Appeals Court Bitch Slaps NOAA Snake River Salmon Recovery Plan
By Tom Chandler on Apr 9, 2007 in Environment, News
I like it when a judge thinks that one side of a lawsuit is basically so full of shit that they scold them like a small child in the opinion.
OK, they didn’t actually say that, but they did say:
GRANTS PASS, Ore. (AP) — A federal appeals court today strongly rejected the Bush administration’s novel 2004 plan for making Columbia Basin hydroelectric dams safe for salmon, saying it used “sleight of hand” and violated the Endangered Species Act.
The ruling by a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco upheld U.S. District Judge James Redden’s order requiring the dams to sacrifice power production to help juvenile salmon migrating to the ocean.
The NOAA had delivered a whole laundry list of loony non-recovery plans before getting poked in the eye by the court:
“Under this approach, a listed species could be gradually destroyed, so long as each step on the path to destruction is sufficiently modest,” Judge Sydney R. Thomas wrote of the Bush administration’s approach to balancing dams against salmon. “This type of slow slide into oblivion is one of the very ills the ESA seeks to prevent.”
What was the judge talking about? At one point the NOAA argued that they didn’t have to produce a salmon recovery plan that would work — they were just legally bound to produce a plan. After that didn’t fly, they came up with:
In 2004, NOAA Fisheries came up with a new approach that argued because the dams were built before the Endangered Species Act became law, their existence was part of the environmental baseline, and not subject to removal to help salmon. The same went for basic operations, such as irrigation, flood control and power generation.
The appeals court completely rejected that approach, calling it, “little more than an analytical sleight of hand, manipulating the variables to achieve a ‘no jeopardy’ finding,” Thomas wrote. “Statistically speaking, using the 2004 BiOp’s analytical framework, the dead fish were really alive. The ESA requires a more realistic, common sense examination.”
Nowadays, salmon are in as short supply as the “realistic, common sense examination” the NOAA hasn’t provided.
To read the whole sordid story, go to: Yakima Herald Republic Online
smellslikefish | Apr 9, 2007 | Reply
Huh. Guess this would be the same NOAA(National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) which consistently gets the weather report WAY wrong. Yet here, a federal agency appears to be backing certain, special interests. Who’d a thunk it?
Jim Webb | Apr 10, 2007 | Reply
Well, “bitch slaps” may not have been the best phrasing. As in, someone in the court of appeals is a bitch? Probably, but not relevant. Wonder if this will find its way to the Supreme Court. Has anyone taken on the Bush administration’s treatment of the Klammath? Now there would be a nice lawsuit, one into which I could really sink my teeth. What about the Nimbus and Folsom dams on the American?
Dave Neal | Apr 10, 2007 | Reply
The Bush Admin. and other supporters of these particular dams what nothing more than to drag their heels and drag out this process until all the wild salmon and steelhead are extint in these drainages…then there will be nothing left to protect.
Tom Chandler | Apr 10, 2007 | Reply
The NOAA has definitely failed to impress on this one. As for the Klamath, I don’t know how involved the current administration is with the four dams.
They are deeply involved in the diversion issues higher up the Klamath (irrigators vs. flows for salmon).
Jim Webb | Apr 10, 2007 | Reply
The irrigation issues are what I was thinking about. Seems like we need to get all the stakeholders to sit down together and try to work something out. You know, farmers from Fresno county, fishermen from Monterey, public utilities, sport fishermen, ande environmental groups. Isn’t that wishful thinking? Oh, and next time, I’ll spell Klamath correctly.
Tom Chandler | Apr 11, 2007 | Reply
Actually, there has been movement on the water diversion issues. For a while the more militant factions of all the groups made sure no one was talking, but now the commercial fishermen are talking to the farmers and environmental groups (at least a little).
The prevailing word is everyone realized that no one’s going to walk away with the whole cake on this one (there simply isn’t enough water to go around)…
Jim Webb | Apr 11, 2007 | Reply
Yeah, like Mark Twain said…”In California, whiskey is for drinking, water is for fighting over”.