Obama won't fight global warming with bear rules

WASHINGTON -- The Obama administration, which promised a sharp break from the Bush White House on global warming, declared Friday it would stick with a Bush-era policy against expanding protection for climate-threatened polar bears and ruled out a broad new attack on greenhouse gases.

To the dismay of environmentalists, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar refused to rescind a Bush administration rule that says actions that threaten the polar bear's survival cannot be considered when safeguarding the iconic mammal if they occur outside the bear's Arctic home.

The rule was aimed at heading off the possibility that the bear's survival could be cited by opponents of power plants and other facilities that produce carbon dioxide, a leading pollutant blamed for global warming.

The Endangered Species Act requires that a threatened or endangered species must have its habitat protected. Environmentalists say that in the case of the polar bear, the biggest threat comes from pollution — mainly carbon dioxide from faraway power plants, factories and cars — that is warming the Earth and melting Arctic sea ice.

Salazar agreed that global warming was "the single greatest threat" to the bear's survival, but disagreed that the federal law protecting animals, plants and fish should be used to address climate change.

"The Endangered Species Act is not the appropriate tool for us to deal with what is a global issue, and that is the issue of global warming," said Salazar, echoing much the same view of his Republican predecessor, Dirk Kempthorne, who had declared the polar bear officially threatened and in need of protection under the federal species law.

Kempthorne at the same time issued the "special rule" that limited the scope of the bear's protection to actions within its Arctic home.

The iconic polar bear — some 25,000 of the mammals can be found across the Arctic region from Alaska to Greenland— has become a symbol of the potential ravages of climate change. Scientists say while the bear population has more than doubled since the 1960s, as many as 15,000 could be lost in the coming decades because of the loss of Arctic sea ice, a key element of its habitat.