and more effective, and on the other hand, they're saddling the Fish and Wildlife service with demands for which they don't have resources, and haven't there been some species that have not been saved despite the Endangered Species Act. I'm thinking I think it's the caribou. Yes, the woodland cariboo sadly has now disappeared from the United States territory

they formerly occupied in Montana. The very last living survivor of the woodland cariboo died this year. There's still a small herd of woodland cariboo in Canada, but we've lost that part of our natural heritage. And there's been about eight species that have gone extinct waiting to be listed. So anything that you do to further complicate and delay the listing process increases the likelihood that these species are going to go extinct by the time they do get listed.

The scientists call it an extinction vortex. When these species begin to decline and they dropped below a critical population mass, they're pretty much gonners. No matter what we tried to do. You mentioned the condor. The only reason we saved the condor as we collected all the ones that were in the wild, took him into captivity and bred captive condors and then released them. That's the only way they saved that population. Thank you so much for joining us. Pat.

That's Pat Parento. He's a professor at Vermont Law School. Thanks for listening to the Bloomberg Law Podcast. You can subscribe and listen to the show on Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, and on Bloomberg dot com slash podcast. I'm June Brosso. This is Bloomberg Ye.