Decide on polar bears first, then oil: lawmaker

By Deborah Zabarenko, Environment Correspondent

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. government must decide first if polar bears are threatened by climate change before it opens part of their icy habitat to oil drilling, the head of a congressional environment panel said on Thursday.

The decision whether to list the big Arctic bear as threatened under the Endangered Species Act was supposed to happen last week but was postponed for up to 30 days.

That means it could come after the government offers 29.4 million acres in the Chukchi Sea off the Alaskan coast in a sale of oil leases on February 6.

"Rushing to allow drilling in polar bear habitat before protecting the bear would be the epitome of this administration's backward energy policy, a policy of drill first and ask questions later," Rep. Ed Markey said at a hearing of the House (of Representatives) Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, which he chairs.

Testifying on the matter were two key Bush administration officials: Dale Hall, director of the Fish and Wildlife Service that has been investigating the polar bear's status, and Randall Luthi, director of the Minerals Management Service, which announced the oil lease sale last week.

World polar bear populations are currently stable, but U.S. scientists predict that two-thirds of them could be gone by 2050 if predictions about melting sea ice hold true. Polar bears live and hunt on sea ice; when it melts they either drown or are forced onto land, where they are inefficient hunters.

This is the first time global warming has been a factor in arguing for threatened status for any species in the United States and that makes the decision more complex.

Instead of the limited measures required to rescue a species threatened by a drained swamp or denuded forest, polar bears depend on sea ice. That ice is melting at an accelerated rate, at least partly because of human-generated global warming, scientists have reported.