In official submissions to the US government’s consultation on the status of the polar bear, Palin and her team referred to at least six scientists who have questioned either the existence of warming as a largely man-made phenomenon or its severity. One paper was partly funded by the US oil company Exxon Mobil.

Palin’s complaint to the Department of Interior cited the pre-publication Exxon Mobil paper — “Polar bears of western Hudson Bay and climate change” — six times, and even attached a copy. “Polar bears” was eventually published by the obscure Journal of Ecological Complexity, with funding not only by Exxon Mobil, but also the American Petroleum Institute (Big Oil’s lobbying shop), and the Koch Industries money machine:

This paper was authored by Alaskan scientist Markus Dyck, Timothy Ball, Sallie Baliunas, Willie Soon, and David Legates. All but Dyck are notorious climate skeptics with extensive ties to the Exxon-Bush right wing machine. As polar bear biologist Andrew Derocher told the Alaska Daily News, “I would venture to guess that, beyond Markus Dyck, none of them had ever seen a polar bear.”

Yet another unpublished crackpot article — by retired scientist Syun-Ichi Akasofu, a hardcore global warming denier — is cited to support Palin’s absurd claim about global warming: “There is also no agreement among experts on how these changes fit into longer-term analysis of past and projected future climate conditions.”

As John McCain said at the Clinton Global Intitative on September 25: “We now know that fossil fuel emissions, by retaining heat within the atmosphere, threaten disastrous changes in climate.” However, yesterday he said, “I’ve already turned to Governor Palin, particularly on energy issues.”

McCain turns to Palin for energy policy, and Palin turns to … Exxon Mobil.

UPDATE: Greenpeace asks about the money:

No reporters have questioned Exxon or API about funding this research and no one has gotten the scientists themselves on the record as to how much money they got from Exxon and friends and the marching orders attached to that funding.

Drowning in the gaps left by melting Arctic ice, the polar bears of Alaska have become one of the first creatures to make the endangered species list because of global warming. This was a double blow to Big Oil, as the industry’s pollution is responsible for climate change, and the polar bear seas are sitting on billions of dollars worth of oil and gas. So Gov. Sarah “Pipeline” Palin (R-AK), literally married to the oil industry, is facing down the half-ton carnivore in her legal sights — proving herself more environmentally extreme than Texas oilman Bush.

When the Bush administration reluctantly proposed listing the polar bear as a threatened species early this year, Pipeline Palin sided with the oil and gas industry and countered with a New York Times Op-Ed opposing the federal listing and then, once the administration went through this May, with a lawsuit against its implementation.

Now, it’s hard to believe that anyone not holed up in a militia compound could adopt a position more unfriendly to the Endangered Species Act than Bush and Cheney, but Palin made it clear that the administration was going a bit soft and green on the matter. What’s more, she maintained:

My decision is based on a comprehensive review by state wildlife officials of scientific information from a broad range of climate, ice and polar bear experts.

When University of Alaska professor Rick Steiner sought a copy of that review, the Anchorage Daily News reported, he was informed that the documents he requested would cost $468,784. (Apparently the cost of photocopies has gone up since the Freedom of Information Act was enacted.) Steiner subsequently obtained e-mail records indicating that Alaska state biologists actually supported the listing. He told the Anchorage Daily News:

Even the petroleum-loving Bush administration couldn’t find a way around the science on this issue.

The clear scientific evidence of global warming’s effects was airily dismissed by Palin as “uncertain modeling of possible effects.” In a June, 2008 interview with conservative pundit Glenn Beck, Palin maintained that polar bears are “very, very healthy,” and that “the number of polar bears has risen dramatically in the last 30 years.” In fact, Congressional testimony on the polar bear cites a 17 percent drop in the Southern Beaufort Sea populations since the 1980s, with reductions in skull size, cub survival and adult male weight.

Those declines coincide with the catastropic loss of sea ice on which the bears live — a direct result of climate change, which Palin also dismisses.

In August, Pipeline Palin sued the Fish and Wildlife Service over the polar bear listing. It appears that the person Sen. McCain (R-AZ) plans to put in charge of government reform has pulled a page from the Bush playbook — when faced with findings unfavorable to Big Oil, simply deny the data, silence the scientists, and jam up the courts.

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They are likely to become endangered in the near future.

The Department of Interior, under Secretary Dirk Kempthorne, fought for several years in the courts since 2005 to avoid making a decision on whether the precipitous decline in Arctic sea ice due to global warming is making the polar bear an endangered species. Fish and Wildlife Service director Dale Hall testified in January that there was no significant scientific uncertainty in the endangerment posed by global warming to polar bears — the only legal justification under the Endangered Species Act for a delay.

Kempthone’s decision to follow the science is in marked contrast to Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Stephen Johnson’s action to override his staff in refusing to regulate tailpipe greenhouse gas emissions.

However, Kempthorne also argued vigorously that his decison does not compel the Bush administration to construct a plan to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, repeating President Bush’s entirely spurious claim that would be a “wholly inappropriate use” of the Endangered Species Act. The Interior news release announces, “Rule will allow continuation of vital energy production in Alaska.” In justifying his declaration that the ESA places no new restrictions on Arctic drilling, Kempthorne claimed that the Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA) is “more stringent” than the ESA. However, the court ruling that compelled him to issue today’s rule states that “the protections afforded under the ESA far surpass those provided by the MMPA.”

Despite his protestations, Kempthorne’s decision clearly calls into question the legality of the sale of oil and gas drilling rights in polar bear habitat on February 6, while the polar bear decision was being illegally delayed.

Kempthorne whined that the Endangered Species Act is “one of the most inflexible” pieces of legislation because it didn’t allow him to consider whether protecting species like the polar bear from extinction would cost too much.

The most painful irony of the situation is that the melting of the ice that is pointing the polar bear to extinction is also making the Arctic more accessible to drilling. Like lemmings off a cliff, the oil industry and its right-wing allies are rushing to extract these fossil fuels and further increase global warming emissions. The fate of the polar bear should be of concern for those who believe in our moral responsibility to be good stewards of this planet. But of equal consideration is their role as the canaries in the climatic coal mine. The consequences of an unfrozen Arctic would be utterly catastrophic — not just to Arctic species, but also to humanity.

UPDATE: From the Department of Interior press release on the 368-page rule:

To make sure the ESA is not misused to regulate global climate change, Kempthorne promised the following actions:

• The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is proposing a 4(d) rule that states that if an activity is permissible under the stricter standards of the Marine Mammal Protection Act, it is also permissible under the ESA with respect to the polar bear. This rule, effective immediately, will ensure the protection of the bear while allowing us to continue to develop our natural resources in the arctic region in an environmentally sound way.
• Director Hall will issue guidance to staff that the best scientific data available today cannot make a causal connection between harm to listed species or their habitats and greenhouse gas emissions from a specific facility, or resource development project or government action.
• The Department will issue a Solicitor’s Opinion further clarifying these points.
• The Department will propose common sense modifications to the existing ESA regulatory language to prevent abuse of this listing to erect a back-door climate policy outside our normal system of political accountability.

In short, the Bush administration is announcing that even though the Endangered Species Act forced them to admit global warming is threatening species with extinction, it is going to attempt to rewrite the Endangered Species Act to ignore global warming in the future.

UPDATE II: Andy Revkin at Dot Earth concludes, “So this leaves everything as it was, in a way, with the bears facing a transforming ecosystem and environmentalists successful in their litigation, but not necessarily empowered by the listing.” At Climate Progress Joe Romm calls the decision “bye-polar disorder.”

UPDATE III: Sierra Club spokesman Josh Dorner tells the Wonk Room, “This is the regulatory equivalent of a signing statement — only this one gets to be challenged in court.”

UPDATE IV: Via Warming Law, Lisa Heinzerling at the Georgetown Law Faculty Blog explains why the Endangered Species Act is known as the “pit bull” on environmental laws, and that the Department of Interior “rule turns the pit bull into a poodle” and contrasts it with the Environmental Protection Agency’s interpretation of the Clean Air Act:

At the same moment the Department of the Interior is turning interpretive somersaults to avoid regulating greenhouse gas emitters through the Endangered Species Act, EPA is clinging to an unnecessarily literal interpretation of the Clean Air Act to justify its own failure to regulate. These two agencies have thus found different paths to the same end: complete inaction on the defining environmental issue of our time.

The following day, Lyle Laverty, Assistant Secretary for Fish, Wildlife, and Parks, faxed back a response at 5:56 PM:

I understand Secretary Kempthorne called you on March 17, 2008, and expressed his commitment to testify before the Committee on the polar bear proposal once a decision is made on the issue. I also understand the Secretary committed to calling you on Tuesday, April 1, 2008, with an update on the progress towards a decision.

Boxer immediately responded, calling the offer of a telephone briefing and a hearing after a decision has been made “wholly inadequate,” and again requested the April 2 or 8 date for a hearing discussing “this serious breach of the Department’s duty to follow the law.”

This fight began in 2005, when the Center for Biological Diversity petitioned the Fish and Wildlife Service to declare the polar bear endangered by global warming’s assault on Arctic sea ice. Since then, the administration has violated repeated Endangered Species Act deadlines — the latest this January — when it instead announced it would speed through a multibillion dollar sale of drilling rights in the very same Arctic seas.

It has been nearly a month since Fish and Wildlife Service director Dale Hall — who is under investigation for his part in the delays — stated in a February 28 House Appropriations Committee hearing that his agency had submitted its decision on the polar bear listing to Secretary Kempthorne.