Energy: The green light given by the Fish and Wildlife Service for oil drilling off Alaska is being portrayed as an OK to hurt polar bears. But there are so many polar bears, it's the drillers who should worry.

Environmentalists rejoiced last month when Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne declared the polar bear endangered. The designation gave them a poster pet for the dangers of global warming and a club to bludgeon oil companies.

Last week, however, there was a break in the ice, so to speak. New Fish and Wildlife regulations gave legal protection to seven oil companies that plan to search for oil in the Chukchi Sea off Alaska's northwest coast if "small numbers" of polar bears and Pacific walruses are incidentally harmed over the next five years.

The Associated Press went ballistic, proclaiming that less than a month after the polar bear was listed as endangered, "the Bush administration is giving oil companies permission to annoy and potentially harm them in the pursuit of oil and natural gas."

What the administration is doing is honoring contracts signed in February, before the polar bear was listed — wrongly, we believe — as endangered. Fact is, polar bears aren't endangered, either by oil companies or climate change.

When he made the listing, Kempthorne noted that exploration in the Chukchi Sea was exempt. "Polar bears are already protected under the Marine Mammal Protection Act," he explained, "which has more stringent protections for polar bears than the Endangered Species Act does."

Listing the polar bear as endangered was a political decision made under political pressure.

The Mineral Management Service estimates we could recover 15 billion barrels of oil plus 76 trillion cubic feet of natural gas from the Chukchi Sea's 29.7 million acres. Oil companies enjoyed a similar exclusion in the Chukchi from 1991 to 1996 and in the Beaufort Sea since 1993 with no effect on the bears.

In fact, there's no proof of a single bear being harmed by oil operations in Alaska since 1993. Since 1960, when the Alaska oil hunt began, only two oil-related bear fatalities have been documented.

The world polar bear population is at a modern high and growing. Mitch Taylor, polar bear biologist with the Government of Nunavut, a territory in Canada, puts the current population at 24,000, up 40% since 1974. Some 2,000 of these bears live in and around the Chukchi Sea, where the oil companies purchased leases worth $2.6 billion in February.

Taylor says that, contrary to greenie hype, climate change, particularly in the Arctic, is not pushing them to the brink of extinction. They have and will continue to adapt to their environment.

The ice-loving bears have survived warmer periods than we are experiencing now. The most recent such period occurred 6,000 and 9,000 years ago, and it was even warmer between 110,000 and 130,000 years ago, long before the first SUV hit the road.

In a report to Fish and Wildlife, Taylor stated: "No evidence exists that suggests that both bears and the conservation systems that regulate them will not adapt and respond to the new conditions." Taylor stressed polar bears' adaptability, saying they evolved from grizzlies 250,000 years ago and as a distinct species about 125,000 years ago when natural climate change occurred.

From caribou that have thrived for 30 years as 15 billion barrels have been pumped from Prudhoe Bay in Alaska to marine life thriving among drilling platforms that act like artificial reefs off the Louisiana, evidence says oil exploration and the environment can coexist. Katrina ravaged Gulf of Mexico oil facilities and not a single drop of oil was leaked or spilled.

Oil companies are criticized for not using their "obscene" profits to find more oil but then attacked when they want to. Lift the polar bear's endangered status. Drill in the Chukchi. Drill now.  Source

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