The tiny lizard that will test Trump's "drill, baby, drill" agenda

[douglas9]

While President Donald Trump has caused chaos and confusion in his first few weeks in office, he’s made one thing very clear: His administration will do everything in its power to supercharge oil and gas production.

That agenda is unwelcome news for a small lizard in West Texas.

The dunes sagebrush lizard — a tan, scaly reptile measuring just a few inches long — lives in the Permian Basin, the largest oil producing region in the country. It’s found nowhere else on Earth. The basin stretches across West Texas and southeastern New Mexico and produces, by some estimates, as much as 40 percent of US oil. It’s likely that you’ve traveled in a car or plane using fuel derived from oil in the Permian Basin.

Drilling for oil and gas, and the infrastructure that supports it, harms the dunes sagebrush lizard, according to more than two decades of research. Roads and well pads damage and fragment the reptile’s habitat, as does the process of mining sand for fracking. These activities are threatening to extinguish the lizard, which is now unable to survive across nearly half of its historic range, according to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, a government agency.

To stave off extinction, the Fish and Wildlife Service listed the lizard as endangered under the federal Endangered Species Act last spring. The ESA is the nation’s strongest law for protecting wildlife. Under the law, it’s illegal to kill endangered animals and plants (with some exceptions) and the government is required to devise and implement a plan to revive their populations.

https://www.vox.com/down-to-earth/398926/endangered-species-trump-energy-permian-dunes-sagebrush-lizard

[rampartd]

1. i side with the lizard

but it is soon to join the dinosaurs

[Walleye]

2. Oh, the right wing will be using this lizard as an excuse for high gas prices. We will be hearing a lot about it

[riversedge]

3. "Bowman also fears a more wholesale dismantling of the Fish and Wildlife Service that would have far greater impacts on

If Trump can do this he will do it!!



.........Andrew Bowman, the president and CEO of Defenders of Wildlife, a nonprofit advocacy group, said that he anticipates such legislative riders as one tool used in the broader threats to wildlife in the next few years. Bowman also fears a more wholesale dismantling of the Fish and Wildlife Service that would have far greater impacts on wildlife in the US. “It takes a lot of money and time to do listings, to do recovery plans, to designate critical habitat,” he said. “Will they just find a way to hollow out the agency so that the law basically becomes ineffective?”

How Trump and his agencies ultimately approach this small lizard, if at all, will reveal how far his agencies will go to undermine the Endangered Species Act. Will this reptile be sacrificed in the name of Trump’s energy dominance agenda — opening other endangered species to threats — or will the letter and spirit of the law, as it exists now, prevail? In all likelihood, this reptile will remain the subject of litigation for years to come, all the while inching closer and closer to extinction.

“The lizard is a phenomenal example of the way that politics affects endangered species protection,” Rylander said. “The intent of Congress and the Act to list species based solely on the best scientific and commercial evidence available is continually thwarted by political and policy decisions across administrations.”