President Donald Trump announced on Truth Social that his administration had returned the Endangered Species Act (ESA) “to how it was intended to be,” invoking the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s reading of the statute and initiating the crocodile tears of anti-development activists.
The administration’s view is that regulators committed to regulatory expansion had turned the 1973 law into an automatic impediment to human activity rather than a targeted protection of threatened species. In 2012, Justice Scalia called regulators’ broadening of the statute from guarding against injuring animals to protecting habitat “a terrible interpretation” of congressional intent. He rejected the notion that every form of ecosystem modification should automatically count as prohibited “harm.”
To nobody’s surprise, the reaction of activists has been extreme. The administration action “guts protections for threatened wildlife,” announced the Center for Biological Diversity. Earthjustice attorney Kristen Boyles said, “This broad attack on endangered wildlife is un-American.”
But where was this outrage when the Biden administration permitted the killing of bald eagles and whales to erect its politically favored wind turbines? Many of the same voices have spent years promoting large “green” energy projects that inflicted harm on birds, bats, marine mammals, and sensitive habitats.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member