When: Sept. 26, 2018
Where: Natural Resources Committee
Title: “Full Committee Legislative Hearing on Nine Bills to Amend the Endangered Species Act”
What Happened: In July 2018, the Congressional Western Caucus — an all-Republican group of House lawmakers who support environmental deregulation and more oil and gas industry control of public lands — introduced a series of bills to destroy the Endangered Species Act (ESA).
In the guise of “modernization,” the latest in a string of Republican euphemisms for drastically weakening the ESA, the bills give enforcement priority to state regulatory agencies despite the ESA being a federal law, make it harder to list a species as endangered and restrict the public’s ability to file lawsuits to ensure the law is being enforced. That’s just for starters — the nine bills collectively would render the ESA useless as a conservation tool for the foreseeable future.
As CBS News noted in a report on the bills’ introduction, there’s no obvious need for such destructive “modernization,” but Republican leaders are pressing ahead anyway.
The Endangered Species Act is credited with bringing grey wolves, Florida manatees and the humpback whale back from the brink of extinction. Still, Utah Republican Rob Bishop says the act is broken.
[. . . ]
As Congress debates, the Trump administration is looking at ways to act on its own by blocking certain animals from the list like the sage grouse, a bird that lives on oil-rich land out west.
“We are trying to make it better… So if they want to malign me or malign the process, let those radical groups do it,” Bishop said.
Rep. Bishop (R-Utah) chairs the Natural Resources Committee and frequently employs this tone in public remarks, suggesting that environmental advocates are radicals who hate the U.S. economy and don’t really understand science.
The Republicans introduced their ESA bills just before the House left Washington for its annual August recess. For two months nothing happened, and it looked as though they might be forgotten. Then, on Sept. 26, the Natural Resources Committee suddenly held a hearing on eight of them, plus one introduced earlier in the Congress by Rep. Tom McClintock (R-Calif.).
Together, the bills presented by Republicans at the hearing represent the end of the Endangered Species Act as we know it.
Among other measures, the hearing featured a bill by Rep. Steve Pearce (R-N.M.) requiring the Interior Secretary and Commerce Secretary to notify and consult with a “chief executive” of each county and state in which a species proposed for ESA listing “is located” — a particularly impractical requirement for species like the whooping crane, which regularly travels from state to state and county to county. The hearing also featured a bill by Rep. Bruce Westerman (R-Ark.) allowing the secretaries to declare a “petition backlog” that would allow federal agencies to suspend the processing of further listing petitions, denying protections for imperiled species without any public or judicial review.
We’ll spare you an explanation of why each of the other bills, in its own way, is similarly problematic. Suffice to say that all of them are based on the mistaken premise that the ESA is broken. In fact, more than 99 percent of species that have received ESA protection have survived since their listings and 90 percent of listed species are on track to meet their recovery goals on schedule.
Republican lawmakers weren’t interested in discussing the law’s successes. Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) spent much of his speaking time attacking the credibility of Robert Dreher, Defenders of Wildlife’s vice president for conservation programs, who spoke at the invitation of the Committee’s Democrats. As he likes to do with Democratic witnesses, Gosar peppered Dreher with irrelevant quiz questions, including one about how much Defenders of Wildlife has won in lawsuits against the federal government over the years. Dreher answered that it was “an infinitesimal amount of our overall budget,” prompting Gosar to tell him that putting those figures together would be “a nice project for you.” Shortly thereafter, Gosar accused him of “failing algebra.”
Throughout the hearing, which lasted more than three hours, Republicans claimed the ESA is riddled with problems, but they never quite identified them or backed them up with solid evidence.
Ranking Member Raúl M. Grijalva (D-Ariz.) published an op-ed in March 2017 laying out why these sorts of hearings keep happening under Republican control of Congress.
Why engage in a misinformation campaign against a popular environmental law? Follow the money. It’s no coincidence that the American Petroleum Institute, the American Exploration & Mining Association, and the Western Energy Alliance have all endorsed these bills.
Weakening the ESA would allow for sensitive wildlife habitats to be opened to mining, oil and gas drilling, and commercial logging — activities that Republican orthodoxy supports regardless of the costs to the environment and the millions of Americans who enjoy wildlife watching and other outdoor activities on our public lands.
Republicans haven’t changed their tune since that op-ed ran a year and a half ago. Indeed, Grijalva said in a statement on Sept. 25 that the Sept. 26 hearing represented “the whole industry wish list in one sitting,” warning that if the bills become law, “the Endangered Species Act will cease to exist and we’ll look back on Sept. 26 as Wipeout Wednesday.”
The bills at the hearing, unfortunately, represent just a fraction of the more than 100 bills, amendments, and policy riders Republicans have introduced this Congress to remove or block ESA protections for individual species or to weaken provisions of the law that promote sustainable economic development and provide public oversight of the law’s enforcement. Beyond Republicans’ legislative attempts to weaken the law, the Trump administration recently released proposed rules that inject inappropriate economic analyses into the science-based species listing process and prevent threatened species from automatically receiving protections.
Despite years of Republican efforts to weaken the Act and cut funding for agencies that protect and recover American wildlife, 99 percent of listed species have continued to survive, and 90 percent are on schedule to meet their recovery goals.
A real discussion of the ESA’s future would focus less on Republicans’ “death by a thousand cuts” approach and more on federal habitat restoration efforts, how to protect imperiled species like sea turtles, gray wolves and grizzly bears and assessing the trophy hunting industry’s impacts on endangered species trafficked into the United States. Republicans raised none of these issues at the hearing and generally avoid them in conversations about endangered species policy.
By Wednesday afternoon, when the hearing started, multiple important environmental news stories had already broken that week.
On Sept. 24, the New York Times highlighted a pledge by many of the world’s largest oil and gas companies to cut their greenhouse gas emissions as part of a voluntary industry program called the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative. How will this pledge square with the Trump administration’s relentless push for more drilling, especially on public lands, as part of its “energy dominance” agenda? The Republican majority won’t be asking.
On Sept. 25, news came that Hurricane Florence was the nation’s second wettest storm in 70 years, trailing only 2017’s Hurricane Harvey. Ken Kunkel, a scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, found that the third rainiest storm was in March 2016 in northern Louisiana and the seventh was in southern Louisiana in August 2016. As the Washington Post reported, “The three rainiest and four of the top seven have all occurred in the last three years — which Kunkel said is no coincidence.” Michael Mann, a noted climate researcher at Pennsylvania State University, called it “not surprising — but still terrifying — that the two top ranked soakers happened over the past two years.” Mann noted in the article that warmer oceans, more moisture and slower moving storms due in various ways to climate change now tend to make storms dump more rain.
Also on Sept. 25, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals halted pipeline construction on national forest land near the Atlantic Coast. As the Washington Post reported:
Pipeline spokesman Aaron Ruby says the forest service conducted a thorough review and the court’s ruling won’t have a “significant impact” on the construction schedule. Attorney DJ Gerken with the Southern Environmental Law Center says the stay means federal officials should halt work on the entirety of the pipeline.
The fate of pipelines on federal property is squarely in the Committee’s jurisdiction and will have an enormous impact on our nation’s energy future. Republicans on the Committee have shown little interest in the environmental impacts of our fossil fuel infrastructure.
On September 27th, thousands of scientists sent a letter to President Trump defending the Endangered Species Act.
The day before Republicans’ extinction hearing, Ranking Member Raul Grijalva introduced the Conserving Ecosystems by Ceasing the Importation of Large (CECIL) Animal Trophies Act, a bill that restricts the importation of African lions and other sport-hunted species that have been proposed for listing under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). At the hearing Grijalva also submitted written testimony from Dr. Jane Goodall, a champion of wildlife and the founder of the Jane Goodall Institute, that expressed strong opposition to the package of ESA bills offered by Republicans.
Additionally, Democrats on the Committee spent the week leading up to the hearing pushing for hearings and oversight efforts on substantive issues.
On Sept. 19, Rep. Grijalva and Del. Madeleine Bordallo (D-Guam) led a House Democratic letter to Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen urging them to crack down on human trafficking in the seafood industry. The authors noted that despite multiple activist and media exposés in recent years and a heightened level of public interest, little has been done to ensure that seafood from slave labor does not make it into the United States.
On Sept. 20, Grijalva and Reps. Alan Lowenthal (D-Calif.) and Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) wrote to Bureau of Land Management Deputy Director Brian Steed urging him to maintain critical wildlife and caribou habitat protections near Teshekpuk Lake on Alaska’s North Slope, which a new ConocoPhillips master plan targets for aggressive development despite drilling restrictions in the area. The level of development ConocoPhillips is proposing — including new roads, drill pads, an airstrip, a new gravel mine and an artificial island — “requires a robust and thorough environmental analysis,” the lawmakers write, cautioning against applying the Trump administration’s arbitrary one-year cap and 300-page limit on impact assessments for the proposed massive oil field.
On Sept. 21, Grijalva strongly objected to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s decision to permit a Texas billionaire to import a dead black rhino into the United States following a trophy hunt in Namibia, where fewer than 2,200 black rhinos remain after years of poaching have severely harmed the species. As Grijalva said at the time:
We’re now in a world where we auction off our last remaining endangered animals to billionaires for sport and the Trump administration rubber-stamps the paperwork. Taxpayers subsidize this activity for the ultra-rich by paying almost the entire cost of administering this program. The new trophy approval, like others before it, is a monstrous abuse of the public trust and an insult to the American public, and it should be reversed immediately.
That same day, Grijalva called on Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to support a long-term moratorium on uranium mining near the Grand Canyon and push Congress to fully fund the Land and Water Conservation Fund, which was set to expire in a matter of days due to Republican legislative inaction. Zinke was preparing to visit Grand Canyon National Park during the upcoming weekend.
READ THE NEXT WASTED RESOURCES POST HERE
