Link Banana

The much awaited and debated decision was finally made, but because this is still the George W. Bush administration, no action will be permitted to actually protect the animals.

But in both cases, the Bush administration has parried this legal thrust, saying it had no obligation to address or try to mitigate the cause of the species’ decline — warming waters, in the case of the corals, or melting sea ice, in the case of the bears — or the greenhouse-gas emissions from cars, trucks, refineries, factories and power plants that contribute to both conditions.

You know that one about why don’t polar bears eat penguins? And how it can’t happen because they live on different poles? If The Weekly Standard’s Michael Goldfarb gets his way, that anecdote may not be so clever. And we may have some sad polar bears.

Assuming the threat to the bears from climate change is real, and that the computer models are to be believed, there may be a less costly solution. The warming of the last century has had no real effect on the ice floes of the Antarctic. In fact, the Antarctic Ocean appears to have become more favorable to the formation of sea ice over the last 30 years. Could the polar bear be relocated? In Antarctica, Rigor says, “the polar bear would have the issue where most of the sea ice is seasonal, so [with] the big retreat of Antarctic sea ice during the summer, the only place where polar bears could go is onto the Antarctic ice sheet, which probably isn’t the happiest place to be.”

Can a polar bear’s happiness really be allowed to impede the future intercourse of mankind and the commerce of distant nations?

(via Slate)