Image courtesy of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

Despite pressure from many environmentalists, the Obama administration upheld a Bush administration rule limiting the regulatory impact of last year’s decision to list the polar bear as a threatened species.

The rule would essentially prevent the Endangered Species Act from becoming a venue for arguments about greenhouse gas emissions. And the logic is simple enough: Bear biologists hopefully have better things to do than analyze greenhouse gases from, say, a cement plant in Georgia, even if emissions from that plant contribute to global warming and the retreat of sea ice, which ultimately translates into hungry bears.

“We already are doing everything we can to protect the polar bear,” US Interior Secretary Ken Salazar told reporters Friday. “The Endangered Species Act, however, is not in my view the proper mechanism for controlling our nation’s carbon emissions.”

This does not necessarily mean that the administration doesn’t care about climate. Indeed, Salazar reiterated Obama’s call for a comprehensive regulatory regime for greenhouse gases (and presumably one that would be enforced not by biologists but the Environmental Protection Agency, which has more expertise regulating industrial airborne pollutants).

But some environmentalist groups refused to let him off the hook. Greenpeace, for instance, went so far as to cite the decision as evidence of an “emerging willingness by the Obama administration to ignore clear scientific imperatives on global warming in the face of industry pressure.”

Many viewed the environmentalists’ polar bear strategy as part of a broad effort to apply regulatory pressure wherever possible in hopes of forcing action at the federal level. Whether or not they challenge the polar bear rule, there’s no reason to think that this debate is going to end here.

The polar bear might be the first species to receive federal protection due primarily to long-term threats posed by global warming, but the US Fish and Willdife Service is already analyzing whether similar protection should be granted for the pika, a hardy rodent that typically lives among rocks high in the mountains. Indeed, there’s no end to the list of plants and animals that stand to lose their homes as the world heats up.