CFACT

The regulatory machinery of the Endangered Species Act (ESA) is incredibly overdone, often making the reasonable use of regulated land impossible. Congress needs to fix this.

Share the facts at CFACT.org: https://www.cfact.org/2026/05/09/endangered-species-act-regulatory-overkill/

The law itself is pretty simple but the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) has interpreted it in an extreme way. The law says you cannot harm an endangered species. FWS has interpreted “harm” to include any change in the species’ habitat that might affect it. Cutting down a tree that an endangered bird might happen to nest in is considered harm.

The law actually allows for property development within an endangered species habitat. It is called an “incidental take” permit because every habitat change is considered a “taking” of the species. FWS has stretched this language to the limit.

The problem is that FWS has made incidental take permits so expensive that only rich landowners can afford them. Since most of us are not rich this incredible fee structure has made reasonable development impossible.

This taking fee overkill can be seen in an example from Florida. A landowner with a modest five acre plot wanted to build a house on that land. The incidental take fee was a choking $139,440 which made building impossible. The landowner has asked the Court to overturn this destructive fee structure but it is really Congress’s job to do that.

This case is from Charlotte County, Florida, one of a number of American jurisdiction to do what is called a regional Habitat Conservation Plan, which is required to get an ESA incidental take permit. The County then sublets the take to local landowners who want to improve their property.

The horrendous ESA fee structure is usually secret but Charlotte County has published theirs here.

For anything over 100 acres, such as developing agricultural land, the ESA fee is a punitive $2,289,700. This pretty much rules out agricultural development. Ironically it invites things like malls and data centers that sterilize the land. Developing even the smallest piece of land, up to 0.22 acres, costs $2,032.

In most of America where there are endangered species about the landowner has to directly apply to FWS for an incidental take permit in order to develop their land. The required Habitat Conservation Plan (HCP) is very expensive and time consuming. So much so that doing HCPs for landowners has become a lucrative industry.

Even worse FWS has ruled that their approval of every HCP has to go through the laborious National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) process. This is truly strange given that there are no direct impacts on the endangered species, just on its habitat.

In sharp contrast the National Marine Fisheries Service issues incidental take permits to actually harass and harm protected marine mammals without going through NEPA. The Dominion Energy offshore wind project is authorized to harass and harm almost 60,000 marine mammals. NEPA is not involved.

The situation is clear. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife’s Endangered Species Act regulations seriously distort Congressional intent. They make it almost impossible for anyone except the rich to develop land within the extensive habitat of an endangered or threatened species. Not just in Florida but throughout America.

The Endangered Species Act is not the problem; it is the extreme regulations that Congress must constrain.

Endangered Species Act regulatory overkill The regulatory machinery of the Endangered Species Act (ESA) is incredibly overdone, often making the reasonable use of regulated land impossible. Congress needs to fix this. The law itself is pretty simple but the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) has interpreted it in an extreme way. The law sa...

Smart energy and environmental policies work for people and nature both. Leftism destroys both.

Share the facts at CFACT.org: https://www.cfact.org/2026/05/06/what-about-earths-threatened-and-endangered-people/

Another Earth Day has come and gone – number 57, like Heinz steak sauce. Once again, the media, activists and international agencies fed us pablum, exaggeration and alarmism.

Our public lands, the Endangered Species Act, biodiversity and environmental justice are under threat, they raged. Oceans are filling with plastic waste. Big polluting corporations are getting away with “climate homicide” and “planetary ecocide.” The Arctic is melting, and polar bear cubs are drowning.

The United Nations took a short break from bashing Israel over “Palestinian genocide” and western nations for the “gravest crime” ever committed against humanity (trans-Atlantic slavery), to proclaim April 22 “International Mother Earth Day” and call for an end to “crimes” that “disrupt biodiversity.”

Activists held the “first multilateral conference” on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels. Their “Our Power, Our Planet” theme says further progress will require that communities and individuals pressure governments to accelerate the “clean” energy transition from “dirty” fossil fuels.

Forgive my skepticism. But I was a college organizer for very first Earth Day (1970), back when we had real, highly visible environmental problems: air pollution and toxic smog over cities, industrial water pollution that made it unsafe to swim, leaded gasoline, and more. We largely solved those problems.

Since then, greens have grown in domestic and foreign financing, power and influence, and the ability to conduct ideological campaigns and lawfare on issues of irrelevance to the vast majority of Americans, let alone families in the most energy-deprived, destitute, diseased and malnourished nations on our planet.

Any yet, for days leading up to Earth Day and afterward, virtually nothing was said by the UN, WHO, eco-activists, media screed-meisters or I-care-deeply politicians about these people … or even about people in their own developed countries who bear the brunt of climate-centric, anti-growth, net-zero, de-industrialization, lower-living-standards policies.

It’s as if people don’t exist, and don’t belong, on our planet. The human herd must be culled.

In the developed world, most climate-focused countries and states have the most pseudo-clean energy mandates and subsidies … the highest electricity prices … the highest prices for goods and services. They’re destroying entire industries, leaving thousands unemployed. They have the technologies to utilize their abundant carbon and nuclear energy, but ruling elites don’t want citizens to enjoy jobs and living standards based on that energy. Each year thousands die needlessly during frigid winters and summer heatwaves because families cannot afford or obtain proper heating and air conditioning.

The “climate crisis” is s Hollywood special effects disaster movie. The foundation for any “clean” energy transition is imaginary. Utopian energy is simply not clean, green, renewable or sustainable.

When wind turbines, solar panels, transformers, transmission lines and backup batteries or power plants are included, wind and solar energy require dozens of times more raw materials (and thus mining and pollution) and hundreds of times more land than just building a few nuclear or combined-cycle gas plants close to where electricity is needed – and forgetting about any pseudo-renewable systems.

For families in poor nations, the price tag is infinitely higher.

Worldwide, 730 million people still have no access to electricity. Billions more have minimal, sporadic access. In Sub-Saharan Africa, 600 million have no electricity; hundreds of millions more have minimal, unpredictable electricity from small wind turbines and solar panels here and there. The situation in much of rural Asia and Latin America is little better. Ditto for vehicles and gasoline.

The result is entirely predictable. Almost no wage-earning jobs or mechanized farming, but abundant backbreaking work for parents and children in fields – and plenty of malnutrition, disease and death.

Over half the world’s people (more than four billion) still subsist on $10 a day.

More than 260 million suffer from critical food insecurity and malnutrition, and 35 million children are acutely malnourished, including 10 million with childhood wasting disease – leaving them with weak immune systems and vulnerable to developmental delays, disease and death

Malaria still infects 280,000,000 people annually and kills 610,000. Indoor air pollution from wood, dung, coal and kerosene cooking and heating fires kills nearly 3,000,000 people globally every year. Up to 3.5 million – mostly children – die annually due to inadequate safe water, sanitation and hygiene. Diseases modern western societies never even hear about sicken, disable or kill still more millions.

Do you think any of their grieving families gives a spotted owl hoot that your local temperature climbed a degree since the Little Ice Age ended, or a polar bear cub drowned halfway around the world?

A major reason is rampant corruption. The World Bank found that at least 7.5% (and as much as 15% or more) of total assistance to the most aid-dependent nations ends up in ruling elites’ foreign bank accounts. And yet the WB’s International Development Association received $94 billion for the 2022-2025 period. Multilateral development bank financing to top humanitarian recipients was $12 billion in 2020. Total worldwide Official Development Assistance reached a record $161.2 billion in 2020. Do the math.

Far worse, these banks, US and European foundations, and climate, agricultural and other activist groups work tirelessly to prevent these countries from acquiring or developing the electricity and other energy they need to emerge from squalor, starvation and disease. For decades these virtue-signaling banks have provided loans only for wind and solar projects – almost never for coal or gas power plants.

The result? Expensive, limited, unreliable electricity. No modern hospitals, schools, water purification, factories or shops. Continued pollution from wood and dung fuels. No jobs, improved living standards or reductions in killer diseases.

The same institutions – along with UN and other government agencies – oppose pesticides for eradicating locusts and malarial mosquitoes. They wage campaigns against biotech corn, soybeans, canola, and even hybrid seeds and life-saving Golden Rice. They pressure African governments to ban non-organic fertilizers and crop-saving pesticides that have been approved as safe in wealthy countries. Many even oppose tractors and other mechanized equipment.

To them, the only acceptable farming method is “agro-ecology” – la Via Campesina: the Peasant Way – aka, “traditional,” “organic,” backbreaking subsistence farming.

This, corruption, wars and food-deprivation as a weapon of war is why we still have malnutrition, starvation, disease and astronomical death tolls in African and other impoverished countries.

These global zealots want power over poor countries – not power for the countries’ destitute and desperate people. Their morally depraved policies and practices bring death to millions every year.

Developing countries should avoid doing what rich nations are doing now that they are rich. Instead, they should do what rich nations did to become rich. They should remember that wealthy industrialized countries did not have MDBs to help them; they created institutions to finance the power generation and factories that created jobs, middle classes, health, prosperity, new industries … and taxes to pay for more.

They must chart their own destiny – and take their rightful places among Earth’s healthy and prosperous people. Decent, moral Westerners must help them end the corruption and make this happen.

What about Earth’s threatened and endangered PEOPLE? Another Earth Day has come and gone – number 57, like Heinz steak sauce. Once again, the media, activists and international agencies fed us pablum, exaggeration and alarmism. Our public lands, the Endangered Species Act, biodiversity and environmental justice are under threat, they raged. Oceans a...