Endangered Species Act Update: The Fight is Still On

The good news: Senator Inhofe still hasn’t been able to get a consensus bill introduced in the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee, and Senator Crapo’s bill is still stuck in the Finance Committee.

The less good news: E&E Daily reports that Senator Inofe is now looking for other legislative vehicles to get an Endangered Species Act bill onto the Senate floor.

Every week that passes without seeing any movement on a gut-the-Act bill is a week closer to success, and we are feeling good about our chances of pulling off this defensive battle, but we are acutely aware that the fight is still on until all possible gut-the-Act bills have been killed and buried.

The E&E Daily report:

ENDANGERED SPECIES: Inhofe may look to other vehicles to move ESA rewrite

Allison A. Freeman, E&E Daily reporter

Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairman James Inhofe (R-Okla.) said yesterday he may turn to other vehicles to move Endangered Species Act legislation on the Senate floor in light of an apparent deadlock in negotiations and little hope of moving a bill through committee.

"We're watching everything as it comes along to see the best way to do it," Inhofe told reporters yesterday.

Inhofe had been deferring to Fisheries, Wildlife and Water Subcommittee Chairman Lincoln Chafee (R-R.I.) and ranking member Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) to lead the process, but earlier this month he said their negotiations were making little headway and that he would look at other alternatives for moving legislation forward.

Inhofe admitted yesterday that moving his own bill through committee is not a likely option, saying he probably lacks the votes to move a bill. He blamed the deadlock on Chafee.

"My strategy doesn't seem all that important right now," Inhofe said. "I am committed to get a bill on the floor, and I am not too particular, but every time I talk to Senator Chafee, it doesn't matter what it is, he will not support it."

Chafee, a key swing vote on the EPW Committee, has said he would not support an Inhofe bill and would only get behind legislation if Democrats were also on board. If Democrats and Sen. Jim Jeffords (I-Vt.) joined Chafee in voting against a bill, a 9-9 tie would result, mirroring the same result that sank "Clear Skies" legislation earlier in the session.

"I can't do it with the votes," Inhofe said of the committee process.

Still, he said ESA legislation is "important enough" to look at the full range of options for bringing changes to the act to the floor, possibly as an amendment on other legislation.

Chafee and Clinton had formed a working group with Inhofe and Jeffords in an effort to find compromise ESA legislation. Chafee said earlier this month that negotiations were "stuck" on about five issues, including funding, critical habitat and the jeopardy standard, and that legislation this year was improbable.

Lincoln unsure on future for ESA tax incentives

In a related matter, Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) said she is not sure if the proposal that she and Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) put forward last December will see any time in the Finance Committee. "I hope so, but we have a lot of issues on our plate," Lincoln said of advancing the ESA bill.

Lincoln and Crapo introduced S. 2110 last December. The measure would give landowners tax breaks as incentives for helping to recover endangered and threatened species and includes "conservation banking," a market-based initiative that would allow landowners to benefit from the sale of conservation credits.

President Bush Ignores Voluntary Trail Closure

From the Palm Springs Desert Sun:

President Bush enjoys bike ride above Palm Springs

Benjamin Spillman
The Desert Sun
President Bush woke up early and rode his mountain bike along the Clara Burgess Trail to the top of Murray Hill, which affords a spectacular view of the Coachella Valley and Little San Bernardino Mountains.

The trail is considered strenuous for riding, with a 500-foot elevation gain. The total round-trip was a little more than 7 miles.“He said it was a pretty tough terrain, but he enjoyed it,” Press Secretary Scott McClellan said.

Jim Foote, acting manager of the Santa Rosa and San Jacinto Mountains National Monument, said the Clara Burgess trail is also among those monument managers ask people to avoid part of the year to prevent disrupting endangered Peninsular bighorn sheep.

The trail is one of about 10 in the monument under a “voluntary avoidance” program. People are asked to stay off the Clara Burgess trail from Jan. 1 to June 30 during the sheep lambing season, he said.

It was uncertain Sunday night if White House organizers accompanying President Bush knew about the “voluntary avoidance” program.

Earth Day

It’s earth day, friends. We might have spent our time here on the blog talking about oil hitting $75/barrel (as Environmental Action reports).

We might have discussed the Wall Street Journal’s celebration of a job well done (Earth Day Mission: Accomplished).

Instead, we send you to the good folks at Daily Kos for their ever insightful and interesting reflections on Earth Day 2006.

Time Magazine Calls Senator Allard One of the Worst

In case you haven’t seen it, Time Magazine ranked Senator Allard one of the five worst Senators in the country. Given its generally conservative reporting, we don’t think Time was evaluating the Senator on the basis of his environmental record, but he probably earns a similar position on the conservation list as well. We want to give credit where it’s due, and the Senator on occasion supports important initiatives, but on the whole Senator Allard has been as hostile as they come having earned a whopping 5% on the League of Conservation Voters' environmental scorecard. On the Endangered Species Act, for example, the Senator is a co-sponsor on Crapo’s atrocious “gut the Act” bill now (thankfully) languishing in the Senate’s Finance Committee. This is an important enough issue to him, in fact, that it’s been living on his home page for some time now.

We’ve got details of the Crapo bill on our Endangered Species Act Defense Campaign page.

Coloradolib was among the bloggers who picked up the story.

Julie MacDonald Strikes Again

Julie MacDonald is a political appointee at the U.S. Department of Interior. Her job duties, as best we can figure, overriding the recommendations of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service at every possible opportunity, at least when the Service recommends doing something that might benefit an endangered plant or wildlife species. They also seem to include concocting rationales for denying or removing protection from our most endangered plants and wildlife. Despite overwhelming scientific consensus that the Gunnison sage grouse is suffering severe declines and is quickly sliding toward extinction, and despite indications that even the Fish and Wildlife Service itself recommended publishing a formal proposal to protect the grouse under the Endangered Species Act, the Service yesterday not only decided not to protect the grouse but removed it from the "candidate" list, thus eliminating even the nominal protection it had with that designation.

If you are interested in learning more, you can read any one of a bunch of news stories, including stories in the Denver Post, Grand Junction Sentinel, Washington Post (which printed the Associated Press story, which you'll find in dozens of other news outlets), and the Gunnison Country Times.

Endangered Species Act Update

Among the oddities of election year politics is that Congress, for the most part, stops passing legislation when they get close enough to election day that they are worried about what affect their votes might have. We are now in mid-April without a bill in the Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee (that would presumably be a companion bill to the Pombo bill passed by the House last fall) and with no motion on the Crapo bill sitting in the Finance Committee, and everyweek that goes by without movement on a "gut the Endangered Species Act" bill in the Senate, then, is one week closer to mid-term elections. For that reason, it's both a small victory in its own right and another step toward prevailing in our campaign to defend the Act. Not only does the political will to move legislation diminish with every passing week, the Senate calendar gets more and more jammed up with top Republican priorities (which do not include the Act).

For all of these reasons, the Associated Press is now reporting on the "dwindling prospects of Senate action." We aren't in the clear yet, of course, but things are looking better every day.

Republicans for Environmental Protection Score Their Own

Republicans for Environmental Protection – that remarkable pro-conservation holdout within the GOP – issued their first ever environmental scorecard last week. The Billings Gazette today ran a story about how poorly Wyoming’s delegation fared, reporting that REP gave Senator Craig Thomas a 10 out of 100, Senator Mike Enzi a zero, and Congresswoman Barbara Cubin a -4. Their scoring system includes negative points for leadership on anti-environmental efforts, which seems like an unusual but thoughtful touch. It’s no shock, of course, to see pro-conservation folks pan Wyoming’s all-Republican delegation, but to see it come from fellow Republicans is especially appropriate.

In Colorado, Representatives Bob Beauprez and Marilyn Musgrave each earned scores of -4 as well, Representative Tom Tancredo managed to land an 8, and Representative Joel Hefley was pretty much off the charts with a 12. Senator Wayne Allard also fared poorly but earned kudos, along with Senator Thomas of Wyoming, for his role in persuading House members to remove a provision in the budget reconciliation bill that would have facilitated privatizing public lands through the 1872 Mining Law.

Both of Utah’s Senators – Senators Robert Bennett and Orrin Hatch – earned a score of 7. Both of Utah’s Republican Representatives – Rob Bishop and Chris Cannon – earned a score of -4.

The overall conservation champions included Representatives Sherwood Boehlert (NY) with a 108, Michael Fitzgerald (R-PA) with a 100, and Jim Saxton (NJ), also with a score of 100. Representatives Joe Barton (TX) and Richard Pombo earned the lowest scores in the House: -12. On the Senate side the champions included Senators Lincoln Chafee (RI) with an 87, Olympia Snowe (ME) with a 70, and Susan Collins (ME), also with a 70.

Senator Chafee on NPR’s Living on Earth

In case you don't know, Senator Lincoln Chafee - the Republican Senator from Rhode Island - is one of the Senate's great conservation champions. On the Endangered Species Act, for example, where a party line vote in the Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee might well mean the end of the Act as we know it, Senator Chafee has so far stood with the Democrats in refusing to support a damaging bill. For his deep commitment to a conservation ethic shared by Republican icon Teddy Roosevelt he has earned the enmity of his party and a challenger in the Republican primary.

If you didn't hear National Public Radio’s Living on Earth interview yesterday you can listen to it or read the transcript on Living on Earth web site.

New GAO Report on Endangered Species Recovery

Some interesting if unsurprising news yesterday: The Government Accountability Office released a new report that reviewed endangered species recovery plans adopted by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service. The overall finding seemed to be that although the agencies tend to adopt recovery plans for listed species, the recovery plans frequently lack key elements that might help both guide recovery and measure the success of the Act in terms of recovery. In other words – as most credible reviews of the Endangered Species Act have concluded – the agencies aren’t doing a very good job of implementing the Act. Bear in mind that Representative Pombo’s basic argument about the Act is that it’s failed because we haven’t recovered many species. The facts have never much of an impediment to Pombo, however, so it’s no surprise that he overlooks the impressive extent to which species protected by the Act are far less likely to become extinct and far more likely to be stable or recovering. In fact, the longer a species has been protected by the Act the more likely it is to be recovering.

“Therefore,” notes the GAO study, “simply counting the number of extinct and recovered species periodically or over time, without considering the recovery prospects of listed species, provides limited insight into the overall success of the service’s recovery programs.”

In other words, as E&E News suggested in their story today, “The Government Accountability Office report appears to contradict critics of the act, who point to its low recovery and delisting rates as a sign of its failure.”

If Pombo and his anti-conservation friends were serious about improving endangered species conservation, we would all be supporting legislation that provided adequate funding for listing and habitat protection programs, enhanced programs that provide economic incentives to private landowners for good endangered species conservation, and established clear standards and timelines for recovery plans.

Senate Passes Endangered Species Day Resolution

Last night the Senate passed, by unanimous consent, an Endangered Species Resolution declaring May 11, 2006 as Endangered Species Day. Although it’s largely symbolic, of course, it’s still good news, and pro-conservation symbolism is important in its own right. The purpose of “Endangered Species Day” is to encourage schools to set aside a few hours for students to learn about what endangered and threatened species live in their state, why they are endangered and what can be done to help. It will also encourage organizations, businesses and agencies to collaborate on educational information and appropriate ceremonies and celebrations of endangered wildlife recovery success stories. We’ll be giving some thought over the next few weeks as to what we might do to support Endangered Species Day in Colorado and welcome any suggestions.

The resolution’s bipartisan cosponsors included:

Senator Joseph Biden (D-DE)
Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV)
Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA)
Senator Lincoln Chafee (R-RI)
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY)
Senator Mike Crapo (R-ID)
Senator Christopher Dodd (D-CT)
Senator Russell Feingold (D-WI)
Senator Carl Levin (D-MI)
Senator Joseph Lieberman (D-CT)
Senator Jack Reed (D-RI)
Senator Olympia Snowe (R-ME)