President Donald Trump's new plan for the Endangered Species Act could effectively dismantle the program's protections for vulnerable wildlife, CNN environmental reporter Bill Weir warned Thursday.
"The Trump administration is moving to strip protections for endangered species and their habitats," said anchor Sara Sidner. "The White House says the Biden-era measures are too restrictive and hurt the economy ... this is quite a list of beloved animals in places like Florida."
"Absolutely," said Weir. "This, according to one spokesperson from the Center for Biological Diversity, they said, 'We assumed Trump would attack wildlife again, but this dumpster fire of a plan is beyond cruel.'"
The new rules, Weir said, would "take us back to 2019," when Trump tried to make similar changes that the Biden administration undid. "The big one would be economic consideration for stakeholders," said Weir. "So, for example, if you tell a timber company, you can't cut this forest down because of endangered owls or some other creature there, they could say, well, that's going to cost us X millions of dollars.
"And that is a math that has never been used when it comes to saving particular species or very delicate entire ecosystems."
"Right now, this will be fought in court as it was in the first go-around," Weir continued. "There's a 30-day public comment period that happens starting Friday there, and then take a couple of years for them to change these rules. But as you mentioned, so many beloved creatures, the red wolf, black-footed ferret, Florida panther, the Hawaiian monk seal, endangered. We got the right whale, North Atlantic, the condor in California, sea turtles as well. The Endangered Species Act has brought back songbirds and different species through the years, has been a resounding success in some places here."
"People care about these landscapes," he added. "They care about these creatures. And this will be a fight."
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