Will rusty patched bumble bee’s endangered listing become a legal weapon for anti-development activists?

rustypatchbee
Rusty patched bumble bee was added to the endangered species list in 2017.

[Editor’s note: Paul Driessen is a policy adviser for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow.]

Trump’s Interior Department opened a real can of worms when it let the Obama Administration’s last-minute endangered species designation for the rusty patched bumblebee (RPB) take effect March 21 [2017]….

The designation has serious adverse implications for Mr. Trump’s ambitious plans for infrastructure improvements, economic growth, job creation, and reining in regulatory abuse and overreach.

Already, officials in the Minneapolis area have delayed a road construction project – purportedly near a patch of potential RPB habitat – while they look for signs that the bees are actually nesting there. Another Minnesota group is trying to use hypothetical threats to RPBs to delay construction of a wastewater treatment plant that would prevent pollution from reaching sensitive state waterways!

When the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation originally petitioned the FWS for an RPB endangered species designation, it said the species’ decline was due to habitat loss and disease – specifically an intestinal parasite that was accidentally imported to the USA from Europe in the 1990s, during experiments on managed bumblebee hives. But Obama’s FWS arbitrarily contorted its justifications to blame pesticides (specifically advanced-technology neonicotinoid pesticides, a key target du jour of the Environmental Left) for the bee’s decline. There is virtually no evidence to support that.

The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion, and analysis. Read full, original post: Off to a Bumbling Start at Interior

For more background on the Genetic Literacy Project, read GLP on Wikipedia

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