Comment by qcnguy
2 hours ago
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.
> nobody can ever prove good or bad intent
You're certainly happy to throw about assumptions.
> The outcome here was the dam was blocked
It was slowed but not "blocked". The dam exists!
> the taxonomists were wrong
Still in dispute.
> There's no accountability.
Academic reputation is a surprisingly strong form of accountability, and even more so in the 1970's.