Free Republic

Gina McCarthy, President Obama’s choice to replace Lisa Jackson at the Environmental Protection Agency, has been chastised for having lied to Congress, in claiming that EPA did not use “dangerous manmade climate change” to justify new 54.5 mpg standards for cars and light trucks. She’s also been implicated in the agency’s practice of using fake emails to hide questionable dealings and activities. These issues highlight attitudes toward ethics, law and public policy that prevail at EPA and too many other government agencies. However, that attention should not distract from other important matters. Ms. McCarthy may be the worst of the...

An experiment to see if killing invasive barred owls will help the threatened northern spotted owl reverse its decline toward extinction is underway in the forests of Northern California. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said Friday that specially trained biologists have shot 26 barred owls in a study area on the Hoopa Valley Indian Reservation northeast of Arcata, Calif. The service is spending $3.5 million over six years to remove 3,600 barred owls from sites in Oregon, Washington and California. It is not unusual to kill one species to help a threatened or endangered one. Cormorants and sea lions...

Nothing's worked. Not the clamp on federal timber sales that hammered Oregon's mill towns. Not the lawsuits or the listing as an endangered species. The belated work to retain and restore its favored old-growth habitat will take decades to unfold. Twenty plus years of trying to save the northern spotted owl and it's still slipping away. Come summer, federal wildlife officials expect to finish a draft environmental impact statement that most likely recommends taking to the woods with shotguns. Over the next year, in three or more study areas from Washington to northern California, they might kill 1,200 to 1,500...

PORTLAND, Ore. - A few hundred aggressive cousins of the threatened northern spotted owl may be killed by government agents with shotguns under a proposed federal plan. The spotted owl was listed as threatened 17 years ago, and its numbers continue to dwindle through much of its range in the Pacific Northwest, federal officials said Thursday in proposing the plan to prevent the species from dying out. The barred owls have crowded their cousins, the spotted owls, out of prime habitat, sometimes even attacking them. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service hopes that thinning the number of barred owls will...