In action to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s recent proposition to note the dunes sagebrush lizard under the Endangered Species Act, Rep. August Pfluger, R-San Angelo, has actually submitted an expense that intends to downsize federal preservation efforts for the types and promote increased drilling in their environment.
The costs, entitled the “Limiting Incredulous Zealots Against Restricting Drilling” Act — or LIZARD Act, looks for to stop oversight from the federal government and count on specific and market efforts to secure the types.
Located just in the Permian Basin, the brown dunes sagebrush lizard — likewise called the dune lizard — resides in the sand underneath the area’s shinnery oak trees. With a story comparable to the majority of threatened types of West Texas, critics think the federal government’s resistance to provide federal defenses stems partially from political pressure from nonrenewable fuel source interests, which are mainly to blame for the lizard’s endangerment.
“On the campaign trail, President (Joe) Biden promised to kill the fossil fuel industry, and that’s about the only promise we can count on him keeping,” Pfluger stated in a news release. “His latest tactic — listing the dunes sagebrush lizard as an endangered species so he can shut down drilling in the Permian — is just the latest in a string of assaults on the Permian Basin and our way of life. The President wants to control private property in Texas. Not on my watch. My legislation protects energy security and jobs in the Permian by nullifying his latest attack.”
In an earlier statement, Pfluger alleged that the proposal to list the species under the Endangered Species Act is the Biden Administration’s attempt to “weaponiz(e) a lizard against the livelihoods of Texans to destroy an entire industry.”
The new bill comes less than half a year after the congressman introduced similar legislation, called the Listing Reform Act, which he said would modernize the Endangered Species Act and stop the federal government from using the bill as a “weapon against America’s critical agriculture and energy industries.”
Although the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service first proposed the dunes sagebrush lizard for listing in 2010, advocates began to cast light on the species’ dire situation as early as 1983 when fossil fuel development, sand mining and the spraying of herbicide from nearby ranching operations began to rapidly destroy the species’ habitat, according to the Defenders of Wildlife.
Similar to the fight for the lesser prairie-chicken — another local species whose population is succumbing to the natural gas industry — the protections of the dunes sagebrush lizard has primarily relied on individuals and landowners since the Fish and Wildlife Service withdrew its original proposal in 2012 because it signed a state-led conservation plan to protect the species.
At the time, the state had created the Texas Habitat Conservation Plan — shepherded by then-Comptroller Susan Combs — which largely relied on voluntary conservation efforts from industry interests. According to the Austin American-Statesman, the original Texas Conservation Plan appeared to have vastly underestimated the size of the dunes sagebrush lizard’s habitat, protecting less land than Combs had forecast.
After its failure to adequately conserve the species in its petroleum-rich homestead, the state withdrew the plan in November 2018, leaving the species with no plans for its survival for the last five years.
“The Dunes Sagebrush Lizard has needed Endangered Species Act protections for more than 40 years and to see yet another political attempt to derail what should only ever be a science-based listing decision is truly unfortunate as we face the impacts of a biodiversity crisis,” Andrew Carter, director of preservation policy for Defenders of Wildlife, said in a declaration to the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal.
“Listing this lizard would not stop using voluntary preservation programs and financial activities would still have the ability to continue under licenses so long as candidates make a good-faith effort to reduce the damage and effect on this delicate types whose only fault is that it survives on a significant oilfield,” he included.
