A divided appeals court Tuesday ordered the Fish and Wildlife Service to revisit part of its assessment of how Arctic oil drilling could harm or kill Beaufort Sea polar bears but did not stop work from going forward on Alaska’s North Slope.
While rejecting some environmentalist claims, two members of the three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found flaws in the federal agency’s “incidental take regulation” issued in 2021.
In that rule, FWS determined that there would be only minimal unintentional consequences for the polar bear from drilling and related operations.
Under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the most serious form of unintentional “take” of a polar bear is ranked as “Level A.” FWS, in turn, divided this into “serious Level A” take, meaning the death of a polar bear, and “non-serious Level A harassment.”
