Legislation aimed at limiting the reach of the Endangered Species Act comes up Tuesday in the House Natural Resources Committee, where Democrats lack the votes to counter any GOP moves on the act.
Among the bills the committee plans to markup are:
* A measure by U.S. Rep. Pete Olson, a Republican from Texas, to amend the Endangered Species Act of 1973 to require review of the economic cost of adding a species to the list of endangered or threatened species.
* A proposal by U.S. Rep. Dan Newhouse, a Republican from Washington state, to amend the Endangered Species Act of 1973 to require making available all data that is the basis of a determination of endangered or threatened species to states affected by the determination.
* A measure by U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert, a Republican from Texas, to amend the Endangered Species Act of 1973 to provide that nonnative species in the United States shall not be treated as endangered species or threatened species.
Also on the committee's agenda is legislation to delist the gray wolf in the western Great Lakes and Wyoming from Endangered Species Act protection, and block any legal efforts to overturn the delisting. The measure was introduced by Rep. Collin Peterson, a member of Minnesota's Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party.
Rep. Peter Visclosky, a Democrat from Indiana, has asked the committee to approve legislation to rename Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore as Indiana Dunes National Park.
The committee meeting gets under way at 4 p.m. Tuesday in the Longworth House Office Building.
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Comments
The same people that make that determination now, in the same way they do now with the added element of determining and factoring the cost.
The authors of the Endangered Species Act wisely recognized that a finding of whether or not a species is endangered or threatened is a factual one -- that is, it should be based on a scientific evaluation of the species' biological status. What comes next is a different question. What will it cost to recover a listed species? By law, such a determination is already required. Some species spend an unfortunately long time on the endangered species list because the funding provided for recovery by Congress is very limited.
Olson's bill is a transparent attempt to hamstring the ESA. Estimates of the potential future economic impacts of listing a species are speculative at best. How far ahead are scientists supposed to forecast the costs? Who can know what future threats to the species or its habitat will materialize, adding to those costs? And, as one of the previous posters pointed out, what about the costs of not listing a species? Many provide vital ecosystem services upon which we all depend. Olson seems to want to know the cost of everything but not its value.
thanks, Mike B.!
The one thing I would add is that many species end up as "candidate species", defined as species with sufficient data to support listing as threatened or endangered, but there are so many other higher priority species that they don't get listed, let alone get recovery plans.
https://www.fws.gov/endangered/esa-library/pdf/candidate_species.pdf
Olsen's bill raises the cost of listing for each species, thus constricting the bottleneck from candidate to threatened even further unless the bill provides FWS additional funding (it doesn't).
The fact that most species who have ever lived have gone extinct is not the most relevant fact. If the dinosaurs had not gone extinct, we would most likely not be here, as their absence opened up niches for mammals to evolve and fluorish.....However, the relevant fact is that the rate of extinction has increased enormously, so that scientists can now say that we are living in the Sixth Period of Mass Extinction. The other five were caused by cataclysmic events such as an asteroid slamming into the earth, intense periods of volcanism, etc. . This extinction event is caused entirely by humans--through habitat loss due to pollution, humans taking over land areas, deforestation, desertification, outright killing, producing carbon (and other) emissions that are changing the climate, and many other actions and behaviors of ours that affect other species. The extinctions that are happening now are occurring at a rate unprecedented in the last 200,000 years. And the true relevance to us is that we are living now, and it is the particular array of species on the planet now that create the environment in which we evolved and to which we are adapted. The planet won't care if all these species go extinct. Others are likely to evolve. But we will care because we are likely to be among the ones who go missing. We are not "getting along just fine" right now. The entire planet is changing and we are responsible.