The Endangered Species Act Reduces Housing

From Alex Tabarrok.

"Max Tabarrok’s paper on the Endangered Species Act and housing (WP) has just been published in the Journal of Public Economics! It’s a clever paper: Max observed that the moment an animal is put on the endangered species list, developers face enhanced compliance costs and liability risk. But what’s important for an empirical economist is that this increased regulation isn’t national–it binds just where the species lives. Thus, the ESA creates many natural experiments, places where it binds and nearby places where it doesn’t and the list changes over time–there were 82 listings in 1970 and nearly 1500 today–and there are even some de-listings which reduce regulation.

Here, for example, is a picture of the habitat (red) and control areas (blue) for when the Northern Long Eared Bat was put on the endangered species list.

 

The bottom left panel measures annual housing permits per 1000 1980 pop in treatment (red) versus control (blue) areas. The bottom right is the event study coefficients. After the bat was put on the endangered species list, the number of new housing permits declined in areas where bats might live relative to control areas.

Here is what happened when the Peregrine falcon was delisted. Before the delisting, housing permits were lower in regions (red) where the falcon had habitat compared to controls areas but after the delisting the treatment areas caught up to the control areas.

 

Overall:

…this paper provides evidence that an additional endangered species listing reduces annual housing permit flows by 0.5 permits per thousand 1980 residents, about 10% of the average place’s permit flow. Accounting for spillovers and diminishing costs, my estimates suggest the aggregate effect of the ESA has been to reduce the national housing stock by…roughly 6.3 million missing units over 1980–2024, about 4% of the 2025 housing stock.

Now, you might say, ok this shows the ESA has costs. What about the benefits of the ESA? It’s hard to measure the benefits, of course, or even know if the ESA is effective. But Max shows using satellite data that there are quite a few places where the ESA binds on infill development.

…at the intensive margin of housing production, new developments are often replacing existing buildings or are filling in space in a highly developed area that could not host endangered species even if no new construction took place. On the intensive margin, the tradeoff with species protection does not bind, and may even be positive sum as it substitutes for less dense greenfield development. Therefore, whether and how much the ESA constrains development on the extensive vs intensive margin is relevant to the tradeoffs we face between housing production and species protection, and thus is relevant to the aggregate welfare effects of the law.

In this section I extend the main empirical specification of the paper to satellite data on land use from the National Land Cover Database (NLCD) (Multi-Resolution Land Characteristics Consortium, 2025) and to heterogeneity within the Building Permits Survey to assess where the effects of the Endangered Species Act are accruing.

The NLCD is a set of satellite images of the United States compiled and pre-classified by the U.S. Geological Survey. They classify 30-square-meter pixels into one of fifteen land use groups, including four levels of development, three types of forest, and two types of wetland. The NLCD has annual files going back to 1985. I overlap these pixels with the map of permit-issuing places in the BPS using constant 2024 borders, and track the changes to pixels within each place over time. The hazard rate of extensive margin or greenfield development is measured by the flow of non-developed pixels (e.g., forests or wetlands) into any of the four levels of developed land use, divided by the total area of greenfield land use.

He concludes:

The most urbanized 15% of places are responsible for 90% of total permit flows, while the highest-value endangered species habitat is well outside these developed areas. The Endangered Species Act seems to restrict infill development in these dense areas as much as it restricts greenfield development in exurban sprawl (Table 9, Table 10, Table 11). Relaxing the legal mechanism of the Endangered Species Act in already developed areas may increase permit flows in dense, energy- and land-efficient cities in California and on the East Coast at the expense of sprawling suburbs in the Sun Belt, increasing both housing supply and endangered species habitat.

The Trump administration is trying to limit the ESA, multiple lawsuits have already been filed. Max’s paper is thus timely and it points to a fix that might satisfy housing proponents and environmentalists: relax the ESA’s bite on infill and redevelopment in already-built-up areas, where the housing-versus-habitat tradeoff barely binds, rather than across the board.

Addendum: Obviously, I am pleased as punch to see this paper in print. Max began writing the paper before graduate school–he has only just finished his first year. He was fortunate to have had lots of great advice along the way, most notably from a superb pre-doc he did at Dartmouth under the auspices of Heidi Williams."

Polar Bears, Dead Coral and Other Climate Fictions

Activists’ tales of doom never pan out, but they leave us poorly informed and feed bad policy

By Bjorn Lomborg. Excerpts:

"Over the past 20 years, climate activists have elevated various stories of climate catastrophe, then quietly dropped them without apology when the opposing evidence becomes overwhelming."

"in the 2010s, campaigners stopped talking about them. After years of misrepresentation, it finally became impossible to ignore the mountain of evidence showing that the global polar-bear population has increased substantially. Whatever negative effect climate change had was swamped by the reduction in hunting of polar bears. The population has risen from around 12,000 in the 1960s to about 26,000."

"For the past three years the Great Barrier Reef has had more coral cover than at any point since records began in 1986, with 2024 setting a new record."

"About a month ago, the New York Times finally shared what it called “surprising” climate news: Almost all atoll islands are stable or increasing in size. In fact, scientific literature has documented this for more than a decade. While rising sea levels do erode land, additional sand from old coral is washed up on low-lying shores. Extensive studies have long shown this accretion is stronger than climate-caused erosion"

"While extreme heat kills nearly 6,000 Americans each year, cold kills 152,000, of which 12,000 die from extreme cold. Even including deaths from moderate heat, the toll comes to less than 10,000. Despite rising temperatures, age-standardized extreme-heat deaths have actually declined in the U.S. by almost 10% a decade and globally by even more, largely because the world is growing more prosperous. That allows more people to afford air-conditioners and other technology that protects them from the heat."

"politicians across the world are now spending more than $2 trillion annually—far more than the estimated cost from climate change that these policies prevent each year."

Engineering contributed to the increased frequency and severity of floods on the Mississippi as well as environmental damage

See ‘The Great River’ Review: Taming the Mighty Mississippi: Engineers have tried—with varying degrees of success—to reshape the river to human needs by Gerard Helferich. Excerpt:

"Today’s Mississippi is a human creation, engineered from source to mouth. Despite such Herculean effort, the frequency and severity of floods have worsened over the past century. The engineering is a major contributor, since levees direct more and faster-moving water downstream. As the average amount of yearly rainfall flowing in the Mississippi increases over time, and as more land along the river is paved (creating more runoff), it is “slowly becoming a river that our levees cannot contain,” Mr. Upholt warns. He also catalogs the environmental damage caused by our attempts to shape the river, including flooded forests and disappearing animal species. Meanwhile, New Orleans continues to sink, and the river’s delta, spreading south of the city, loses 800,000 square feet of wetland every day in the face of rising sea levels."

Private landowners make better conservationists

By Matt Ridley.

"The Duke of Norfolk is best known for presiding over the coronation as hereditary Earl Marshall, but what really gets him excited is a native farmland bird, the grey partridge. Nearly 20 years ago he was appalled to learn from the veteran ecologist Dick Potts that the species was down to its last three pairs on his estate in Sussex and about to go extinct.

He decided to do something about it. Today the Peppering estate has around 300 pairs of partridges as well as corn buntings, lapwings, rare butterflies, long lost cornfield flowers and other wildlife. Last year the duke brought curlew eggs south from the Pennines and hatched them off to try to re-establish the species on the South Downs.

This story is told in a charming new book “Return of the Grey Partridge” by Roger Morgan-Grenville and “Eddie” Norfolk, and is an example of a new trend for private landowners to do pioneering conservation work on a scale that often dwarfs and sometimes shames the wildlife conservation charities that get more media attention.

Philip Merricks is another example. He inherited a large arable farm at Elmley on the Isle of Sheppey but when it was designated as a site of special scientific interest 43 years ago because of its importance for breeding lapwings and redshank, he was offered compensation only for things he was not going to be allowed to do, rather than for doing anything positive for conservation.

He pestered the government, saying: if you want me to farm lapwings instead of corn, I can do so but you have to let me do it actively. After a lot of discussion with those who thought he should just go on farming but badly, he won support to do it his way. By digging scrapes, managing water levels, controlling crows and foxes, excluding badgers and grazing cattle at the right times, he has steadily built up the lapwing population to an astounding 350 pairs, and the redshanks to 400, alongside scores of other rare breeding birds. In May, as I can attest, Elmley is an avian Serengeti. In winter, it holds more than 25,000 wigeon and more than 100 harriers.

In 2010 independent monitors calculated that while Elmley’s lapwings were producing 1.33 chicks per pair per year, the lapwings on the neighbouring land run by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds were producing just 0.11 chicks per pair per year, not enough to replace adult deaths. One reserve was a population source, the other a population sink. Eventually, the RSPB turned the management of their patch over to Merricks.

Merricks enlisted the ornithologist Professor Ian Newton to argue that for ground-nesting birds, conventional environmental policies focused on habitat improvement but not predation control were – and still are — worse than doing nothing. They create an “ecological trap”, by luring lapwings to good habitat, where their eggs and chicks are gobbled up by crows and foxes year after year. Like Peppering, Elmley is now incubating and releasing young curlews with the hope that they will return to breed successfully.

Then there is Holkham, the estate of the Earl of Leicester in north Norfolk. Its eight miles of coast and extensive salt marshes were always a magnet for geese, ducks and wading birds. In the mid 1800s, the second earl of Leicester created a sanctuary for the geese. But when the marshes were declared a national nature reserve in 1967, a succession of government agencies took over the management and focused on passively “protecting” rather than actively encouraging the wildlife.

Frustrated by this, in 2012 Lord Leicester ended Natural England’s lease, believing his team could do a better job of managing the nature reserve themselves. The quango’s panjandrums were gobsmacked by this impertinence, arguing that the estate lacked qualified staff and would ruin the place.

Instead, under the leadership of the former gamekeeper and writer Jake Fiennes, Holkham National Nature Reserve has seen a steady increase in the number of birds both wintering and breeding. Vast and growing numbers of pink-footed geese and wigeon use the reserve in winter, as I saw in January, while in summer the numbers of breeding cormorants, herons, little egrets, marsh harriers, oystercatchers, avocets and bearded tits have all increased. They were joined in 2016 by great white egrets and in 2019 by cattle egrets. Rarest of all, the number of young spoonbills fledged on the reserve has increased from 10 in 2010 to 90 in 2023. This is their largest British breeding site.

The reserve attracts about a million visitors a year, whose car parking fees and donations help pay for the conservation work. Together with income from cattle grazing and grants, the estate has made conservation into a commercially respectable, though not lucrative, proposition.

There are two features that Leicester, Merricks and Norfolk bring to the management of their land that differ from the way wildlife trusts or the RSPB manage their reserves. The first is the scale of active intervention. These are not purist “rewilders”, who see their role as getting human beings out of the way of nature. They dig scrapes, plant hedges, graze cattle, alter water levels, sow crops for pollinators and bird feed, and generally interfere. So do some NGO conservation charities but usually with less determination and enthusiasm.

The second difference is the scale of predator control. Again some NGOs do this but usually with reluctance and they try not to talk about it. Private-sector conservationists, by contrast, work day and night during the spring and early summer to rid their land of as many crows, foxes, stoats and rats as possible, knowing that anything less than zero tolerance is disastrous for ground-nesting birds. Predator control would probably not be necessary if Britain was a pristine wilderness, but in a world where human activity subsidises these animals it is vital. The five gamekeepers at Peppering, for instance, have a target to kill 200 rats each during the spring, and it is a Sisyphean task.

Not all landowners are so green-tinged, but nor are these the only aristocrats doing private conservation. A healthy rivalry is driving others to keep up with the Howards. The Duke of Northumberland’s fields between Alnwick and the coast are now swarming with partridges, finches, buntings, larks, thrushes, barn owls and hares, even in winter. In Dorset, Viscount Cranborne counts the corn buntings and turtle doves thriving alongside his growing population of partridges.

In the Pennines, we grouse moor owners produce healthy surpluses every year of some of the country’s rarest birds: merlins, curlews, dunlins, golden plover and black grouse among others. These species are absent or very rare on hills that are not managed for grouse shooting: most of the Lake District and Wales for example. In Wensleydale Lord Bolton has become a passionate champion of the curlew, organising events for the public to see and hear the hundreds of pairs that nest on his moor.

Some conservationists complain that birds of prey are not so welcome on these moors, but this is increasingly out of date. In the past ten years the number of fledged hen harrier chicks in England has gone from zero to 141 and most of these were born on grouse moors. In Nidderdale, the Earl of Swinton welcomes visitors to a special hide to photograph roosting hen harriers. Managing the numbers of these birds before they destroy the very system that enables them to thrive is now an urgent issue.

The contrast between these moors and those owned by the RSPB has not gone unnoticed. In his book Moorland Matters, Ian Coghill, former chairman of the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust, lambasts the RSPB for its management of Lake Vyrnwy, a Welsh moor that was once thick with curlew, merlin and black grouse but where all three species are now teetering on the brink of extinction. Coghill points out that the very failure of these birds to thrive is then effectively weaponised by the society in its fund-raising. In asking for £3,299,900 from the heritage Lottery Fund, the RSPB threatened that without the money “curlew, black grouse and merlin will cease to appear as a breeding species in this area of Wales”.

Of course, there is one big difference between privately run conservation projects and those run by NGOs: many of the private-sector conservationists also like to shoot birds. The Duke of Norfolk makes no secret that one of his motives in restoring the grey partridge was to generate a surplus of birds that could then be shot for sport.

Likewise, most Pennine moor owners are only “curlew farming” (as the BBC presenter Chris Packham derisively puts it) as a byproduct of encouraging red grouse to shoot. Yet the red grouse is Britain’s most unique bird and conserving it, at private expense, to the point of abundance is in itself a triumph of active conservation.

Private landowners own vastly more acres than NGOs, so any policy to help nature to recover necessarily requires their involvement. A scattering of NGO-owned and taxpayer-funded islands of diversity will not be enough. Yet when the government or its quangos draw up new rules they talk mostly to the NGOs and think mostly of how to stop bad landowners doing bad things, rather than working with good landowners to do good things. The Duke of Norfolk tells a funny, if exasperated, story about how much easier he found it to get the monarch, and even the pope, to return his calls than the official within Natural England in charge of permitting him to release curlews."

Why won’t Greenpeace admit that wind turbines may be killing whales?

By Matt Ridley. 

"Who cares about whales? Whales might be dying because of sonar surveying, but Greenpeace simply ignores the science that doesn’t suit it.

So far last year, 71 whales have washed up dead on the shores of New England and neighbouring states. The rate seems to have risen in recent years along with a growth in the number of offshore wind turbines. A small group of concerned citizens have started to campaign against the turbines on behalf of the whales, and the journalist Michael Shellenberger has made a short film about their efforts called Thrown to the Wind.

The evidence gathered by the scientists in the film is far from conclusive: it’s a correlation that could be a coincidence. But it’s not a mad idea that wind farms threaten whales. For a start, the industry has meant increased traffic in the areas where the whales feed, which could well have led to more collisions between whale and ship.

More worryingly, the sonar surveying that precedes wind-farm deployment – to map the seabed and its geology – creates a loud, continuous banging noise that could be disorienting or stressful for the whales. Shellenberger’s documentary shows scientists apparently recording far higher noise levels from the survey ships, and at greater distances, than are permitted by the authorities.

Moreover, when it comes to investigating what killed each whale, the US government relies on a non-profit organisation called the Atlantic Marine Conservation Society. This, the film reveals, has several board members connected to the wind industry – and to the wind developer Equinor in particular.

You or I might take the view that we should wait and see if better evidence emerges that wind turbines are killing whales. But the big environmental pressure groups like Greenpeace – which in its early years, remember, ran a Save the Whales campaign – don’t believe in waiting for evidence. They revere the ‘precautionary principle’, the whole point of which is that industries should be assumed to be guilty until proved innocent. Lack of definitive evidence must never be used to excuse a potentially devastating environmental vandal.

So has Greenpeace enthusiastically joined the campaign against offshore wind farms, demanding a precautionary pause till we can be sure they’re not killing the whales? Er, no. Quite the reverse. When somebody tweeted about the issue this week, Greenpeace was quick to dismiss it, sounding like the most shameless corporate toady and directing readers to a statement on its website: ‘In response to a tragic spate of whale deaths along the East Coast, anti-science media such as Fox News, long beholden to fossil fuel corporations, has amplified the baseless claims made – with no supporting evidence – by a small group of local mayors that offshore wind farming is somehow to blame.’

‘No supporting evidence’ – a phrase you never heard Greenpeace use about genetically modified crops in its long campaign against them. The organisation, you see, long ago stopped caring much about conservation and became obsessed (when not managing its nine-figure annual budgets) with carbon dioxide. This brought it great riches in grants and made it a crony of the big companies it used to rail against, in this case Big Wind. Thus does the world turn.

In recent years whale numbers have boomed, thanks to protection from whaling. Humpbacks now gather in pods hundreds strong and in many areas are back to population levels last seen before whaling began. So a few deaths may not matter that much, or may just be an inevitable by-product of a larger population. Perhaps that’s Greenpeace’s view.

But the same is not true of North Atlantic right whales, once probably the most common species in that ocean. The number of these great, dark, slow sea-buffalos has fallen to dangerously low levels. There are fewer than 340 left, and falling. It’s therefore neglectful of the US government – let alone Greenpeace – to be so blasé about the possibility, however remote, of the wind industry killing or even disturbing them."

60 Minutes Promotes Paul Ehrlich's Failed Doomsaying One More Time

The Population Bomber has never been right, but is never in doubt that the world is coming to its end. 

By Ronald Bailey of Reason.

"Stanford University biologist and perennially wrong doomster Paul Ehrlich appeared on CBS 60 Minutes on Sunday where he once again declared, "I and the vast majority of my colleagues think we've had it; that the next few decades will be the end of the kind of civilization we're used to."

Ehrlich made himself (in)famous when he in his 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb: predicted that "The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970's the world will undergo famines-hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate." Instead of rising as Ehrlich predicted, the global crude death per 1,000 people has fallen from 12.5 in 1968 to 7 in 2019 before ticking up to 8 in the pandemic year of 2020.

At least CBS correspondent Scott Pelley acknowledged, "The alarm Ehrlich sounded in '68 warned that overpopulation would trigger widespread famine. He was wrong about that. The green revolution fed the world." Nevertheless, Pelley credulously reports Ehrlich's assertion that the world is undergoing a Sixth Mass Extinction owing to humanity's rising population and consumption. Paleontologists have identified five previous mass extinction events during the past 450 million years in which something like three-quarters of species disappeared due to events like supervolcano eruptions and asteroid strikes.

In fact, just as positive trends in global agricultural productivity that were already underway 50 years ago nullified Ehrlich's prophecy of inevitable famines that would kill hundreds of millions, current trends in agricultural productivity, population, urbanization, and dematerialization will likely negate his extinction auguries and predictions of civilizational collapse. Why? Because an increasingly wealthy and technologically adept humanity will be withdrawing from nature over the course of this century.

As the result of continuing increases in crop productivity, the world has reached peak agricultural land which means that more land will be freed up to revert to nature as the century evolves. In addition, global human population will likely peak around 2050 and begin falling. Furthermore, people will be depopulating the landscape as they move into cities. Currently, some 56 percent of humanity live in cities and that number is projected to increase to 68 percent by 2050 and 85 percent by 2100. What that means is that the number of people living on the landscape (many as subsistence farmers) will drop from 3.5 billion now to around 1.2 billion by 2100. Again, this will free up land into which wild species can expand and grow.

In his 2020 article on resource production and use, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis researcher Arnulf Grübler outlines a scenario in which technological progress enables a richer humanity to cut its overall natural resource use from about 100 gigatons per year now to 83 gigatons by 2050. (It's worth noting that about half of the current resource use involves non-metallic minerals, e.g., cement, sand, and stone.) Humanity can withdraw increasingly from nature by getting more and more value from ever less resource use.

Human activities have indeed been putting greater pressure on other species, both on land and in the seas. "The data are rock solid. I don't think you'll find a scientist that will say we're not in an extinction crisis," asserted Ehrlich's Stanford colleague biologist Anthony Barnosky in the 60 Minutes segment. "It means you look out your window, and three quarters of what you think ought to be there is no longer there. That's what mass extinction looks like." Assuming Barnosky's estimates are right, just how long would it take for three-quarters of the world's species to go extinct? "If currently threatened species—those officially classed as critically endangered, endangered and vulnerable—actually went extinct, and that rate of extinction continued, the sixth mass extinction could arrive within as little as three to 22 centuries," said Barnosky in the U.K. Mirror back in 2011. Three centuries is slow in terms of global geological and biological processes, but it is really fast in terms of the earlier noted positive human technological, economic, and social progress trends.

In 2018, in their article in the journal BioScience, three researchers from the Wildlife Conservation Society see biodiversity conservation reaching "breakthrough" after passing through a "bottleneck" over the next few decades. Ultimately, they projected that over the course of this century increasing wealth and urbanization will enable the global restoration of wild nature. From the article:

For the first time in the Anthropocene, the global demographic and economic trends that have resulted in unprecedented destruction of the environment are now creating the necessary conditions for a possible renaissance of nature. Drawing reasonable inferences from current patterns, we can predict that 100 years from now, the Earth could be inhabited by between 6 and 8 billion people, with very few remaining in extreme poverty, most living in towns and cities, and nearly all participating in a technologically driven, interconnected market economy. Building on the scholarship of others in demography, economics, sociology, and conservation biology, here, we articulate a theory of social–environmental change that describes the simultaneous and interacting effects of urban lifestyles on fertility, poverty alleviation, and ideation. By recognizing the shifting dynamics of these macrodrivers, conservation practice has the potential to transform itself from a discipline managing declines ("bottleneck") to a transformative movement of recovery ("breakthrough")

CBS and 60 Minutes should be ashamed of promoting Ehrlich's oft-debunked nonsense.

Note: I have debunked Ehrlich's bogus prophecies many, many, many, many times. For more background, see my books The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the 21st Century and Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know: And Many Others You Will Find Interesting, with my co-author Marian Tupy."

No, Humans Are NOT Causing A "Sixth Mass Extinction"

CBS "60 Minutes" sacrifices its credibility in selling apocalyptic pseudoscience

By Michael Shellenberger. Excerpts:

"To cause a “mass extinction,” humans would need to be wiping out 75-90% of all species on Earth. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the main scientific body that tracks species, says just 6% of species are critically endangered, 9% are endangered, and 12% are vulnerable to becoming endangered.

Further, the IUCN has estimated that just 0.8% of the 112,432 plant, animal, and insect species within its data set have gone extinct since 1500. That’s a rate of fewer than two species lost every year for an annual extinction rate of 0.001%."

 

"The huge increase in biodiversity during the last 100 million years massively outweighs the species lost in past mass extinctions. The number of genera, a measure of biodiversity more powerful than species count alone, has nearly tripled over the course of this time period. After each of these past five mass extinctions, the biodiversity in the fossil record dips between 15 to 20%. But each extinction is followed by much larger growth."

 

"Conservationists, it turns out, are skilled at maintaining small populations of animals, from yellow-eyed penguins of New Zealand to mountain gorillas of central Africa. The real challenge is expanding the size of their populations.

 

But it’s not the case that humankind has failed to conserve habitat. By 2019, an area of Earth larger than the whole of Africa was protected, an area that is equivalent to 15 percent of Earth’s land surface. The number of designated protected areas in the world has grown from 9,214 in 1962 to 102,102 in 2003 to 244,869 in 2020."

 

"In fact, in rich nations around the world, wild areas are coming back, thanks to the more efficient use of land for producing food in general and meat in particular. Humans use about half of the ice-free land surface of the Earth. Of that half, we use about half for meat production, which is one the greatest threats to endangered species. But the amount of land humans use for meat has declined massively in recent decades, nearly an area the size of Alaska"

Threatened rule improves incentives to recover endangered species

Biden administration considering rules that would make it more difficult to protect prairie dogs and other species.

By Jonathan Wood of PERC.

"Several years ago, visitors to southwestern Utah would encounter unusual old-west style “wanted” posters. Instead of a bandit, the “villain” in this poster was the Utah prairie dog, a species whose status and regulation under the federal Endangered Species Act had been a source of frustration and conflict for decades.

Unfortunately, a June 4th announcement from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service suggests that such conflicts will soon return to communities across the country, to the detriment of states, landowners and endangered species. The agency stated that it will undo every Endangered Species Act reform completed by the prior administration, including a rule that tailors protections for threatened species.

If finalized, repealing this threatened species rule would be a significant step backward for federal-state cooperation and species recovery.

Once endangered, the Utah prairie dog population gradually recovered from a low of about 3,000 in 1972 to approximately 84,000 in 2016. As the population rebounded, federal regulation of the species paradoxically became stricter, in effect penalizing the state, communities and landowners for contributing to the species’ recovery.

When a federal court held the federal regulation was unconstitutional in 2014, the state of Utah had an opportunity to try a different approach, one that relied on cooperation rather than conflict. Under Utah’s plan, state biologists worked with communities and landowners to address conflicts in residential areas or sensitive places like playgrounds, cemeteries and airports by relocating prairie dogs to public and private conservation lands. Under the federal regulation, such reasonable recovery efforts were illegal without costly and time-consuming federal approvals.

The population continued to increase at an impressive rate under state management — and on lands that could provide a permanent home — while conflict over the species receded.

In 2017, the state wildlife official who led Utah’s effort was selected to run the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the federal agency behind this conflict. Under his management, the agency proposed a significant change to the way it regulates threatened species like the Utah prairie dog, with the goal of empowering other states, communities, and landowners to find similar win-win solutions.

Previously, the Fish and Wildlife Service treated all endangered and threatened species the same, even though threatened species face relatively remote risks compared to endangered species and the statute explicitly sets different approaches to regulating these categories. Decades of experience had shown the folly of this approach.

Because the same burdensome regulations applied even if a species’ status improved from endangered to threatened, private landowners had little incentive to invest money, time and energy in recovery efforts. As most endangered and threatened species depend on private land for habitat, this translated into a recovery rate of only 3%.

Under Fish and Wildlife Service’s new approach, formalized in 2019, instead of automatically applying the strictest regulations available, the agency would tailor regulations to the needs of threatened species. A 2018 report for the Property and Environmental Research Center explained how this change reduces conflict, encourages cooperation, and better aligns the incentives of states and landowners with the interests of rare species.

The logic is simple: Relaxing federal regulations as species recover rewards states and landowners for successful recovery actions. Likewise, the possibility of stricter regulations should species decline and become endangered discourages actions that could harm species.

This tailored approach could deescalate conflict over many species, including Montana’s grizzly bears and Wisconsin’s gray wolves. Efforts to delist these recovered populations have been stymied by political fights and litigation, both exacerbated by the high stakes created by the Fish and Wildlife Service’s prior all-or-nothing approach.

If, instead, federal control gradually receded as species recovered, allowing states to take more and more responsibility over time, we could reduce the stakes of a delisting decision and deescalate political and legal conflict.

Perhaps surprisingly, the policy underlying the tailored approach did not originate with the Trump administration. The shift toward tailored rules for threatened species began during the Obama administration, which recognized the benefits of better incentives to recover species.

Therefore, reversing the threatened species rule would not only upend a reform that provides better incentives for states and landowners to recover rare species — a key principle underlying the Biden administration’s “American the Beautiful” initiative. It would also mean politics triumphing over common sense and almost certainly more litigation.

Ultimately, we should not evaluate Endangered Species Act rules simply on whether they are more or less stringent, but on whether they improve the incentives for landowners and states to recover endangered species.

The 2019 threatened species rule improves incentives. With it under attack, it is critical that states, communities, landowners, and conservationists come to its defense — and that cooler heads at the Fish and Wildlife Service ultimately prevail."

Property rights in Texas suffered a setback recently when the Texas Parks & Wildlife Department approved an unprecedented expansion of regulatory power under the state’s endangered and threatened species laws

A step back for property rights by Robert Henneke of The Texas Public Policy Foundation. Excerpts:

"the TPWD list of 45 species includes 39 species not currently regulated by the federal government."

"Since 2001, species have been added to the state’s threatened species list five times, with four of those instances featuring the addition of only one species. But TPWD now seeks to indiscriminately place three times that many species onto the state’s lists."

Two of the species overlap with liquefied natural gas operations along the Texas Gulf Coast, calling into question whether regulation of these species will disrupt our energy sector. The proposal provides thin justification and little supporting evidence. There is, instead, only a vague statement that the department utilized a protocol developed by NatureServe, a nonprofit environmental group.

Once a species is added, removal is often a slow and arduous process. For example, even though the federal government found the Arctic peregrine falcon had fully recovered in 1994, it took TPWD another 15 years to remove the species from its threatened animals list.

The TPWD proposal is also duplicative of other state programs. The Texas comptroller’s office already has such a program, which is dedicated to ensuring the federal government “makes transparent listing decisions for species in Texas based on up-to-date and accurate scientific and technical information, with opportunities for meaningful public input.” And unlike TPWD, the comptroller manages to accomplish all this without restricting and penalizing private citizens."

Endangered Species Overreach

A new rule won’t put more fish and wildlife at risk

WSJ editorial.

"Perhaps you’ve been reading that the Trump Administration wants to make it easier to eliminate polar bears, spotted owls and other species from the face of the earth. As ever in Donald Trump’s Washington, the reality is different, so allow us to explain.

The uproar concerns a proposed new rule to revise some practices under the 1973 Endangered Species Act. For all the praise liberals shower on that law, it has achieved far less than advertised. A 2018 report from the Heritage Foundation’s Robert Gordon found that since 1973 the ESA has helped to recover only 40 species, and nearly half of those were mistakenly listed in the first place.

Meanwhile, the law has become a legal weapon to strip property rights and block millions of acres from private development. Congress ought to rewrite the ESA but can’t break a partisan impasse. So this week Interior Secretary David Bernhardt tried to clarify regulation under the law to prevent abuses.

The new rule restores Congress’s original two-tiered approach, killing the Fish and Wildlife Service’s “blanket rule” that treated “endangered” and “threatened” species alike. This will devote scarce government dollars—and landowner attention—to the species most at risk. It will also provide states more flexibility to assist species that are struggling though not seriously endangered.

The new rules clarify vague terms such as “the foreseeable future” to mean only as far as the government can “reasonably determine” a danger of extinction. This will make it harder for activists to use claims of vague future climate damage to declare many more species endangered.

And the rules remind regulators they must use the same five criteria in deciding whether to delist a species as they did when listing one—destruction of habitat or range; overutilization; disease; inadequate regulation; or other natural or manmade factors. This will guard against special interests that move the goalposts every time a recovered population is proposed to be cleared.

Another reform would limit the use of “critical habitat” designations that tie up tens of millions of acres of U.S. land. The rules reinstate a requirement that agencies first evaluate acreage that contain the at-risk species before considering new, unoccupied areas. Agencies also must prove that unoccupied critical habitat contains “one or more of the physical or biological features essential to the species’ conservation.”

The goal of all this is to return to a rules-driven, scientific approach to species management. States like California are threatening to sue, but Interior will have a strong defense because its new rule adheres closely to the text of the statute. Greens long ago commandeered the species law via lawsuits and regulatory overreach to put more land under bureaucratic control. This has alienated landowners and misallocated scarce resources.

Many struggling species live on private land, and the cooperation of owners is crucial for recovery. Environmental laws and regulations should encourage stewardship, rather than penalize private partners. To the extent the rules improve private-public cooperation, the key deer and sage grouse will benefit. Which is supposed to be the point of the law."

The Myth That the Polar Bear Population Is Declining

The story of a resurgent polar bear population deserves to be told and applauded.

By Jon Miltimore of FEE.

"Many of us watched the viral video in horror. A starving polar bear scavenging for food on barren land, his ribs visible beneath a jaundiced white coat.

“This is what climate change looks like,” said National Geographic.

The magazine explained that because of melting sea ice, precipitated by climate change, more of these mammals are starving. They pointed to a new study in Science suggesting that polar bears require much greater caloric intake in their diet than previously believed.

The video, shot by photographers Paul Nicklen and Cristina Mittermeier on Somerset Island, sparked outcry over the decimation of polar bears due to global warming.

The footage was viewed by 2.5 billion people, National Geographic estimated. The video remains the most viewed on National Geographic’s website—ever.

What Followed

While many remember the footage of the polar bear, fewer are aware of what followed.
As Michele Moses recently explained in The New Yorker, scientists accused National Geographic of “being loose with the facts.” There was no evidence, many pointed out, that the bear’s condition was the result of climate change. The bear simply could have been old, ill, or suffering from a degenerative disease.

Mittermeier admitted as much a year later.

“I can’t say that this bear was starving because of climate change,” she wrote in National Geographic.

Perhaps we made a mistake in not telling the full story—that we were looking for a picture that foretold the future and that we didn’t know what had happened to this particular polar bear.

The Polar Bear as a Symbol

Mittermeier was looking for visual evidence of the future she imagined, one ravaged by climate change. And she found one that day in a starving bear.

As Moses of The New Yorker points out, polar bears have become an “indisputable image of climate change.”

“The story of climate change has been told, in part, through pictures of polar bears,” Moses writes. “And no wonder: in their glittering icy habitat, they reflect the otherworldly beauty that rising temperatures threaten to destroy.”

That picture of a single starving bear arguably did more to advance the issue of climate change than any white paper or IPCC report could have. Unfortunately, the footage tells us relatively little about the actual state of the polar bear population.

What the Numbers Say

While you’ll find no shortage of headlines declaring that polar bears face extinction, the numbers tell a different story.

Data from conservation groups and the government show that the polar bear population is roughly five times what it was in the 1950s and three or four times what it was in the 1970s when polar bears became protected under international treaty.

In fact, though polar bears were placed under the protection of the Endangered Species Act in 2008 over concerns that its Arctic hunting grounds were being reduced by a warming climate, the polar bear population has been stable for the last three decades.

In 1984, the polar bear population was estimated at 25,000. In 2008, when polar bears were designated as a protected species, The New York Times noted that number remained unchanged: “There are more than 25,000 bears in the Arctic, 15,500 of which roam within Canada’s territory.”

New estimates from the International Union for Conservation of Nature show a mid-point estimate of 26,500 (range: 22,000 to 31,000) in 2015. In The State of the Polar Report 2018, zoologist Susan J. Crockford says updates to IUCN data put the new global mid-point estimate at more than 30,000.

Even accepting the lower figure, the estimate is the highest since the polar bear became internationally protected in 1973.

The health of the polar bear population runs counter to predictions from scholars who have said two-thirds of polar bears will disappear in coming decades because of warming temperatures and melting sea ice in the Arctic.

The good news that polar bears are thriving is unlikely to draw as much attention as images of a starving polar bear scrounging for food on Somerset Island. Nevertheless, the story of a resurgent polar bear population deserves to be told and applauded."

The New Endangered Species Act Rules, Explained

By Jonathan Wood of PERC.

"Earlier this week, the Departments of the Interior and Commerce announced new rules concerning implementation of the Endangered Species Act. Much of the media coverage has been over-the-top, posing questions like whether the new rules “gutted” the act, are a giveaway to big oil, and “Why does Trump hate polar bears and kids?” This isn’t unusual; most every proposed change under the law has evoked such responses, even when proposed under presidents generally viewed favorably by environmentalists.

The new rules do a wide variety of things, including codifying longstanding policies, making minor technical tweaks, and implementing more significant, substantive changes to how the law is implemented. So what do these new rules really mean for endangered and threatened species?

Economic Impacts in Listing Decisions

The Endangered Species Act requires Interior and Commerce to determine whether or not a species warrants an endangered or threatened listing based solely on the science, without consideration of economic impacts. Previously, agency regulations also required such decisions to be made “without reference to possible economic or other impacts of such determination.” One of the new rules deletes this requirement.

This rule-change does not allow economic impacts to affect whether a species is listed as endangered or threatened. Indeed, the rule explicitly “acknowledge[s] that the statute and its legislative history are clear that listing determinations must be made solely on the basis of the best scientific and commercial data available” according to five statutory factors. Thus, the rule gives the agency no authority to decline to list a species based on the economic impacts of such decision. If the agency attempted to do so, it would violate the statute and the rule.

Although this change has no effect on listings, it may have political significance. In fact, the agencies justify the rule on transparency grounds, explaining that they intend to report these economic impacts to better inform the public. If the costs are extraordinarily high, some fear this may create political momentum for Congress to amend the Endangered Species Act.

But this risk seems remote. Economic impacts are considered and reported under several other parts of the act. For instance, critical habitat can only be designated “after taking into consideration the economic impact.” The economic impacts reported under this provision can be exceedingly high. Critical habitat for the green sturgeon, for instance, was estimated to cost up to $600 million per year. Many other species have estimated impacts exceeding $100 million and the cumulative impacts are well into the billions. Yet protecting species remains extremely popular.

Consideration of Climate Change Impacts

The Endangered Species Act distinguishes between “endangered” species (those at risk of extinction today) and “threatened species” (those likely to become endangered “within the foreseeable future”). The new rules define the “foreseeable future” as “extend[ing] only so far into the future as the Services can reasonably determine that both the future threats and the species’ responses to those threats are likely.”

Some have suggested this rule will make it harder for the agencies to list species threatened by climate change. However, the rule merely codifies the policy the agencies have followed since 2009. Since that time, numerous species have been designated based on climate change impacts. In 2012, for instance, the Department of Commerce designated several populations of bearded seal as threatened by climate change and the loss of sea ice, relying on IPCC modeling. In doing so, the agency explicitly followed the 2009 policy.

To be sure, others have argued that climate science is too speculative to affect listing decisions. And they will likely continue to do so. But the new rule doesn’t make it harder for the agencies to rely on climate science. Instead, it merely makes public and binding the policy that has governed listing decisions during the George W. Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations.

Threatened Species

One of the new rules restores the Endangered Species Act’s distinction between the regulation of endangered and threatened species. When Congress enacted the law in 1973, it reserved the “take” prohibition—which forbids activities that affect any member of a species or its habitat—for endangered species. The prohibition could be extended to threatened species too, but only if the agencies deemed it “necessarily and advisable” for the conservation of the species.

In 1975, the Interior Department issued a blanket rule extending this prohibition to all threatened species, unless it adopted a special rule relaxing the prohibition for a particular species. In essence, the blanket rule provided no meaningful distinction between regulations for species that are listed as threatened or endangered.

One of the new rules issued this week repeals the blanket rule—thus restoring Congress’ original distinction between threatened and endangered species. This move aligns Interior’s practice with that of the Commerce Department, which has never had a blanket rule. (The Commerce Department manages marine species, like whales and most fish.) This new rule only applies prospectively. So the blanket rule continues to cover species previously listed as threatened, meaning no species lose any protection because of the change.

This change has been described as “weakening” protections for threatened species. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that species will fare worse under the new rule than they did under the old one. In The Road to Recovery, I’ve argued that restoring regulatory distinctions between endangered and threatened species will better align the incentives of landowners with the interests of rare species. Under the new rule, burdens imposed on landowners will increase if species decline and relax as they recover, giving landowners a significant stake in a species’ status.

In fact, the rule change formalizes a shift begun under the Obama administration. According to a Defenders of Wildlife report, the Obama administration’s Interior Department relied less frequently on the blanket rule than nearly any other administration, opting instead to relax “take” prohibitions using the same type of “species-specific” rules that will now be more common under the new rules for threatened species moving forward. Indeed, the new rule adopts the same policy the Commerce Department has followed for decades, without any evidence that it has undermined the protection of species under its authority.

Of course, the way agencies implement this change going forward matters a great deal. But the new rule holds significant promise for boosting the rate at which we recover endangered species (which is currently under 3 percent).

Critical Habitat

The Endangered Species Act directs that land essential to the conservation of endangered and threatened species be designated as critical habitat. This can include lands occupied by the species or unoccupied lands. The effect on property owners of such designations may include additional permitting or mitigation requirements for any use of the land that requires a federal permit.

The new rules require all occupied areas to be designated as critical habitat before unoccupied areas can be considered. This restores a rule that was in place until 2016. It likely means that unoccupied areas will continue to be a small percentage of designated critical habitat. Since 2007, for instance, roughly 97 percent of critical habitat was occupied at the time of listing.

Although unoccupied areas are rarely designated, they are an outsized source of controversy. In 2011, Interior designated 1,500 acres as critical habitat for the dusky gopher frog on private lands in Louisiana, despite the fact that none had been seen there in 50 years and the land would require extensive restoration work to become suitable for the species again. Despite the lack of benefit to the species, the designation could have cost the landowner up to $34 million in lost development value. A challenge to that designation ultimately reached the U.S. Supreme Court last fall, which held in a unanimous decision that only habitable land could be designated as critical habitat.

The new rules aim to reduce the number of such conflicts and address (in part) the effects of the Supreme Court’s decision. They require any unoccupied lands designated as critical habitat to “contain one or more of the physical or biological features essential to the species’ conservation” and a “reasonable certainty” that the land “will contribute to the conservation of the species.”

These changes will likely discourage marginally the designation of unoccupied land. But, given the limited historical reliance on such lands, the need to conform agency practice to the Supreme Court’s decision, and the fact that conflicts over these lands benefit neither property owners nor species, the effect of the change will be modest.

Delisting Species

Finally, the new rules also provide that “[t]he standard for a decision to delist a species is the same as the standard for a decision not to list it in the first instance.” In other words, there is no higher standard for delisting species than applies to the initial decision to list it. This is consistent with the Endangered Species Act’s text, which addresses both listing and delisting decisions under the same provision and with the same five-factor test.

Some have argued that the bar for delisting a species should be much higher than the bar to list a species, reflecting a more cautious approach. And some courts seem to have erected such barriers. For instance, asserting that the standard should be higher “when a species is already listed,” a federal court recently struck down the delisting of the Yellowstone grizzly bear, despite extensive, bipartisan recovery efforts that enabled the species to exceed its recovery goal (and likely its ecosystem’s carrying capacity).

But a heavy thumb on the scale against delisting may not be in the long-term interests of endangered species. One of the primary incentives for recovery efforts is the promise that, if the efforts succeed, the species will be delisted and federal regulations will be lifted. Making delisting too difficult may have the unfortunate consequence of discouraging efforts to recover species.

Interagency Cooperation

The Endangered Species Act also requires agencies to consult with the Interior and Commerce Departments if the activities they undertake, approve, or fund may affect listed species. If any activity will jeopardize a species’ survival or adversely modify its habitat, it is prohibited. But determining whether these standards are met can be a drawn out and expensive process. One of the new rules adopts several changes to this interagency process, although most are of a technical variety.

These changes include focusing on those effects that are most certain to occur, establishing a baseline against which to compare these effects, clarifying the information required, setting deadlines for reviews, and the standards that apply to these reviews. Of all the rules, this is the one that depends most on how agencies implement it (which is perhaps unsurprising for a largely procedural rule). To fully diagnose the rule, we’ll have to wait and see how it works in practice.

But it’s important to bear in mind how infrequently these interagency reviews result in findings that projects will jeopardize a species or adversely modify its habitat. According to a Defenders of Wildlife study, none of the more than 100,000 projects that underwent this review from 2008 to 2015 led to a jeopardy or adverse-modification determination. This is likely because agencies have gotten pretty good over the last 45-plus years in adjusting projects to avoid or mitigate impacts to endangered species prior to submitting them for review, in the hopes of streamlining the review process. That knowledge won’t go away.

Conclusion

The Endangered Species Act is a popular and important law. So it isn’t surprising that changes to its implementation evoke strong feelings and rhetoric. Ultimately, details matter more than rhetoric. If we’re serious about protecting endangered species, it is imperative that we find ways to preserve what the statute does well (prevent extinction) while improving it as a tool to recover species."