excalibur
Diamond Member
- Mar 19, 2015
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Because the Federal courts have allowed this.
The ESA is a joke and was never intended to depress economic expansion, but that is exactly what the results have been.
www.nationalreview.com
The ESA is a joke and was never intended to depress economic expansion, but that is exactly what the results have been.
The Endangered Species Act (ESA) doesnāt do a very good job at conserving endangered species. It does do a good job at providing environmental activists with a powerful tool to block construction projects they donāt like.
The economic incentives the ESA creates are exactly backward to what youād want if the goal was to conserve endangered species. The ESA says that if an endangered species is discovered on your land, you forfeit many of your property rights to the government. Because most landowners donāt want to forfeit their property rights to the government, the law in effect encourages them to destroy potential habitats for endangered species and maybe even kill endangered animals to prevent the government from discovering their presence.
The track record of the ESA is very poor. The federal government only takes credit for 71 listed species having actually recovered, which is less than 3 percent of the total number of species listed over the lawās 50+ years. But even that is probably an overestimate because other non-ESA factors can also contribute to speciesā recovery.
On the other hand, if you understand the ESA to be a tool, not for conservation, but for environmental activists, then it has been very successful. The perverse incentive it creates for landowners is paired with a perverse incentive for environmental scientists: If you can invent an endangered species, you can stop just about any major project you want.
What constitutes an endangered species is inherently a judgment call, and itās one that courts are likely to defer to scientists on, since judges donāt usually know much about biology, zoology, or ecology. So if youāre an environmentalist who wants to stop a project, send some scientists out to the area the project is taking place and try to find some species that could be considered endangered. If they can find one, the project has to stop under the ESA.
Five decades later, the New York Times has reported on one of these efforts. Soon after the ESA was passed, environmentalists used it to block construction of the Tellico Dam in Tennessee. They claimed to have found an endangered species of minnow, the snail darter, in the Little Tennessee River, and the Supreme Court ruled that the dam could not go forward.
One problem: āThere is, technically, no snail darter.ā Thatās according to Thomas Near, a Yale fish biology professor quoted by the Times. We now know this to be the case because in 2015, fish that looked like snail darters were found in a river hundreds of miles away from the Little Tennessee River. DNA analysis confirmed that the āsnail darterā was in fact the eastern population of this other type of fish, the stargazing darter, which is not endangered.
āI feel it was the first and probably the most famous example of what I would call the āconservation species concept,ā where people are going to decide a species should be distinct because it will have a downstream conservation implication,ā Near told the Times.
If this pattern sounds familiar, itās similar to the strategy often used by public-health activists and climate activists. They twist scientific findings and present a false story to the public, convincing themselves it is a noble lie in pursuit of their desired policy outcome, which they believe to be more important than the actual science.
...
The economic incentives the ESA creates are exactly backward to what youād want if the goal was to conserve endangered species. The ESA says that if an endangered species is discovered on your land, you forfeit many of your property rights to the government. Because most landowners donāt want to forfeit their property rights to the government, the law in effect encourages them to destroy potential habitats for endangered species and maybe even kill endangered animals to prevent the government from discovering their presence.
The track record of the ESA is very poor. The federal government only takes credit for 71 listed species having actually recovered, which is less than 3 percent of the total number of species listed over the lawās 50+ years. But even that is probably an overestimate because other non-ESA factors can also contribute to speciesā recovery.
On the other hand, if you understand the ESA to be a tool, not for conservation, but for environmental activists, then it has been very successful. The perverse incentive it creates for landowners is paired with a perverse incentive for environmental scientists: If you can invent an endangered species, you can stop just about any major project you want.
What constitutes an endangered species is inherently a judgment call, and itās one that courts are likely to defer to scientists on, since judges donāt usually know much about biology, zoology, or ecology. So if youāre an environmentalist who wants to stop a project, send some scientists out to the area the project is taking place and try to find some species that could be considered endangered. If they can find one, the project has to stop under the ESA.
Five decades later, the New York Times has reported on one of these efforts. Soon after the ESA was passed, environmentalists used it to block construction of the Tellico Dam in Tennessee. They claimed to have found an endangered species of minnow, the snail darter, in the Little Tennessee River, and the Supreme Court ruled that the dam could not go forward.
One problem: āThere is, technically, no snail darter.ā Thatās according to Thomas Near, a Yale fish biology professor quoted by the Times. We now know this to be the case because in 2015, fish that looked like snail darters were found in a river hundreds of miles away from the Little Tennessee River. DNA analysis confirmed that the āsnail darterā was in fact the eastern population of this other type of fish, the stargazing darter, which is not endangered.
āI feel it was the first and probably the most famous example of what I would call the āconservation species concept,ā where people are going to decide a species should be distinct because it will have a downstream conservation implication,ā Near told the Times.
If this pattern sounds familiar, itās similar to the strategy often used by public-health activists and climate activists. They twist scientific findings and present a false story to the public, convincing themselves it is a noble lie in pursuit of their desired policy outcome, which they believe to be more important than the actual science.
...
How Environmentalists Abuse the Endangered Species Act | National Review
The law gives activists enormous power if they can find ā or invent ā an endangered species.
www.nationalreview.com
