By Alan Caruba Friday, January 24, 2014
Editor's Note: My friend Alan passed in 2015 at age 77. Alan was a prolific writer and a generous writer allowing me to publish his work, which had a timelessness to it, and after all these years people are still hitting his Warming Signs blog articles. He would be pleased. Here's one of them. RK
By Alan
Caruba
David W.
Snook, 57, of Bridgewater, New Jersey died on Wednesday, January 15, when two
deer leaped into the path of his Dodge Ram on Route 206. One of them was
airborne when it smashed through the front windshield, striking him before
exiting out the rear window. This caused the truck to veer into the guard rail
and come to rest in a ravine.
In 2012,
the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection estimated that the Garden
State was home to 110,000 deer. Each year about 35,000 are killed in hunts and
those of us who live here owe the hunters a debt of gratitude. In my county of
Essex, home to Newark, the freeholders regularly hire hunters to cull the herd
that shares its home with one of the most densely populated counties in the
state.
Need it be
said that the animal rights crowd is always upset about this. New Jersey also
has a fairly sizeable bear population and during the hunting season, between
250 and 450 are “harvested” as the Fish and Game agency calls it. They have
been found in all 21 counties of the state. And state officials now estimate
that there are more coyotes in New Jersey than bears.
Suffice to
say New Jersey’s animals are not suffering from a decline in species, nor
facing extinction any time soon. My guess—and it’s only a guess—is that this is
true nationwide. However, to justify one of the dumbest laws ever passed, the
Endangered Species Act, some 1,500 species are classified with fuzzy
definitions of being “threatened”, “endangered” or “recovered.”
The Act
was signed into law in 1973 by Richard Nixon, who also gifted us with the
Environmental Protection Agency, currently doing everything in its power to
destroy the coal industry and plants that use it to generate electricity. They
claim that the carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are a threat to the climate, but
ignore the many other natural sources of CO2, including all seven billion
humans that exhale six pounds of it a day. And that all species would die
without CO2 maintaining all the vegetation on Earth.
What is
never mentioned is that species extinction has been around as long as there
have been species. It was not CO2 that killed the dinosaurs and 75% of other
species that had dominated the Earth for 180 million years and there were no
humans around to blame for the Great Permian Extinction when more than 90% of
all life on Earth disappeared—animals, plants, trees, fish, and even algae.
Most geological eras have come to a close with calamitous events.
In
December 2013, the Obama administration granted industrial wind farm operators
a 30-year permit to kill legally protected bald eagles and golden eagles
without being subject to legal repercussions. Wind energy has killed 1.4
million birds and bats every year, including those regarded and protected as
threatened such as California condors, bald eagles, and Indiana bats.
Apparently, if you are producing 1% percent or so of electricity, it’s okay to
kill these creatures. Meanwhile everyone else pays higher electricity bills.
The dirty
little secret about the Endangered Species Act is that environmentalists have
used it for years to deter all manner of economic development by claiming some
fish or other creature was endangered if you built a hospital, new homes, or in
the case of the dunes sagebrush lizard which lives in the West Texas and
Southeast New Mexico Permian Basic when oil companies want to explore and
extract this energy resource that will generate jobs and huge tax revenues to
help reduce the national debt.
It is
insanity to think humans can or should do anything to “save” various species.
The most dramatic and tragic evidence of this has been the twenty-year effort
to “save” the northern spotted owl. The result was to close millions of acres
of federal forests in the Northwest from logging, devastating the once flourishing
timber industry.
In July
2011, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced that it would permit the
killing of barred owls believed to be killing the spotted owls. The sawmills
that once thrived are mostly gone, along with their jobs, and revenue. The
forests are overgrown and are immense fire traps. And the Fish and Wildlife
Service thinks that spending $127 million might restore the spotted owl
population over the next 30 years.
This kind
of stupidity is criminal.
How
effective has the Endangered Species Act been? As it enters its 41st
year it has “recovered” less than 2% of the approximately 2,100 species listed
as endangered or threatened since 1973. A December 17 Wall Street Journal
article reported that “it has endangered the economic health of many
communities and created a cottage industry of litigation that does more to
enrich environmental activist groups” that pays their salaries.
The
Endangered Species Act is a huge failure. It should be repealed, but don’t
expect Congress to do anything that sensible.
© Alan
Caruba, 2014
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