Green Options

In one of his last move Secretary of the Interior, outgoing Secretary Dirk Kempthorne issued a Secretarial Order authorizing the Bureau of Land Management to establish offices to expedite the permitting of renewable energy and associated transmission facilities on BLM lands.

Unfortunately for outgoing Interior Department Secretary Dirk Kempthorne, the $236,000 renovation of the Main Interior Building Executive Suite bathroom was finally completed just in time for Ken Salazar to move in.

In a last minute effort to alter the endangered species rules before Bush leaves office, officials are speed-reading 200,000 public comments.  If the Administration goes through with their plan, they will implement the biggest changes to the rules since 1986.

The Fish and Wildlife Service has called 15 people to Washington this week to speed read 200,000 comments in 32 hours.  The public comments are regarding a proposal by the interior department to exclude greenhouse gases and the advice of federal biologists from decisions about whether dams and power plants could harm species.

Dale Hall, Fish and Wildlife Service Director, told the Associated Press on Tuesday that the short time frame for processing the comments was requested by Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne and, indeed would set a record.  Usually the review process takes months.

For a long time now we’ve spoken about the continuing effort by US and other environmental and animal rights groups to get the polar bear listed on the United States Endangered Species Act.

Polar bear populations have been declining over the past few years, attributable, some claim, to man-made global warming. Al Gore helped the plight of the polar bear by including in his award winning An Inconvenient Truth a cartoon of a polar bear swimming, unable to find land. The cartoon was inspired by evidence that some polar bears had drowned – a hitherto unforeseen occurrence.

So it is good news that on Wednesday the Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne announced that the polar bear has finally been listed as “threatened” under the ESA. However he was certain to ensure in his announcement that the decision should not be “misused” to regulate global climate change.