Sad! The War in Iran Is So Bad That the U.S. Can No Longer Save the Whales.
It’s been 33 days since Trump lawlessly bombed Iran—killing 200 schoolchildren—and on any given day since, we’ve either already won the war, we’re threatening Iran with nukes, or we’re maybe “two to three weeks” from things being over. It’s like a fun, national version of Wordle, where every day we get to guess the status, except there are no winners and no prizes—unless, of course, you’re someone who had inside information (naughty!) and made a few easy bucks on some oil trades. Anyway.
But on Tuesday, the latest insight into where we’re actually at came when Trump’s Endangered Species Committee, aka the “God Squad,” voted to grant an exemption to the Endangered Species Act so that oil and gas companies in the Gulf of Mexico can drill to their heart’s content without having to deal with the pesky nuisance of dwindling marine life.
In 1978, five years after the Endangered Species Act was passed, the committee was created as a way to decide what potential exemptions to the act could be granted. Made up of six high-ranking federal officials, it earned the nickname the “God Squad,” since they literally decide whether a species lives or dies.
Secretary of War Defense Pete Hegseth told the committee this exemption was absolutely necessary for “reasons of national security.” Fair, I’d forgotten all about the great espionage trials of Free Willy.
“When development in the Gulf is chilled, we are prevented from producing the energy we need as a country,” Hegseth said. Weird. It seems like two months ago, the U.S. was both producing the energy we need as a country and continuing to protect endangered species. I wonder what changed…
Five votes are needed for an exemption to pass, and Tuesday was only the fourth time the committee’s been called to a vote since its creation. The last time was in 1992, when it voted to allow the Bureau of Land Management to sell timber out of a forest in Oregon where the threatened northern spotted owl species lives. It remains threatened.
According to NPR, Hegseth asked Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to call for the vote two weeks ago, marking the first time the committee’s voted on grounds of national security.
“Not only is a ‘God Squad’ convening as rare as hen’s teeth in the first instance, but this snap announcement that came a week and a half ago is so vague that the public doesn’t even really know what the committee is supposed to consider,” Jane Davenport, a senior attorney at Defenders of Wildlife, told the outlet. “So it’s just completely baffling, but it is on brand for this administration.”
For the record, the committee is always made up of the Secretary of the Interior (currently Burgum), the Secretary of Agriculture (Brooke Rollins), the Secretary of the Army (Daniel P. Driscoll), the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors (Pierre Yared), the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (Lee Zeldin), and the Administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Neil Jacobs).
According to NOAA, the Gulf of Mexico is home to 20 endangered species, such as the Rice’s whale, which environmental activists are especially concerned about after Tuesday’s decision. Currently, there are definitely fewer than 100 Rice’s whales in the Gulf, though some scientists suspect there are even fewer than 50. Compared to the majority of whale species that migrate, the Rice’s whale lives its entire life in the Gulf, making it more susceptible to noise and pollution from oil drilling.
Hegseth told the “God Squad” that due to Iran’s “recent hostile action” in blocking the Strait of Hormuz—through which about a fifth of the world’s oil flows—the Act had to be revoked in order to ensure the U.S. has plenty of domestic oil production. Which again, is so weird, since it seems like, two months ago, Iran was not blocking the Strait of Hormuz. I wonder what happened…
“To be secure as a nation we need a steady, affordable supply of our own energy,” Hegseth said. “This is not just about gas prices; it’s about our ability to power our military and protect our nation.”
In anticipation of the imminent energy crisis, on Monday, the European Union urged people to start working from home and traveling less. “Even if … peace is here tomorrow, still we will not go back to normal in the foreseeable future,” EU Energy Chief Dan Jørgensen said, adding that Europe was facing a “very serious situation.”
Going forward, the “canary in the coal mine” metaphor will now be replaced with the “Rice’s whale in the Gulf of Mexico.”