Issues
Northern California Judge reverses FWS decision on grouse listing. This week, U.S. District Chief Magistrate Judge Joseph Spero of San Francisco restored protections for the bi-state sage grouse in California and Nevada. The judge had previously ruled federal wildlife officials illegally denied Endangered Species Act (ESA) protection for a population of bi-state sage grouse in California and Nevada in 2015. Under this new ruling, the bird will be listed as threatened until a new review determines its status.
Until that review, more than 2,800 square miles of critical habitat along the Sierra eastern front will be under a protected designation, another reinstatement of Judge Spero’s doing. The latest order follows Spero’s ruling last spring in which he agreed with a coalition of environmental groups that the service’s decision on the bi-state population was “arbitrary and capricious”.
The lawsuit filed two years ago by four environmental groups specifically challenged Fish and Wildlife’s decision to withdraw its October 2013 proposal to list the bi-state population as “threatened” under ESA. That decision, issued in April 2015, also involved withdrawing a proposal to designate 1.8 million acres of mostly federal land as critical habitat for the bird. The groups argued that nothing had changed since 2013, when the service proposed protections due to population declines from the loss and fragmentation of habitat due to urbanization, infrastructure development, conifer tree encroachment and changing wildfire patterns.
Spero agreed with the environmental groups that Fish and Wildlife “failed to adequately explain why it reversed course and denied protection” to the bi-state population. Spero’s ruling directs Fish and Wildlife to “provide a new opportunity for public comment on the Proposed Listing and shall prepare and publish in the Federal Register a new and final listing determination on the proposed rule.” The service has until Oct. 1, 2019 to respond.
New gas project approved in Wyoming Sage Grouse habitat. On Tuesday, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) approved Jonah Energy’s 3,500-well natural gas project in Sublette County, Wyoming. The project is one of the largest to be approved on public land in Wyoming and could contribute up to $17 billion in revenue over its 40-year lifespan, according to Bureau of Land Management estimates. It is expected to spearhead an economic boon as nearly 1 million acres of federal land in Wyoming will be offered for lease to oil and gas by the end of the year, and more projects are expected to follow.
The important project has also received attention due to its location in prime Greater sage-grouse habitat in southwest Wyoming. Numerous environmental groups are now looking into options to reverse the BLM’s decision as the project will affect more than 48,000 acres of what BLM classified in Obama-era federal sage grouse conservation plans as “priority habitat management areas.” The project area also includes 27,000 acres of “winter concentration areas” that the grouse use during the snowy season.
Jonah Energy, however, has continued to go above and beyond to protect the species while supporting critical energy and economic development in the region. According to the Casper Star Tribune, “Jonah has fostered a reputation for environmental stewardship over its lifetime in Wyoming.” Brian Rutledge, director of the National Audubon Society’s Sagebrush Ecosystem Initiative, has also expressed his optimism about the bird’s preservation in the area given that Paul Ulrich, Jonah Energy’s director of government and industry regulatory affairs, is a member of the Governor’s Sage-Grouse Implementation Team and has included him in project planning efforts to avoid harming the sage-grouse and their habitat.
In the News
Republicans say Endangered Species Act no longer working, call for major makeover. USA Today. Conservative Republicans are targeting the Endangered Species Act for a major makeover, arguing that the decades-old law is a failure. Their primary piece of evidence: Of the 2,493 species listed as threatened or endangered, only 54 have ever been recovered enough to be removed from the list – a delisting success rate of less than 3 percent. “As a doctor, if I admit 100 patients to the hospital and only three recover enough under my treatment to be discharged, Governor, I would deserve to lose my medical license with numbers like that,” said Sen. John Barrasso, of Wyoming, at a recent hearing on proposed reform legislation he drafted. The Republican lawmaker is a doctor. Democrats and environmental groups look at the law, passed in 1973 under a GOP president, and see a different picture. “They define success as delisting,” said Derek Goldman, with the Endangered Species Coalition that includes more than 400 national, state and local environmental and conservation groups. Instead, he said, the key statistic is 99 – the percentage of species listed under the law that have been saved from extinction. Work continues in both the House, under the leadership of House Natural Resources Chairman Rob Bishop of Utah, and the Senate to promote reasonable and measured changes to the law.
How Trump’s legal woes may alter enviro, energy issues. E&E News, (Sub req’d). Political fallout from President Trump’s mounting legal troubles is reverberating in Congress, with Democrats and Republicans jostling over how it will affect the ongoing Supreme Court battle, spending fights and the midterm elections. It is too soon to know whether this week’s guilty plea by former Trump attorney Michael Cohen and the federal convictions of former campaign manager Paul Manafort will turn GOP fortunes. Another possibility, as has often been the case in the Trump era, is that the latest political storm will pass while Republicans, who control all of government, press their agenda with Democrats having few options to halt it. Almost immediately, Senate Democrats used the legal woes to push back against Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, and call for at least slowing his confirmation process. Any delay in seating Kavanaugh to the bench would have an immediate impact for the environmental community. The first case the high court will consider when it convenes on Oct. 1 is its first review of the Endangered Species Act in nearly a decade.
US government failing to provide recovery plans for some endangered species. Nature. The number of endangered species that the United States government has no recovery plans for has grown steadily over the past decade, according to an analysis published this month in Conservation Letters1. The plans detail the specific threats against a species as well as the ‘nuts and bolts’ strategies that will help the species recover. They are also mandated under the Endangered Species Act, the country’s key conservation law. Researchers used publicly available data from the US Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service, the agencies tasked with developing recovery plans, to determine how many species lacked such safeguards and how that has changed since 1978. They found that of 1,548 species eligible for a plan, 24.5% were currently still without. Furthermore, the analysis showed that the number of recovery plans has always lagged behind the number of species listed, but that the gap between the two has widened since 2009, when the rate of species listings increased (See ‘Endangered Plans’). “There isn’t enough funding for the services to close that gap,” says lead author Jacob Malcom, a conservation biologist at the Defenders of Wildlife in Washington DC. And without the plans, he says, people won’t know what threatens a species and may be unwittingly preventing their recovery.
Armed Services’ climate focus will be different with Inhofe. E&E News, (Sub req’d). Inhofe is now widely expected to succeed McCain as Senate Armed Services Committee chairman, a perch that gives him oversight of all Pentagon energy and environmental policies. The military has long been one of the world’s largest consumers of oil, propelling its jet planes and powering military bases around the globe. Although Inhofe and McCain might have long-standing political ties and records as military hawks, there are notable breaks in how the senators have approached energy and environmental issues facing the Defense Department. And like their onetime campaign flight, their arguments over those topics could get heated. McCain and Inhofe also broke over a push by conservatives to attach provisions to this year’s defense bill that would have prevented the sage grouse and prairie chicken from being listed under the Endangered Species Act for 10 years and would have delisted the American burying beetle. McCain’s opposition was seen as crucial to the ESA provisions being dropped from the final bill, despite House support. Inhofe said it would be up to the committee to decide whether the same language would be proposed next year, but his support makes it more likely than not it would stay in.
