Don't Panic; the Endangered Species Act isn't endangered

You may have heard that Trump is trying to gut the Endangered Species Act(ESA).

If you're not a rabid leftist you probably wondered if this was another bit of media hyperbole aimed at discrediting Trump--sky cloudy, rain falls on children's picnic; Trump to blame.

You're right.

What the Trump administration is investigating is refining the implementation of the ESA to ensure that it better serves Americans.

Among the changes are the idea that getting a species off the endangered list shouldn't be harder than getting it on the list and assessing the financial impact of protecting a species.

Essentially as the ESA is implemented now the left is saying that no amount of human suffering, poverty, or disease is enough to justify the elimination of a species.  For example protecting the snail darter in California costs thousands of jobs, and drives up food prices for millions of people.  Who is most impacted by that?  Poor people.  They are impacted by an absence of jobs and by higher food prices more than the arugula munching left wing mobs in Silicon Valley.

Because to the left everything is about them, and they are generally rich or they're supported by the government--which includes sinecures in academia or government bureaucracies-- , they don't care how they impact the poor--that's why rich leftists rarely give most of their money away to help the poor.

Taking into account the impact on people of preserving a species makes sense. But that's something that leftists generally lack.  For example you've probably seen the outcry about some dentists who shot a lion and some woman who shot a giraffe.  What you don't hear is that without hunters paying big money to go hunting in Africa there would be no protection for lions or giraffes from poachers and the countries where those hunts occur would be a lot poorer.

The radical left acts as though we must either protect every species no matter how insignificant or we must wantonly slaughter species left and right.

Conservatives, being rational, recognize there is a middle ground.  We need to make reasonable efforts to avoid eliminating species but we can't put bugs ahead of people all the time.

That's all that taking into account the fiscal impact of protecting a species means; how much pain does it cause people and is that pain worth it to save the species in question?  Clearly saving lions from extinction is more important than saving some random species of plant. But it's also clear that simply enabling some contractor to make some extra money isn't sufficient reason to exterminate a species.

Hence the sane approach is to weigh the impact on people as one aspect of the equation.  But as usual leftists are quite comfortable saying that people don't matter.

Another change being examined is to make it as easy to take a species off the list as it is to put it on the list.  For example let's say that biologists have determined that if the timber wolf population drops to 300 it should go on the endangered species list and that a healthy population size is 500.  What Trump is considering is saying that once the timber wolf population recovers to 500 or more the wolf is easily removed from the list.  As it stands now even without lawsuits by radical leftists who care more about animals than people it's much harder to remove a species from the list than to add it to the list.

This can have significant economic consequences. For example even though timber wolf populations have rebounded if a farmer sees a wolf attacking one of his herd he can't do anything to stop it. Should he harm the wolf he could see a year in prison and up to a $50,000 fine.  So the farmer just has to stand by and watch thousands of dollars of his money be eaten up by wolves.

One last note; none of the changes that Trump is considering will allow any of the decisions made on "endangered" animals to occur in darkness. If the bureaucrats misuse the new rules, should those rules be implemented, it would be visible to the public.