U.S. to keep Bush rule on managing polar bears

WASHINGTON — Global warming will lead to declining polar bear populations, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar acknowledged Friday, but the Interior Department will let stand a Bush administration rule that proposes to manage the threatened animals without taking into account greenhouse gases that heat the planet and threaten their sea ice habitat.

Salazar announced Friday that he'll keep in place the Bush administration rule limiting government scientists from looking at anything other than the Alaska habitat of polar bears as they develop wildlife management plans.

Environmentalists had sought a change to the rule, which effectively limited federal regulators from considering the effects of greenhouse gas emissions as they worked to address the bears' loss of habitat in Alaska.

The rule was announced last May when former Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne determined that under the Endangered Species Act, the bears are threatened. However, Kempthorne warned at the time that the Bush administration didn't want polar bears to be used as a "back door" for setting climate-change policy and issued the rule to keep greenhouse gas emissions from consideration.

On Friday, President Barack Obama's Interior Department reluctantly agreed with the Bush administration, saying it's scientifically impossible to use the Endangered Species Act to regulate the greenhouse gases that contribute to the destruction of the bears' habitat. The emissions from a cement plant in Georgia, for example, can't be tied directly to the precipitous decline of sea ice, Salazar said.

Slowing global warming by capping greenhouse gas emissions will have to be addressed with comprehensive climate-change legislation supported by the administration, said Tom Strickland, the assistant interior secretary for fish and wildlife and parks.

"On a parallel track, this administration, in contrast to (the) previous administration, is actively engaged in trying to get a comprehensive climate-change bill passed," Strickland said.

Environmentalists who've been instrumental in seeing the polar bear listed as a threatened species said they were disappointed with the decision. Obama's new administration lacked the courage to address global warming using the framework of the Endangered Species Act, said Bill Snape, a lawyer for the Center for Biological Diversity, which has an ongoing lawsuit to overturn the rule.

"It sweeps under the rug the No. 1 cause of the species decline in the first place, which is greenhouse gases from the Lower 48," Snape said.