Tales from the Arctic and Obama’s Polar Bear Decision
Posted May 12, 2009 in Saving Wildlife and Wild Places, Solving Global Warming
Last Friday, two intrepid explorers finished their trek across some of Greenland's most remote territory. The travelers, Larry Lunt, a member of NRDC's Global Leadership Council, and Alain Hubert, the founder of the International Polar Foundation, set out on this expedition not only for the time-honored reasons of adventure and challenge, but also to draw attention to how much the Arctic is already transformed by global warming.
Read their dispatches and trace their journey at OnEarth Magazine's site.
I deeply admire Larry and Alain's fortitude. Like the vast majority of the world's population, I have never been to Greenland myself. But I've come close. Last summer, as a member of the Aspen Institute's Commission on Arctic Climate Change I got to travel by boat through the Arctic Ocean east of Greenland.
I was struck by what a profoundly harsh environment it is. It is a world of white, steel gray and blue, with very little of the familiar green plant life that orients us humans. Yet the Svalbard archipelago I circled has long been a jumping off point for polar exploration. We met a man who was trying to kayak to the North Pole, and I had newfound admiration for the conditions these explorers endure.
That is what Larry and Alain faced in order to tell the story of Arctic melt, and I am deeply grateful. Yet as they join the ranks of illustrious polar explorers, they are facing a dramatically new terrain.
A few years ago, I spoke at the Explorers' Club in New York City, and I saw the dog sledge that Admiral Peary used to cross the frozen ice on his way to the North Pole 100 years ago. Today, thanks to global warming, he would need a boat to get there.
Why We Need Arctic Dispatches
A monumental and potentially catastrophic change is happening in the North, and yet most of us have no idea what it looks like or what it means for our lives down here. Larry and Alain are helping bring that back home to us.
We need to hear what they have to say now more than ever. Decisions are being made today that simultaneously set the course for the Arctic's future yet ignore the reality of the Arctic present.
Just look at the Obama administration's decision last week to retain a controversial Bush-era ruling related to protecting polar bears under the Endangered Species Act. The ruling means that federal agencies must exclude the effects of global warming pollution on polar bears when there are drafting their protection plans. Yet government scientists agree that global warming is a primary threat to these bears!
Working to Prevent an Arctic Gold Rush
It is because of this kind of dissonance in decision making that the Aspen Institute convened the Commission on Arctic Climate Change. The commission is trying to create a conservation and governance structure for the region as a whole.
We need a comprehensive approach, especially since eight different nations have Arctic territory, and each one of them is eager to lay claim to the oil, gas, fish, and shipping routes that have been uncovered by global warming's melting ice.
To protect the increasingly fragile Arctic environment, the Aspen Commission is looking at three issues:
- Protecting the living resources, including the fish and wildlife
- Establishing criteria for industrial activity
- Identifying what kind of governance regime will work best
This past spring, Dr. Gro Harlem Bruntland joined the commission. I met Bruntland at the international climate negotiations in Bali last year, and I have great respect for her. She was the Special Envoy on Climate Change to the United Nations Secretary General and the former Norwegian Prime Minister. I am confident she can help integrate the latest climate science with real-world governance.
I just hope we put these better management plans in place as soon as possible. If we don't, the explorers who follow in Larry and Alain path will confront a terribly altered Arctic environment.
Comments are closed for this post.
Comments
Jason Scotts — May 13 2009 09:33 AM
I trust the tragic decision to maintain the Bush era regulation on polar bears will now force the NRDC to stop "coddling" the Obama administration and realize that like the previous gang that ruled for the last 8 years that only the mighty American dollar matters.. Remember that great line from The Who: "Meet the new boss; same as the Old Boss". Let's call out the Obama Administration and their sorry record to date on the environment.
Informed Lawyer — May 19 2009 04:16 PM
I met Gro Harlem Bruntland at a New York Bar Association function 5 years ago.
Her ego was quite large, as was her definition of 'sustainable development'. I was more annoyed than impressed by her.
Perhaps the Obama administration is being pragmatic about the 'specter' of global warming which looms much larger than the science justifying all of the rhetoric surrounding it.
Reality knocks, however. Economics makes the world go round, and also conserves nature. Too bad, you greenies don't see the light.
ITSSD: Americans' Constitutional Rights Will Be Trampled Unless Congress Convenes Public Hearings on the UN Law of the Sea Convention
PRINCETON, N.J., May 5 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- In a new article appearing within the forthcoming issue of the Santa Clara Journal of International Law entitled, What Goes Around, Comes Around: How UNCLOS Ratification Will Herald Europe's Precautionary Principle as US Law, international attorney Lawrence Kogan calls upon all Americans to immediately exercise their constitutionally guaranteed 'right to know'. This article identifies the multiple pathways through which global environmental extremists, US trans-nationalists, and the 111th Congressional supermajority seek to use the highly complex United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) as a loading platform from which to import into the American heartland very harmful UN and European-anchored environmental treaty and customary international law rules. "Unless the public demands due process of law from their congressional representatives," emphasized Kogan, "such rules, resembling rogue waves, will collectively override US sovereignty and the supremacy of the US Constitution and its accompanying Bill of Rights".
According to Kogan, "The US Navy continues to publicly deny the likely adverse consequences of the more than 45 plus environmental UNCLOS articles, regulations, protocols and annexes that implicitly and explicitly incorporate Europe's Precautionary Principle. This principle is known not only to raise indirect taxes and to threaten American free enterprise by chilling investments in technological innovations, reducing economic activity and increasing product manufacturing, processing and distribution costs and service fees, but to also severely impact military planning. Indeed, since, at least the late 1990's, foreign governments and environmental activist groups have invoked this controversial European legal nostrum to block US commercial activity, to curtail the Navy's ability to train offshore with sonar equipment, and to impair the timely US naval exercise of customary international law rights to freedom of navigation and innocent passage, both on the high seas and in territorial waters and at the north and south poles."
"Meanwhile," notes Kogan, "there are 'environmentally-enlightened' congressional committee chairs and ranking members who appear to be enamored with the legislative and associated regulatory powers derived from Europe's political civil law Precautionary Principle, especially those who hail from the coastal States of Alaska, California, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York. They are busily preparing amendments to a host of US federal environmental, chemical and energy statutes that would expressly incorporate said principle as US law from within our own borders and thereby obviate the need for special US legislation to implement the UNCLOS' land and air-based pollution provisions. For example, these amended statutes, the new carbon cap-and-trade regime currently under development and the proposal for a new federal oceans policy are designed to achieve regulatory harmonization with socialist Europe. Their effect is to attenuate and subjugate US constitutionally guaranteed individual rights, including private property, to global communal interests. In addition to raising the cost of living for all Americans, they would also create disguised environmental trade barriers that are likely to injure and trigger retaliation from US trading partners, all at a time when the US is suffering from a deep financial crisis."
It has been observed that the Obama administration is paying lip service to ensuring Americans greater public transparency and a higher standard of governmental ethics than had its predecessors, even as it devises how to exploit the opaque federal administrative regulatory process to enshrine Europe's Precautionary Principle as US law. Perhaps, this explains why it has yet to 'walk the talk' to move those congressional committees possessing oversight jurisdiction concerning the UNCLOS' environmental, economic and tribunal components to hold open public hearings, prior to ratification, that substantively discuss their impact on the US economy, US national security, US constitutional rights and US sovereignty. If, however, 'change' is in the air as this administration insists, then nothing less than full disclosure will make it authentic.
The Institute for Trade, Standards and Sustainable Development (ITSSD) is a non-partisan non-profit international legal research and educational organization that examines international law relating to trade, industry and positive sustainable development around the world. An annotated version of this press release is accessible at: http://itssd.org/news.html . The full law review article is accessible at: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1356837 .
Phone: 609-658-7417 Fax: 609-897-9598 Email: info@itssd.org Website: www.itssd.org
SOURCE Institute for Trade, Standards, and Sustainable Development