Thread by @emilygrubert

This is an enormously big deal.

Something that gets lost sometimes is that the Endangered Species Act is in many ways our only truly enforceable environmental law.

I love yelling about this, so thread: (1/)

https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1160931874245623809

People are probably not hugely surprised when an MSHA (Mining Safety and Health Administration) or CAA (Clean Air Act) violation results in an essentially meaningless fine, even when someone (often an identifiable someone for MSHA, and unidentifiable someones for CAA) dies (2/)

(For the record, this is awful.) (3/)

So then when people GO TO PRISON for jumping in a pond with a (highly endangered) fish in it, it tends to surprise onlookers (e.g., motherjones.com/environment/20…) (4/)

The ESA is serious. As the NYT points out, the reason --and the threat to its continued ability to serve as our /only really meaningful environmental law/ -- is that you're not allowed to make financial arguments when deciding whether a species merits protection. (5/)

That is: you can't be like, well, protecting the sage grouse means losing one zillion dollars from oil revenues, so it doesn't get to be protected. (6/)

This is basically the reason that many, many environmental legal arguments boil down to "I found an endangered thing so you can't do the project." (7/)

ESA protections are basically the only thing that can actually *stop* a project.

Again, louder: That species is basically your *only path* to stopping a project on environmental grounds. (8/)

I struggle with whether I think this (possibly accidental) extreme enforceability was good, as the long-term effect has been that people see their arguments about their kids' health get ignored, but some stupid little fish shuts it down -- but it's what we have. (9/)

I'd much rather a situation where different laws with different arguments were all super enforceable...

...but for now, if you care about asthma and climate, sometimes you need to rest on a legal argument about a species (10/)

So people hear the narrative: we won't do this for you, but we'll do it for this animal that no one's ever seen or heard of, and it has tended to breed a lot of suspicion of the goals of environmentalism, I think. (11/)

A lot of people who make ESA arguments care deeply about the people--probably more than about the particular species at hand in some cases, though of course species are important too--but they need the ESA in order to win. (12/)

The TL;DR is then: the ESA isn't really about species anymore--it's about having any legal avenue to actually stop projects.

Best case: all our laws become legitimately enforceable in behavior-changing ways! Current case: yay, we might not even have the ESA any more. (13/)

So when you see "ESA weakening" think: "environmental enforceability going away entirely" in addition to "extinctions."

This is a huge deal, both directly for species themselves and for people fighting for a cleaner environment. (/end)