AP: Those Mean Ol’ Oil Companies Are Going To Annoy The Polar Bears

The really use the word “annoy”. You gotta love objective reporting:

WASHINGTON – Less than a month after declaring polar bears a threatened species because of global warming, the Bush administration is giving oil companies permission to annoy and potentially harm them in the pursuit of oil and natural gas.
The Fish and Wildlife Service issued regulations this week providing legal protection to seven oil companies planning to search for oil and gas in the Chukchi Sea off the northwestern coast of Alaska if “small numbers” of polar bears or Pacific walruses are incidentally harmed by their activities over the next five years.
Environmentalists said the new regulations give oil companies a blank check to harass the polar bear.

Harass the polar bear? I don’t think anyone looking for oil will be out to deliberately harass a polar bear while he’s at it. I like this part:

“Now, three weeks later, Interior issues a rule under the act that we view as a blank check to harass the polar bear in the Chukchi Sea,” said Brendan Cummings, oceans program director at the Center for Biological Diversity. He added that his group believes the new regulations are illegal.
Exploring in the Chukchi Sea’s 29.7 million acres will require as many as five drill ships, one or two icebreakers, a barge, a tug and two helicopter flights per day, according to the government. Oil companies will also be making hundred of miles of ice roads and trails along the coastline.
“We are poorly equipped to address those risks and challenges,” said Steven Amstrup, one of the foremost experts on polar bears and a scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey’s Alaska Science Center. “To assess what the impacts are going to be, we should know more about the bears.”

When they say they need to know more about the bears that means they want a series of endless studies that will put the exploration for oil on hold forever. Here are a few bear facts that may help out. It’s a big white bear that lives on the ice and eats seals. And it will eat you if it you give it the opportunity. Don’t annoy one if you can help it.
Come on, you guys, just come out and say it – it ain’t about the bears. It’s about stopping new exploration and drilling for oil any way you can. The bears are just one tool in the little kit you’re using to get it done.
Buried at the end of the article is this little bit of inconvenient truth for the Environazis:

There is no evidence of a polar bear being killed by oil and gas activities in Alaska since 1993, according to the Fish and Wildlife Service. Since 1960, when the hunt for oil and gas began in Alaska, only two fatalities of polar bears have been linked to oil and gas activities in the state, the service said.

But, hey, who needs facts, right?