Without shame, lawmakers and interest groups will claim that requiring polluters to take responsibility for their pollution is government overreach. They will argue that asking businesses and people to refrain from destroying taxpayer-owned lands, or killing the last of a species, is somehow an infringement of rights.Republican Sens. Rand Paul and Dean Heller have introduced legislation that would gut the Endangered Species Act, requiring an act of Congress to add a new animal, allowing states to opt out, and requiring individual protections to be renewed every five years.Predictably, advocates of destroying species protections - which proved critical to the survival of the bald eagle, American alligator and grizzly bear, among dozens of others - cloak their campaign in the cynical assurance that it will actually make animals safer.
Instead, such legislation would reverse decades of progress, imperiling species that are already threatened. It would create a patchwork of priorities and protections. It would subject environmental regulations to even greater political pressure.The list of species exterminated by Americans is a long and sad one. The passenger pigeon, which once flew in flocks that covered the skies, was gone by 1914. The Carolina parakeet disappeared by 1918. The Smith's Island cottontail was lost by the 1980s. More recently, the eastern cougar,Twitter Adds Another Ad Tool: Conversion Trackin
which once roamed the Appalachian Mountains, was declared extinct in 2011, though it hadn't been seen in decades. Countless species of fish and amphibians and mollusks were exterminated before they were identified.
Indeed, some of those animals disappeared after the Endangered Species Act was passed. But in every case, the damage to the creatures' habitat and population by development and pollution had already been done.That's precisely what the law is designed to prevent. It has worked for 40 years, and it shouldn't be sacrificed simply because animals can't write campaign checks.The City regulator, the Financial Conduct Authority, is currently putting the finishing touches to a year-long investigation into whether insurers make excessive profits from the 400,000 savers who each year buy an annuity to convert their pension into income.Research by the Telegraph has shown how the biggest profits are made when loyal customers simply accept the first offer made by their own pension provider, rather than shopping around the whole of the market.