View Larger Image Tortoise thought to be extinct found on Galapagos Island

 By CFACT | November 6th, 2020| Environment |12 Comments @ CFACT

An expedition to the island of Fernandina of the Galapagos Islands has found a female of the species Chelonoidis phantasticus, or the Fernandina giant tortoise. The tortoise was orginally thought to be extinct, as a member of the species had not been seen since 1906.  In even better news, the team that found the Fernandina giant tortoise believes there are more alive on the island, based off of droppings and tracks.

TheScientist reports:

“‘The photos from the team clearly show a moderately saddle-backed, old female about half to two-thirds the size of the known male. Pending genetic confirmation, this is almost undoubtedly the lost Fernandina Giant Tortoise,’ says Anders Rhodin from the Turtle Conservancy and International Union for Conservation of Nature, in the statement.

“The team members suspect more tortoises may live on Fernandina because of scat and tracks they observed there. The expedition included members from the Galapagos National Park, the Galapagos Conservancy, and Animal Planet, which funded the search and will feature it on an episode of the show ‘Extinct or Alive.’”

The end goal is to of course breed more of the species, if their suspicions that additional tortoises are alive proves true. Females can store sperm for a long period of time, according to Duke University professor of conservation ecology Stuart Pimm.  This gives hope for the species, and biodiversity of the Galapagos!

To read the story in TheScientist, click here.

Unanimous Supremes limit Endangered Species Act in Dusky Gopher Frog decision

By CFACT Ed November 4th, 202 0| Environment, Regulation |0 Comments @CFACT 

The Supreme Court ruled 8-0 that the Endangered Species Act cannot be used to control land in Louisiana to protect the Dusty Gopher Frog, which currently only lives in Mississippi.

Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the court held that, “according to the ordinary understanding of how adjectives work, ‘critical habitat’ must also be ‘habitat… Only the ‘habitat’ of the endangered species is eligible for designation as critical habitat.”

This is a significant reform.  The ESA has become the favorite vehicle of activists seeking to control people’s use of their private land.  That the endangered species should actually be present on the land in question might seem a no-brainer, but the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals didn’t get it.  Today’s Supreme Court Decision reverses the Fifth Circuit.

Is the ESA no longer a blank check for eco-gadflies?

Read the full Supreme Court decision Weyerhaeuser Company v. United States Fish and Wildlife Service at CFACT.org.

 

Is the Insect Apocalypse Really Upon Us?

Claims that insects will disappear within a century are absurd, but the reality isn’t reassuring either.

Ed Yong

In 1828, a teenager named Charles Darwin opened a letter to his cousin with “I am dying by inches, from not having anybody to talk to about insects.” Almost two centuries on, Darwin would probably be thrilled and horrified: People are abuzz about insects, but their discussions are flecked with words such as apocalypse and Armageddon.

The drumbeats of doom began in late 2017, after a German study showed that the total mass of local flying insects had fallen by 80 percent in three decades. The alarms intensified after The New York Times Magazine published a masterful feature on the decline of insect life late last year. And panic truly set in this month when the researchers Francisco Sánchez-Bayo and Kris Wyckhuys, having reviewed dozens of studies, claimed that “insects as a whole will go down the path of extinction in a few decades.” The Guardian, in covering the duo’s review, wrote that “insects could vanish within a century”—a crisis that Sánchez-Bayo and Wyckhuys believe could lead to a “catastrophic collapse of nature’s ecosystems.”  

I spoke with several entomologists about whether these claims are valid, and what I found was complicated. The data on insect declines are too patchy, unrepresentative, and piecemeal to justify some of the more hyperbolic alarms...........First, some good news: The claim that insects will all be annihilated within the century is absurd. Almost everyone I spoke with says that it’s not even plausible, let alone probable. “Not going to happen,” says Elsa Youngsteadt from North Carolina State University........To Read More....

We Are NOT Headed For World Without Insects - Insect Decline Survey Hitting Headlines Non Systematic, Patchy & With Limited Data

By Robert Walker | February 11th 2019 | Print | E-mail

 

Please don’t be scared by this, it is just the journalists hyping things up again. It does not mean what it seems to mean from the headlines. Insects can’t vanish and we will continue to be able to grow our crops and do agriculture. The study itself involves a lot of extrapolation on inadequate data, not their fault, it is just that there hasn’t been that much research done on insect populations for them to draw on.

The number of studies they found, 73, is not a lot for the whole world and the studies are limited. The authors are also getting criticism on twitter by experts for the way they conducted the survey, for instance they found it with a literature search in "Web of Science" for “[insect*] AND [declin*] AND [survey]” which seems likely to bias in favour of groups that are declining as well as miss out many surveys that don’t happen to use the term “survey”.

They should have stated the limitations of the survey and they do not seem to have taken the extra care needed for a survey likely to influence public opinion and decision making. This was a traditional review, and not the carefully conducted systematic review that you get in medicine and that first began to be used in conservation in 2006.........To Read More......

The biggest land grab, ever

By Paul Driessen|11th, 2019 |Environment| 0 Comments @CFACT

 

The Natural Resources Defense Council recently sued the Department of the Interior for failing to designate “critical habitat” for the “endangered” rusty patched bumblebee, thereby reducing the bee’s chances of survival.

This is the latest of many Endangered Species Act (ESA) lawsuits and other actions involving insects and leading to an eleventh-hour Obama administration endangered designation for the rusty patched bee.

Interior points out that extremely limited knowledge about the rusty patched bee makes critical habitat determinations impossible. The NRDC counters that Interior must designate habitats based on “best available evidence.”

However, that information is so inadequate, conjectural, false or falsified that it must not be used to justify the astounding potential impacts of rusty patched bee habitat designations.

The litigious groups claim the rusty patched bumblebee was “once common” in many Northeastern and Midwestern states. However, during that “historic” era, bees and other insects were studied for taxonomic purposes — not to assess species’ diversity and populations. So no one knows how many there used to be, or where.

The groups also claim rusty patched bee populations declined rapidly beginning in the mid-1990s, because of habitat loss, disease, climate change and especially the use of crop-protection pesticides. That’s another convenient revision of history.

Not long ago, even the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation said RPB decline was due to habitat loss and multiple diseases that spread from domesticated honeybees to wild bees.

“The exact cause for the loss of the rusty patched is unclear,” says University of Virginia biology professor T’ai Roulston. “But it’s almost certainly related to disease,” especially a fungal gut parasite that “can shorten the lives of worker bees and disrupt mating success and survival of queens and males.”

Habitat loss is clearly another factor. Over the past half-century, cities and suburbs expanded, and farmers increasingly emphasized large-scale monoculture crops like corn and canola for food and biofuels. That reduced underground RPB nesting sites and the varieties of flowers that wild bees prefer.

Mr. Obama’s Fish and Wildlife Service ignored these facts, arbitrarily downplayed its earlier disease and habitat loss explanations, and began blaming pesticides, especially advanced-technology neonicotinoid pesticides, which have become a scapegoat for wild bee health problems.

Little evidence supports the pesticide claims, and much refutes them.

For example, a wide-ranging international study of wild bees, published in Nature, found that only 2 percent of wild bee species are responsible for 80 percent of all crop visits. Most wild bees never even come into contact with crops or the pesticides that supposedly harm them.

Even more compelling, the Nature study determined that the 2 percent of wild bees that do visit crops — and so would be most exposed to pesticides — are among the healthiest bee species on Earth.

Other studies found that neonic residues are well below levels that can adversely affect bee development or reproduction. That’s because coating seeds ensures that neonic pesticides are absorbed into plant tissues — and thus target only pests that actually feed on the crops.

None of these facts will matter, however, once the Fish and Wildlife Service starts designating the rusty patched critical habitats. The agency and environmentalists will be able to delay, block or bankrupt any proposed or ongoing project or activity within a habitat if they think it might potentially harm the bee: From building new homes or hospitals, to laying new pipelines or improving roads and bridges — to saying when, where or if a farmer can plow fields, plant crops or use pesticides.

Make no mistake, the potential geographic reach of these critical habitat designations is enormous.

 The Fish and Wildlife Service has said rusty patched bumblebees are likely to be found “in scattered locations that cover only 0.1% of the species’ historical range.” However, 0.1 percent of the presumed historical range is nearly 4 million acres — equivalent to Connecticut plus Rhode Island.

Worse, that acreage is widely dispersed in itty-bitty parcels across 13 states, where amateur entomologists have supposedly spotted rusty patched bumblebees since 2000. That’s some 380 million acres: 15 times the size of Virginia.

No one knows just where those parcels might be — enabling environmental groups and government agencies to halt projects while large areas are carefully examined for signs of rusty patched bumblebees.

More ominously, anti-pesticide and other environmental groups want yellow-banded, western and Franklin’s bumblebees designated as endangered. These species were supposedly once found in tiny areas scattered over a billion acres in 40 states. Radical greens also want beetles and other bugs designated as endangered.

The ultimate effect — if not their intent — would be to let those radicals use “threatened or endangered” insects to delay or veto countless projects and activities across nearly the entire United States.

All this underscores why the Endangered Species Act must be revised. It’s also why environmentalists and their allies will battle any changes tooth and nail.

The U.S. Supreme Court recently ruled 8-0 that the Fish and Wildlife Service could not use the ESA to compel landowners to create habitat at their own expense, and forego future economic use of their private property, in order to expand an endangered frog’s range.

The court and Interior Department should now bring further balance and sanity to the act, to ensure that conflicting and competing needs are examined and balanced — fully, carefully and honestly.

This article originally appeared in The Washington Times

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Have We Lost Our Minds?

By Rich Kozlovich

Some years back Burt Prelutsky  wrote an article entitled “Those poor, poor perverts”.   The basis of the article was a discussion as to how ridiculous are the arguments surrounding pedophiles and how they are to be treated by society.

He uses the old story of how “intellectuals” (Editor's Note: He used the word “nuts”, but they were the intellectuals of the day.  Nothing has changed!) would sit around for hours and discuss how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.

See, television did cure one thing.

The only problem is that so many of those who are in decision making positions apparently don’t waste their time on television, mores’ the pity, because they now sit around and decide how many feet away from a school a convicted pedophile may live who has been released from prison.

Prelutsky makes a point that should be obvious to the most casual observer:

 “For what reason would any sane society ever release such a person from jail? The notion that kids are safe if the creep lives 2,000 feet away from where they play is perfectly loony. What about the kids walking to and from those parks and playgrounds? “

He points out that it is like releasing all the bank robbers from the prisons and telling them they can’t live any closer that two blocks away from a bank and expecting this to be the solution to their wanting to rob banks. He goes on to say, “judges and lawmakers seem happy to ignore the rates of recidivism among rapists and pedophiles. Is there anyone else, aside from defense attorneys, who would argue that a man who’s raped a six year old child deserves a second chance?”

We have ceded our own common sense to the “experts”! Are they really all that credible?  So credible that we willingly abandon traditional values, common sense and moral balance?

Where is our moral compass?

As unpleasant an issue as this is, I use it to show a peculiar mindset that has permeated society that really is nuts. Concern about pedophiles, bank robbers and other assorted villains of society is the common concern that we all must share. We also have the added concern of those who are destructive to society in a much larger and more insidious way. The green movement! The group industry and society as a whole must have concerns about.  That's the environmental movement, and those who promote it inside and outside industry.

They promote junk science and outright fraudulent science as fact, and those who should be at the fore front standing against this nonsense turn into cheerleaders, and everyone laps it up like ice cream.

We are willing to accept nonsense from these people because the media is on their side. The EPA is clearly complicit as they continue spewing out a lava flow of scientifically dubious regulations. They support junk science through grant money.  Integrated Pest Management and Green Pest Control are these kinds of endeavors.

The green movement even has legislators held hostage to them via their monetary support.

Some years back a California congressman wanted to make changes to the Endangered Species Act…not repeal it as is really needed…..just add some sanity to it; and the Sierra Club spent a ton of money to defeat him and they did. They stated that “this was a lesson” to other legislators. This makes them more deadly to more people over a broader scope of humanity than bank robbers or even pedophiles.

Do we as an industry really believe all the nonsense they spew out? Do we really believe that we can really come to some sort of mutually acceptable final agreement with them? No matter what many of the prominent people in our industry say publicly; when I talk to them personally and off the record, they all acknowledge that it is all claptrap.

A lobbyist I have known for years makes the point that in any negotiations there must be some compromise, and I agree. The problem we seem to have is being able to understand the difference between compromise and capitulation. If during these discussions we give up something, I would like to know what the other side is giving up.

I am not talking about just being quiet for a while either. Or being quiet while their brethren from some other greenie group attacks us, which is what usually happens. There is no command and control system within the green movement. They will not only continue attacking industry they will attack their green brethren as sell outs for not being green enough.

If you give up 25% of something and they go away until next year, but they will be back the very next year demanding that you give up another 25%,  And this will go on, and on, and on until you no longer have anything to give up.

When you dance with the Devil you don't call the tune, you can't name the dance, you don't lead and you may not be able to leave the dance floor. Why don't we get it?

If you think this is an extreme and unreasonable view; ask Kentucky Fried Chicken. They backed down on point after point and the animal rights people said that this was a “good start”. There will be no end to their demands because the Neville Chamberlain “Policy of Appeasement” philosophy will not work on people with an agenda?

They are the anointed! They know best about all things. They truly believe their individual and collective intellect is far greater than all of the practical experience accumulated by mankind over the centuries. Their's is the “vision of the anointed”, and must not be ignored, no matter the consequences.

As a result of the policies they have promoted they clearly have become the 20th century’s greatest mass murders, and are working just as hard in the 21st century to maintain that status.

Ford Motor Company found out the hard way. In a Fox News article Steve Milloy points out:

“After Ford caved into pressure from left-wing activist investors and issued a report stating that it “views stabilization of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and energy security as critical and related business issues that warrant precautionary, prudent and early action,” the enviros thanked Ford in return by accusing his company of putting “more heat-trapping pollution into our skies each year than the entire country of Mexico”; continuing to “produce more global warming pollution on average than any other automaker”; continuing to make SUVs; and fighting a California law that would require a 30 percent reduction in automobile carbon dioxide emissions by 2016.”

Let’s not kid ourselves; what they really want is Ford, and the rest of the automobile industry, out of business.

So, what do they want from us in pest control? Well, I am sure that if we would offer to kill ourselves that they would agree that this would be a nice "start"!

If you look at who has affected people’s health positively and negatively you will find that it is the pesticide application industries that have saved and extended lives, and it's the environmental movement who has taken lives.

So why do we listen to them? Why does anyone?

I am the last one to decry their desire for a simple life without all the modern conveniences; if that is what someone wants, then I say…enjoy! However, if all of these people think their ideas are so great, why are all the greenies and their supporters living in the developed world and not in the third world where their policies hold sway? If they really believe all of the stuff they spew out, they need to take a personal stand and move there.

They could really make an impact on everyone’s mind by taking their children with them also.

Certainly that must make sense to everyone! After all, why would a greenie want to expose themselves and their children to all of these terrible chemicals and advanced technology of an advanced nation?   Right?

They need to move to one of the many areas of the world where there are no roads, few cars and no running water contaminated with any chlorine or fluoride. No electricity, no vaccinations, no genetically modified foods, no fungicides, no anti-bacterial cleaners, all organic food, no pesticides, no air conditioning.

Will there be many takers? I have no doubt there would be few, if any!  You can be sure that the greenies will be as close to the modern conveniences and the society they claim to despise as surely as bank robbers will rob banks and pedophiles will hang around children.

To paraphrase the earlier question asked by Burt Prelutsky:

“For what reason would any sane society ever believe anything these people say?"

The notion that society would be better off adopting the ideas and philosophies of the green movement is perfectly loony.” And yes!  We really have lost our minds!

Let's try and get this once and for all.  The left is irrational, misanthropic and morally defective, that's history and that history is incontestable. Dystopia follows the left like Sancho Panza followed Don Quixote.  A madman!

Big property rights victory at the Supreme Court

November 28, 2018  By Rick Moran
 

The Supreme Court ruled in favor of a landowner who challenged the government's designation of 1,500 acres of land as "critical habitat" for an endangered frog species.

Edward Poitevent sued the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, who said the land in question – in his family's possession for decades – was critical to the survival of the dusky gopher frog, even though the species had not inhabited the land since 1965.

Daily Caller:

"I am really overjoyed that an eight to nothing court agreed with me that the service's decision was absurd and nightmarish for property rights in the United States," landowner Edward Poitevent told The Daily Caller News Foundation in a Tuesday interview. 

"We all actually thought something like this would happen, but what's really stunning is this is an eight to nothing decision," Poitevent said. 

The Fish and Wildlife Service told Poitevent in 2011 his land, which has been in his family for generations, would be listed as backup critical habitat for the dusky gopher frog, which hasn't been seen there since 1965.  The only known domain of the frogs was a single pond in southern Mississippi as of 2001, but the government said the Louisiana zone was the only other possible habitat it could identify.

One small problem with Fish and Wildlife's decision: The land where the frog hadn't lived in more than 45 years had changed..............To Read More......

When 'reasonable' burdens aren't

November 27, 2018 By Gary M. Galles

While most eyes were on Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination battle, the Supreme Court opened its term by hearing Weyerhaeuser v. Fish and Wildlife Services, a property rights case with substantial implications for Americans.

The case is an appeal of a Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling for the government involving about a hundred remaining dusky gopher frogs in Mississippi. The Fish and Wildlife Service designated 1,500 acres of privately-owned land in Louisiana as critical habitat for the frog. But the frogs have not lived in Louisiana for 50 years. The location’s loblolly pines would need to be removed and replaced with longleaf pines, which require periodic burning. Yet Fish and Wildlife has decided that forcing the owner to forgo other profitable opportunities and adapt his land for the frog is “reasonable” without even conducting an environmental impact study.

The case focuses on the “reasonableness” of designating as “critical habitat” private land which is not currently suitable for the frogs but could be made so at some cost. (Essentially most ownership rights would be transferred to the frogs.) Justice Samuel Alito captured the issue well when he said, “The question is who is going to have to pay and who should pay for the preservation of this public good.”............ To Read More

My Take - Another federal agency that needs to be seriously rolled back or even better yet - eliminated!  This agency, along with the EPA, the Bureau of Land Management and other agencies  have done more to undermine Constitution rights than any reasonable person can find acceptable. 

Their actions, ignored by the Congress, promoted by almost every administration since 1960, heralded by a corrupt media, and enforced by a corrupt federal judiciary, clearly is a treasonous effort to destroy the Constitution by the leftists who've infested the federal government for over 100 years. 

Why is that so hard to grasp? 

Because it's was done slowly, and promoted to the public as being done to save the planet, and a large number of those involved are true believers failing to grasp the very real danger these agencies represent. 

Court rejects activists’ effort to over-criminalize Endangered Species Act

By Bonner Cohen, Ph. D. November 8th, 2018 1 Comment @ CFACT

“Should a motorist who accidentally ends up with an endangered insect on his windshield while driving down the highway face criminal charges?”

The Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF) posed this question in explaining a recent little-noticed but important ruling by the U.S. Ninth Circuit of Appeals. With an emphatic “no,” the court blocked an effort by WildEarth Guardians to expand prosecution under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) to include accidental harm to a threatened or endangered species.

In WildEarth Guardians v. Department of Justice, the court upheld the feds’ longstanding position that limits prosecution under the ESA to those who knowingly harm or disturb a protected species. In the parlance of the ESA, it is a crime to “knowingly” “take” a protected species. The WildEarth Guardians’ suit, by contrast, sought to require defendants to know their actions, even if purely accidental, would cause a take of a protected species.

“The case was an unprecedented attempt to force federal prosecutors to bring criminal cases they have no desire to bring,” said Jonathan Woods, a PLF attorney. PLF represented the New Mexico Cattle Growers’ Association, the New Mexico Farm and Livestock Bureau, and the New Mexico Federal Lands Council as intervenor-defendants in the case, which dates to 2013.

Not Facing Imprisonment for Accidentally Harming or Disturbing a Protected Species

By restoring the traditional interpretation of the ESA, the Ninth Circuit delivered a significant victory for PLF’s clients “and everyone else, for that matter,” Woods explained, “because they need no longer fear that they might accidentally get to close to a protected insect, spider, or rodent and face imprisonment for it.”

Readers may be surprised to learn that it was the San Francisco-based Ninth Circuit Court that handed down such a far-reaching decision, one that went against an environmental group and upheld limitations to the ESA’s prosecutorial powers. The court has long been viewed as a friendly venue for plaintiffs pursuing left-wing causes.

But in this case, the Ninth Circuit, rather than rule on the substance of the suit, decided that WildEarth Guardians lacked standing to bring their challenge because they failed to show that overturning the traditional interpretation of the law would benefit any of the environmental interests the group cited in their suit. By deciding the case on standing, however, the court, according to PLF’s Woods, “has left open the possibility that the United States could change its interpretation or future lawsuits may force it to do so.”

The Extreme Theory Underlying the Lawsuit

Woods emphasizes just how extreme the theory behind the lawsuit was. He explains:

“If the lawsuit had succeeded, you could be locked up in a penitentiary for a year and fined $100,000 if you accidentally hit a rare rodent scurrying in front of your car on a dimly lit highway. You could suffer the same fate if you accidentally disturbed the wrong insect while building a tree house for your kids. You would even commit a serious crime if, someone else having run over a rare animal in front of your house, you moved it before your kids went out to play and were disturbed by it. Simply put, the lawsuit aimed to criminalize a wide range of ordinary and innocent acts simply because the person who committed them was unlucky enough to be near a threatened or endangered species.”

While welcoming the court’s decision, Woods believes “we’d all be a little safer if it has done so in recognition that the law does not permit criminal statutes to be stretched to reach innocent activities."

Ranchers Face Wolves at the Gate

Written byJames Murphy Monday, 01 October 2018

The Diamond M ranch sits on the Kettle River in northeast Washington State, close enough to the Canadian border that a well-thrown rock might hit a range-riding Mountie and cause an international incident. It is a frontiersman’s dream: acres of prairie surrounded by wooded areas with the pristine Kettle River flowing through the middle of it. It’s an idyllic rural place where rough-hewn cowboys, who love the land as if it were family, gently tend their cattle. It hardly seems the place for a thing as dirty as a political battle.

But a bloody political battle — complete with actual death threats — is exactly what the McIrvin and Hedrick families who ranch the land are embroiled in. They are engaged with people who care little for truth and care even less for freedom. Environmentalist mobsters have targeted the family business because, sometimes, necessary action entails thinning the wolf pack in a lethal manner. And when even a single wolf is killed, environmentalists go predictably insane.

“We get a lot of death threats. My wife had to stop answering the phone,” said Len McIrvin, the patriarch of the family that runs the Diamond M. “They say it would be better if you were dead than a wolf…. Another call comes in that said, ‘If you’d like your kids to come home on the school bus, you’d better leave the wolves alone.’”..........To Read More.....

Environmental groups ignore science with grizzly bear lawsuit

by William Perry Pendley September 01, 2018

Twenty-nine years ago this month, a Montana man had a near-fatal encounter with a grizzly bear. Although he survived by killing the bear in self-defense, his almost decadelong prosecution by the federal government reverberated through the years, making Westerners fearful of responding as he did.

Using sound science, a federal agency proposed restoring sanity to this deadly situation — but radical environmental groups sued to stop the plan. As a result, in the face of a gargantuan bear population, the lives of Westerners remain at risk.

On Sept. 9, 1989, John Shuler of Dupuyer, Mont., killed a grizzly bear he encountered while tending his sheep. The federal government brushed aside his self-defense claim, charged him with violating the Endangered Species Act, and ordered him to pay an $8,000 fine.

For 8 1/2 years, federal lawyers argued he had not acted in self-defense, was at fault for exiting his home with his firearm, thus entering “the zone of imminent danger,” that, when his dog went on point on seeing the grizzly, it provoked the bear and escalated the conflict, and finally that bears are entitled to a higher standard of self-defense because they are not capable of sapient thought.........To Read More.....

My -  This was not what Congress had in mind when they passed the Endangered Species Act, and it needs to be repealed.

 

First Yellowstone-area grizzly hunt in 40 years blocked by federal judge

By Laura Zuckerman, Reuters August 30, 2018

 

A federal judge in Montana on Thursday issued a court order temporarily blocking the first trophy hunts of Yellowstone-area grizzly bears in more than 40 years, siding with native American groups and environmentalists seeking to restore the animals' protected status.

 

The 14-day restraining order by U.S. District Judge Dana Christensen in Missoula, Montana, came two days before Wyoming and Idaho were scheduled to open licensed grizzly hunts allowing as many as 23 bears in the two states to be shot and killed for sport.

 

Groups opposing the hunts had sought a restraining order while waiting for the judge to rule on the larger question of whether the federal government should return Endangered Species Act safeguards to grizzlies in the greater Yellowstone region......To Read More....

 

My Take  - Another good reason for eliminating the Endangered Species Act. 

The Extinction of Honest Science

Tony Thomas

Warmists' predictions of climate doom haven't come to pass or anything like it, but give them credit for agility and perseverance in always concocting a fresh scare. The latest meme to keep grants flowing and careers on track: the purported mass die-off of species large and small.

With no significant warming for 20 years, the climate alarmists need better scares. The temperature rise of about 0.8 degC in more than 100 years is not only non-scary, it’s been immensely beneficial for feeding the globe’s burgeoning population. Now the “extreme weather” furphy is at work, with any storm or flood attributed by Al Gore and the Climate Council to fossil fuel emissions. There’s the purported “ocean acidification” but I’m yet to see evidence that it has hurt a solitary crab, let alone a species………….

There are two handy scares still slithering around: “The Anthropocene” and “The Sixth Mass Extinction”. Both are fakes. Both are foisted on kids by green/Left educators. Both require as supposed remedies a supra-national enforcement agency run by the Left/liberal crowd, along with a roll-back of capitalist progress.

Here’s an example………… To Read More.....

My Take -One of the things those who've followed all this stuff and written about it understand: There's no scare that won't be recycled by these misanthropic misfits. Once they've gotten all the money and emotion they can out of a scare that's been debunked - they merely put it on the back burner for future use - since most will have forgotten when the last time it was used it turned out to be nothing more than a "furphy". We can blame the media who should know better and government bureaucrats who do know better.

FYI: A "furphy" is an Aussie slang word for a rumor, or an erroneous or improbable story, but usually claimed to be absolute fact". 

Trump reforms promote endangered species’ recovery

July 25, 2018 by Bonner Cohen, Ph. D., 2 Comments @ CFACT

Responding to widespread complaints that implementation of the Endangered Species Act (ESA), “was not consistent and often times very confusing to navigate,” Trump administration officials have unveiled a package of reforms crafted to make the 45-year-old statute better serve both the species it is supposed to recover and landowners caught up in the law’s cumbersome regulations.

“We are proposing these improvements to produce the best conservation results for the species while reducing the regulatory burden on the American people,” said Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) Deputy Director Greg Sheehan in a July 20 statement.

Under the ESA, rural landowners harboring threatened or endangered species (plants or animals) on their property find themselves in the bull’s eye of the statute’s sometimes severe land-use restrictions, making it difficult for affected farmers and ranchers to make a living. In effect, the ESA’s perverse incentives punish landowners for the very stewardship that attracted the endangered wildlife to their property.

Critical Habitat

Several proposed changes relate to section 4 of the ESA, which deals with procedures for listing species recovery and designating critical habitat (areas deemed essential to support the conservation of a species). First, the Interior and Commerce departments, which jointly oversee the ESA, propose to revise the procedures for designating critical habitat by reinstating the requirement that they will first evaluate areas currently occupied by the species before considering unoccupied areas. Second, the agencies propose to clarify when they may determine that unoccupied areas are essential to the conservation of a species.

The proposal dealing with unoccupied critical habitat is no doubt rooted in the case of the dusky gopher frog. FWS’s designation several years ago of 1,544 acres of forested land in St. Tammany Parish, Louisiana as critical habitat for the endangered frog has triggered a legal dispute that is now before the U.S. Supreme Court. The Louisiana land in question contains no dusky gopher frogs. In fact, the only such frogs known to exist are in neighboring Mississippi. The designation of the unoccupied Louisiana land as critical habitat has devalued the property by an estimated $20 million.

Vague language is a problem with many laws, and the ESA is no exception. The ESA defines a threatened species as one that is likely to become in danger of extinction within the “foreseeable future.” But the statute provides no definition of “foreseeable future.” For the first time, the reform proposals contain an interpretation of “foreseeable future” that makes it clear that it extends only so far that it can be reasonably be determined that both the future threats and the species’ response to those threats are probable.

In a similar vein, the administration is seeking to clear up confusion on what constitutes “destruction or adverse modification” of critical habitat. The ESA provides no definition, leaving it to regulators to apply the term as they see fit. The proposed rule simplifies and clarifies the definition by removing redundant and confusing language.

Restoring the Distinction Between Threatened and Endangered Species

Over the decades, government officials have developed different standards for listing and delisting a species. This has resulted in substantial delays in getting a recovered species removed from the endangered species list. The Trump administration seeks to have the same standard used to delist that are applied to list a species.

In a significant change of policy, the Fish and Wildlife Service is proposing to rescind its blanket rule under section 4c of the ESA, which automatically conveyed the same protections to threatened species as for endangered species. The distinction between the two categories has become blurred over the years, and the administration’s proposal would end that practice, thereby restoring the original intent of the law.

“By creating a clearer regulatory distinction between threatened and endangered species, we are also encouraging partners to invest in conservation that has the potential to improve a species’ status helping us towards our ultimate goal: recovery,” the FWS’s Sheehan said.

Accustomed to using the ESA to impose land-use restrictions across broad swathes of rural America, particularly in the West, environmental groups lost no time in blasting the administration’s proposals. “These proposals would slam a wrecking ball into the most crucial protections of our most endangered wildlife,” said Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Arizona-based Center for Biological Diversity (Washington Post July 20).

Others welcomed the change. “The modest reform proposed by the Department of Interior today could finally enable the Endangered Species Act to achieve both of its noble goals of preventing extinctions and promoting recovery of protected species,” Jonathan Wood of the Pacific Legal Foundation told the Washington Post. “Relaxing regulations as a species recovers will reward property owners for their role in that recovery, creating a necessary incentive for landowners to restore and improve endangered species’ habitat.”

As soon as the proposals are published in the Federal Register (late July), the public will have 60 days to submit comments. The final reform package is expected to go into effect by the end of the year

About the Author: Bonner Cohen, Ph. D.   

House GOP unveils package to eliminate 'frivolous' lawsuits over endangered species

by John Siciliano July 12, 2018

The House GOP unveiled a legislative package on Thursday that would enact major reforms to the Endangered Species Act, eliminating "frivolous" lawsuits over species protections while streamlining the permit process for developers and energy companies.

The reform package, called the "Endangered Species Act Modernization Package," included nine bills meant to reform the 1973 law to focus on "recovery" of threatened and endangered species, rather than keeping species listed indefinitely. 

 Natural Resources Committee Chairman Rob Bishop, R-Utah, said the Endangered Species Act, if it were a Major League Baseball player, would have a batting average below .100. "That means the Endangered Species Act is the most inept program we have in the federal government," he explained.......... To Read More.....

 

The ‘Balance of Nature’ Myth. Nature is always changing

Written by Donna Laframboise, July 5, 2018.

 SPOTLIGHT: There’s no such thing as a ‘balance of nature.’ Nature is not static

BIG PICTURE: A prominent theme of ecologist Daniel Botkin’s latest book, 25 Myths That Are Destroying the Environment, is that the natural world is more sophisticated than we imagine.

Everything is fluid. Numerous interactions are taking place at any given time. On multiple levels and in multiple directions. Between species and within species.  The belief that whales and other animals would be peachy keen if only humans weren’t around informs many conservation measures. We’re the skunk at the picnic. We disturb. We perturb. We upset a natural, intrinsic balance.  The irony of such ‘environmental’ thinking, says Botkin, is that it ignores the environment:........To Read More...

This ancient Chinese tomb held a royal, her extinct ape — and a warning

Ben Guarino

A long-forgotten species of ape has been found buried in a 2,300-year-old tomb. It's a type of gibbon, which scientists named Junzi imperialis. Gibbons are the smallest apes, chatty and as lanky-limbed as Kermit the Frog. They're also more closely related to humans than they are to any monkey. And humans, the scientists say, are the likely agents of these gibbons' extinction.............Turvey scanned the gibbon bones and sent the images to Chatterjee. With their students, the scientists began to pick apart the gibbon's features. Their analysis “revealed it to be significantly different from living gibbons,” Chatterjee said. All of these features combined, the authors say, make a strong case that the gibbon is not just a new species but a new genus. (A genus, you'll recall, ranks above a species — it's the Homo in Homo sapiens.)

Living gibbons are split into 20 species over four genera. What's more critical, in Garber's mind, is the gibbon's extinction………To Read More…..

My Take - Okay, they're predicting doom again. Thirty years has passed since Dr. Hanson told Congress and the world we had less than thirty years to fix Anthropogenic Global Warming or we were doomed. One thing we need to understand is when these "experts" spout doom and gloom it has to be taken with a grain of salt.

Rachel Carson predicted everyone was going to contract cancer due to pesticides and chemicals in general. That didn't happen either. The other thing we need to understand is extinction is the rule not the exception. Over 95% of all species that's ever lived have gone extinct. We're told the world is so biologically interconnected that the loss of one species will doom the world.  Baloney!  Name one disaster that occurred when this ape went extinct. You can't because there wasn't one.  We didn't even know it existed before this their loss was so meaningless- and yet - we're still here. For that matter, name one disaster that was ever created by the loss of any of the millions of species that's ceased to exist. You can't! Why? Because there wasn't any. Environmental disasters create extinctions. Extinctions don't create environmental disasters.

As for mankind being responsible ...... how do they know that? They don't! That's why they weasel word that position by saying humans are "likely" responsible. So why did they say that? They have no evidence. But just like Pavlov's dogs they only have preconditioned responses created by group think in that echo chamber of arrogant self righteous head nodders known as academia.

Trump’s Interior Department seeks to end abuse of migratory bird treaty Act

January 23, 2018 by Bonner Cohen, Ph. D., 1 Comment

Continuing its systematic rollback of Obama-era policies and regulations that centralized power in the hands of Washington bureaucrats and their political allies, the Trump administration is moving to bring much-needed clarity to a century-old bird-protection statute whose enforcement has vexed courts and government officials for decades.

The original Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA) of 1918 was enacted to implement the 1916 Convention with Great Britain (for Canada) for the protection of migratory birds whose flyways traverse international borders. Through amendments over the years, the MBTA now covers implementation of similar treaties between the U.S. and Mexico, the U.S. and Japan, and the U.S. and the Soviet Union (now Russia).

Administered by the Interior Department’s Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), the law makes it illegal to “pursue, hunt, take, [or] capture” any migratory bird “by any means whatever [and] at any time or any manner.”...........To Read More.....

Citizen Science Delivers “Unprecedented View” of Monarch Butterfly Parasitoids

by Entomology Today

Thanks to citizen volunteers, scientists now know more than ever about the flies that attack monarch butterfly caterpillars. Since 1999, volunteers participating in the Monarch Larva Monitoring Project have collected and raised more than 20,000 monarch eggs and caterpillars, and they've recorded incidents of those specimens being parasitized by fly larvae. They have also collected […] Read more of this post

Scientists challenge Center for Biological Diversity report claiming wild bees near extinction

Richard Levine | April 4, 2017 | Genetic Literacy Project

The headlines, even after years of often-hyperbolic reports about an impending ‘beepocalypse’ and other bee health problems, were startling. “Hundreds of North American bee species face extinction: study,” wrote Reuters. Others, like Voice of America, published similar articles. TIME Magazine even produced a video to accompany an article titled “More than 700 North American Bee Species Are Headed Toward Extinction.”

What prompted this sudden burst in journalistic angst? The articles were based on a report released by the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD) in early March, “Pollinators in Peril: A systematic status review of North American and Hawaiian native bees.” According to its solo author—Kelsey Kopec—749 North American wild bee species are in decline and almost half of them are at serious risk of extinction. The culprits? Habitat destruction, pesticide use, climate change, and urbanization. The CBD called it a comprehensive, “first-of-its-kind analysis.”.......To Read More.....