Comment by loudmax
6 hours ago
You're right to point out the difficulty in getting projects accomplished in the face of intransigent environmental concerns. But you're also making a strawman argument. This isn't the possibility of "a bat being injured." This is more like the possibility of a subspecies of bat becoming eradicated by destroying their habitat.
To be clear, the benefits to high speed transit are probably worth destroying some habitats, and we need to weigh the social and economic benefits of allowing some level of environmental disruption. Progress comes at a cost. We should be clear about what that cost is.
This argument is undermined by the malign behavior of green activists and their academic allies, who have been caught in the past inventing non-existent new sub-species specifically so they can use the endangered species argument to block construction projects.
A notorious case is the snail darter, invented to block construction of the Tellico Dam in Tennessee. It was the first legal test of the US Endangered Species Act and it was fraudulent [1]. This raises huge questions about how the Endangered Species Act is actually being used, if the very first test case was about a species that scientists now think doesn't really exist as a separate thing at all.
Another case is the California Gnatcatcher, which is not an endangered kind of bird, but green NIMBYs argued under the ESA that the coastal California Gnatcatcher was a different species that would be endangered by construction. They have successfully kept the "coastal" variant of the bird listed as an endangered species for decades, which regularly blocks or slows down construction in CA.
They love this game! After all, what defines a species? It's a vague concept and the taxonomists who decide whether something is a new species are academics, who are all on the far left. Nothing stops them publishing a paper that concludes the animals next to any planned project are unique and special snowflakes that must be protected, purely because they just want to block progress.
To put the scale of this problem in perspective, last year taxonomists "discovered" 260 new species of freshwater fish alone [2]. They claim that hundreds of unique kinds of fish escaped notice for centuries, that this happens every year, and each one of those kinds of fish is critical to preserve. Is this plausible?
[1] https://yibs.yale.edu/news/fish-center-key-conservation-figh...
[2] https://fishkeepingnews.com/2025/03/04/260-new-freshwater-fi...
> They claim that somehow hundreds of unique kinds of river/lake fish escaped notice for centuries, that this happens every year, and each one of those kinds of fish is critical to preserve. Is this plausible?
I don't disagree with the premise that environmental laws are being abused by people with ancillary agendas, but arguably humans have been underestimating the complexity of ecological systems for generations, incorrectly assuming that we understand everything well enough to manage and control our impacts without long tail side effects.
It may well be plausible that there are many hundreds of undiscovered fish species out there, and that interfering with any subset of them could cascade into other consequences. We've certainly been learning a lot about the impacts of dams on fisheries in recent years—changes made centuries ago that had profound long term effects on our food supply, to take a tangible example.
> have been caught in the past inventing non-existent new sub-species
That's not what happened, and your own links fail to support your narrative. It was genuinely believed - before the passing of the act - that the recently-discovered snail darter was a distinct species. It is still disputed whether it's a distinct species, unique sub-species, distinct population segment, or none of the above. The first three of these would still afford it protections under the Endangered Species Act.
Unfortunately what people say they believe doesn't really matter. These decisions are so subjective that nobody can ever prove good or bad intent. And having nice intentions isn't worth much, what matters is outcomes.
The outcome here was the dam was blocked despite being nearly fully constructed, the decision was objected to by the developers who said it was nonsense, the dam builders were correct and the taxonomists were wrong. 100% bad outcome: everyone loses.
Unfortunately it's what you'd expect from a system that allows people who have no incentive to say yes overrule anything they don't like, because if later it's revealed they were wrong they can just say "whoopsie, well who is really to say what is true anyway, times change etc". There's no accountability.
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As I understand it, the issue currently is that there's not really a framework for justifying or balancing those costs. Right now, the bat conservation people point out that the route will potentially eradicate a particular subspecies of bat. That gets sent up to the planning team, who now attempt to figure out a solution that prevents that from happening, and figures out how much that will cost. But what you probably want in between those points is someone to decide how much is too much to spend on the bats.
We do this for other stuff - for example, the NHS in the UK has a system called QALYs (Quality Adjusted Life Years) which represent how much a particular treatment will extend someone's life, adjusted by the quality of that life. You can then calculate a cost per QALY for a new treatment, and make a decision about what costs are worthwhile for the NHS to pay for, and what aren't.
Something like that that could apply to planning permission decisions would be very useful for national infrastructure projects.
For me the contradiction is simply how much of the status quo doesn't have to justify itself with those rules.
It may seem like an improvement to say that a rail project has to be careful about bats. But left unsaid is that the highway that already exists and competes with rail was never asked to perform such an analysis, and it's likely someone could adding lanes to that highway with much less stringent requirements.
So what is ostensibly environmental law, really ends up being a status quo law - if the status quo is bad for the environment, the law perpetuates it. The headline is about bats and trains, but everything from insects, to animals to people are killed right now - every day - on highways and no one bats an eye.
> To be clear, the benefits to high speed transit are probably worth destroying some habitats, and we need to weigh the social and economic benefits of allowing some level of environmental disruption. Progress comes at a cost. We should be clear about what that cost is.
Do you have a sense of how to approach the question of “cost” for this particular bat case?
When destroying an entire habitat (let’s assume we can define the boundaries of that habitat and it is mostly unique), do you have a sense of how to compute the cost given the multitude of species, geographical feedback loops, etc.?
Much more measured and thoughtful than I would have been, but I think you're exactly right. I don't know the first thing about bats but even I know their populations have been devastated by some kind of white fungus virus, or the "clean windshield" phenomenon associated with the devastating collapsing insect populations they probably depend on, and so it's not a big leap to think $100MM project is being mobilized in the face of a serious existential threat to their survival.
If the best you could think of is that "a" bat might "possibly" get injured it's a dramatic understatement of the kind of environmental threats they face. And you don't have to be anything more than a bit of a news junkie to know that.