Don’t Sweat the Polar Bear

We wrote here about the Left’s effort to use the polar bear to impose limits on our economic growth. As a matter of public policy, it was a bad joke, since 1) the earth is cooling, not warming; 2) Antarctic ice is at record levels; 3) Arctic sea ice is at lower levels due mainly to wind currents, not alleged warming; 4) polar bears have survived both far warmer and far colder climates than anything now in prospect over a period of thousands of years; 5) by all first-hand accounts, polar bear populations are now especially robust; and 6) there is not a damn thing we can do by changing the weather that will have any impact on polar bears, one way or the other.

Now, after all of the abuse that the Democrats gave the Bush administration about polar bears, reality has intruded, and the Obama administration has decided that Bush was right after all:

The Obama administration said on Friday it will keep a Bush-era rule that weakens protection for polar bears’ icy habitat and plays down links between the threatened status of the species and climate change.

U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced the decision, saying that revoking the rule would cause confusion, and that protecting the big Arctic bears was best tackled under a comprehensive climate-change strategy. …

Former President George W. Bush’s administration listed polar bears as threatened under the Endangered Species Act on May 15, 2008, but issued a rule that leaves global warming off the list of threats the federal government must consider in protecting the bear.

That rule will be retained by the Obama administration.

As Glenn Reynolds might put it, They said if I voted for John McCain we’d see George W. Bush’s third term–and they were right!

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