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Lawmakers, Lobbyists and the Administration Join Forces To Overhaul the Endangered Species Act (nytimes.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: The Endangered Species Act, which for 45 years has safeguarded fragile wildlife while blocking ranching, logging and oil drilling on protected habitats, is coming under attack from lawmakers, the White House and industry on a scale not seen in decades, driven partly by fears that the Republicans will lose ground in November's midterm elections. In the past two weeks, more than two dozen pieces of legislation, policy initiatives and amendments designed to weaken the law have been either introduced or voted on in Congress or proposed by the Trump administration.
The actions included a bill to strip protections from the gray wolf in Wyoming and along the western Great Lakes; a plan to keep the sage grouse, a chicken-size bird that inhabits millions of oil-rich acres in the West, from being listed as endangered for the next decade; and a measure to remove from the endangered list the American burying beetle, an orange-flecked insect that has long been the bane of oil companies that would like to drill on the land where it lives. [...] The new push to undo the wildlife protection law comes as Republicans control the White House and both chambers of Congress, and is led by a president who has made deregulation -- the loosening of not only environmental protections but banking rules, car fuel efficiency standards and fair housing enforcement -- a centerpiece of his administration.
The actions included a bill to strip protections from the gray wolf in Wyoming and along the western Great Lakes; a plan to keep the sage grouse, a chicken-size bird that inhabits millions of oil-rich acres in the West, from being listed as endangered for the next decade; and a measure to remove from the endangered list the American burying beetle, an orange-flecked insect that has long been the bane of oil companies that would like to drill on the land where it lives. [...] The new push to undo the wildlife protection law comes as Republicans control the White House and both chambers of Congress, and is led by a president who has made deregulation -- the loosening of not only environmental protections but banking rules, car fuel efficiency standards and fair housing enforcement -- a centerpiece of his administration.
Stupid Reps. Go find your own planet to destroy, but leave mine alone.
-- Cheers!
The word your looking for is "gut".
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I read this and I just can't forget the Leonard Cohen song:
Take the only tree that's left. Shove it up the hole in your culture.
I don't know what else to say, except to point out that when they say "this will create jobs" what it really means is that some large corporate interests will make billions ravaging without any restraint the already-stressed ecosystem and some minor percentage of it will be paid out to workers with the least amount of benefits they can manage and no job security.
So a beetle is gone. Who cares it was totally totally worth it.
Craftsmen's children die of bad water, we don't have to cover the worthless takers health care!
Win-win.
conservation status is "least concern" and they're in europe and asia besides the USA.
great grouse, threatened or near threaten, okay lets watch out for that one.
but the burying beetle? world can live without it, we have 2 million or maybe 30 million species of bugs in this world, losing that one won't matter (and we're not going to lose it anyway, even with drilling, the land area its on is huge)
fucking over this country every chance they get.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
Everything you need to know about the state of the union, right there.
You are welcome on my lawn.
As written, the current endangered species laws promote "shoot and shovel" over actually protecting endangered species. Assume a farmer runs a family farm that has been in the family for generations and finds out that some endangered species of minnow is living in the pond that has been used to irrigate this farm for 100+ years. If a wildlife official ever learned of that minnow in that pond that farm is history since they will no longer be allowed to operate in any way that could endanger the lives of a handful of small fish. The farmer has every incentive to kill those fish as soon as possible before anyone else learns of their existence.
Or assume you own a few acres of woodland next to a thriving suburb and are going to subdivide it and build a small housing development. Partway through the process of clearing the land and paving sidewalks and cul-de-sacs you discover owl pellets from an endangered owl species you've never heard of. If the wildlife officials learn of this bird nest you're done with your development project and are out the tens/hundreds of thousands of dollars you've already spent. If that nest were to disappear before anyone official learns of its existence you're free to build and sell the 20 houses you originally planned.
You people seem to assume that this act's list of endangered species actually is built upon sound science.
So a review of this is certainly a good idea.
That being said, we all know what interests drive this so I don't expect a sensible outcome either...
So, that's why the northern white rhino has been hunted to near extinction? As a recent example....
HOWEVER, from a purely ECONOMIC perspective, privatization and the legalization of trophy hunting does MORE to protect endangered species than the current laws.
This is an old claim by libertarians, but it fails as soon as it contacts reality. First, it only can work for animals that have a direct local economic benefit. It does nothing to protect something like the American burying beetle mentioned in the article. Secondly, while there may be mechanisms of self-interest that coincide with protecting animals if they are all privately owned, those very same mechanisms also hold for companies - and yet, a large number of private companies fail every year.
Stephan
Except when it didn't for all those species that died off.
This is the result of poachers.
Not Dentists paying $50k for a Trophy Hunt.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Because "everything is political" and /. editors are pushing left-wing politics all the time.
This is a science and technology oriented website. The current Republican party has been pushing many anti-science and anti-environmentalism agendas. Perhaps you should stick with Faux News, if all you want to hear is how killing off the last of a species is going to create tons of jobs and put 'merica back on the path to WINNING.
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DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.