A polar bear walks along the beach near Kaktovik, on Alaska’s Beaufort Sea coast. (Loren Holmes / ADN file photo)
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will allow oil and gas workers to more intensely harass polar bears away from people and equipment near the Beaufort Sea.
A new rule, scheduled to take effect Thursday, follows a series of lawsuits brought by environmental groups who claimed that the federal government failed to adequately justify prior rules that allowed lower levels of harassment.
Under federal regulations, “level B harassment” takes place when someone annoys an animal enough to change its behavior, typically steering it away from an object or person.
“Level A harassment” takes place when that annoyance has the potential to injure the animal.
In 2024, the 9th Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals said in an order that it doubted federal officials’ claims that there would be no class A harassment against polar bears and directed the Fish and Wildlife Service to reexamine its approach.
With that order in hand, the service rewrote its rules “to allow the … Level A harassment of polar bears that may result from industry activities.”
A spokesperson for the Alaska Oil and Gas Association, a trade group, said that organization was still analyzing the proposed new rules and didn’t have additional comment.
But the change drew opposition from environmentalists.
“Polar bears are the poster children for animals at risk from our rapidly heating climate and they need far more protection than this rule provides,” said Kristen Monsell, oceans legal director at the Center for Biological Diversity, by email. “It’s horrific that the Trump administration ignored the science to greenlight more harm to polar bears while also proposing to open up more oil drilling in their habitat. Polar bears were already being driven toward extinction, and Trump is hitting the gas pedal.”
Originally published by the Alaska Beacon, an independent, nonpartisan news organization that covers Alaska state government.