Polar bear scam aimed at blocking domestic production of energy

IBD Editorial:

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One of the nine critical errors Judge Michael Burton found in Gore's film was the claim that polar bears were drowning while searching for ice melted by global warming. The only drowned polar bears the court said it was aware of were four that died following a storm.

McAleer then said Gore had misrepresented the status of polar bears as endangered from melting Arctic sea ice and pointed out that the bears' numbers were increasing.

That was before his microphone was cut off and security escorted him away. For McAleer, this warming debate was indeed over.

McAleer's right, and Gore is just plain wrong. Yet the myth he perpetuates has dealt a critical blow to our hopes for true energy independence. Despite ever-increasing numbers and demonstrated adaptability, the famous Knut the polar bear and his kind are still said to be endangered.

That in turn has prompted the federal government to designate 200,541 squares miles off the coast of Alaska as critical habitat for polar bears, effectively killing hopes to exploit the vast energy riches of the American Arctic.

The world polar bear population is at a modern high and growing.

Mitch Taylor, a Canadian polar bear biologist, puts the population currently at around 24,000, up 40% since 1974. Taylor says that, contrary to environmentalist hype, climate change, particularly in the Arctic, is not pushing them to the brink of extinction.

Polar bears have and will continue to adapt to their environment. Taylor emphasizes their adaptability, saying they evolved from grizzly bears about 250,000 years ago and developed as a distinct species about 125,000 years ago when natural climate change occurred.

Science magazine reports that the U.S. Geological Survey now finds that Alaska's Chukchi Sea, part of the designated habitat, holds more oil and gas than anyone thought — 1,600 trillion cubic feet of undiscovered gas, or 30% of the world's supply, and 83 billion barrels of undiscovered oil, 4% of estimated global resources.

Writing recently in Foreign Affairs, Scott Borgerson, an international affairs fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, noted: "The U.S. Geological Survey and the Norwegian company StatoilHydro estimate that the Arctic holds as much as one-quarter of the world's remaining undiscovered oil and gas deposits."

The announcement came one day after the state of Alaska filed a new complaint in its effort to overturn the listing of the polar bear as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

It also came in the same week, ironically, that the Interior Department approved a plan by a subsidiary of Royal Dutch Shell to drill exploratory wells on two leases in the Beaufort Sea off Alaska's north coast. The proposed drilling sites are within the area proposed for critical habitat designation.

The polar bear is not endangered, either by man-caused global warming or by those evil oil companies. The Endangered Species Act is being used as a club to block any energy or industrial development anywhere.

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This is just another example of the bad faith by the anti energy left that have been empowered by this administration. They are willing to do and say anything to thwart domestic production of energy. So many in the media have sold out to their agenda that they are unwilling to challenge the polar bear scam.

Because of this kind of dishonesty, more Americans than ever are questioning the global warming-climate change meme. Hopefully they will start rejecting those pushing this scam at the ballot box.