California Attorney General Jerry Brown has called on the Bush administration to abandon its proposed changes to rules in the Endangered Species Act in a letter to the Fish and Wildlife Service.
The
changes could put "entire species and ecosystems at risk for complete
destruction," Brown said in a statement to the media last week.
Brown
sent a similar letter in mid-October, but his office said it was
ignored. A few weeks later, the Department of the Interior concluded
the rule changes would have no significant environmental impact, a claim Brown's latest letter rejects.
As we reported earlier this week, the Bush administration wants to alter many environmental rules before it leaves office.
One of the revisions Brown is concerned about would remove a requirement
(PDF) that says scientists at the Fish and Wildlife Service or the
National Marine Fisheries Service must evaluate how federally approved
mining, logging and power plant projects might impact endangered
species before the projects can begin.
Under Bush's revision,
the federal agencies that issue permits for these projects would no
longer have to send them to the Fish and Wildlife Service for review --
instead they could determine on their own whether the projects would
harm surrounding wildlife.
"This rule change will literally
remove thousands of projects from scientific review," said Noah
Greenwald, the biodiversity program director for the Center for
Biological Diversity, a national environmental group that opposes the
rule.
The Bush administration also wants to insert language into
the law that would keep the effect of greenhouse gases on threatened
wildlife from being factored into the Endangered Species Act.
Environmentalists have used that concept as a leveraging tool to try to
force the administration to act on global warming.
In
a news release announcing the rule change in August, Department of the
Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne said "it is not possible to link the
emissions to impacts on specific listed species such as polar bears."
The Associated Press has reported that the Interior Department received 300,000 public comments on the Bush-backed changes. In order to issue the final rule as quickly as possible, the department brought in 15 staffers to review all of them in a mere 32 hours. The review process usually takes months.
"We
wanted to make sure that the comments were reviewed, hence the
undertaking," said Interior Department spokesman Chris Paolino of the
brief review process. Paolino added that the department hasn't reviewed
Brown's letter yet but will consider it in its final decision.
This
isn't the first time the Bush administration has come under fire for
its approach to endangered species. Last year, the Interior
Department's inspector general found that former Deputy Assistant
Secretary Julie MacDonald was "editing, commenting on, and reshaping" (PDF) scientific reports on endangered species, despite the fact that she is not a scientist.
While many environmentalists are optimistic that environmental policy will improve
after Barack Obama becomes president on Jan. 20, it's unclear exactly
what Obama intends to do about rule revisions issued by the Bush
administration in its waning days.
A spokesperson for the Obama
campaign told ProPublica they were unable to comment for this story
because Obama's press staff for the transition team wasn't in place. In
August, however, the AP reported that Obama opposed the Bush administration’s proposed changes to the Endangered Species Act.
BY Joaquin Sapien, ProPublica
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