Polar bears feeling heat.

Byline: The Register-Guard

Call them the poster bears for global warming.

Under pressure from a lawsuit filed by environmental groups, the Bush administration proposed last week to designate polar bears as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act. Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne attributed the species' decline to the rapid melting of Arctic sea ice that is essential to their survival.

Of course, Kempthorne, true to the administration's head-in-the-sand approach to climate change, stubbornly refused to acknowledge why the ice is melting or what should be done about it. Any third-grader knows that global warming is causing the ice to melt and that a primary cause of the warming is heat-trapping gases emitted from automobile tailpipes and industrial smokestacks.

Suffice it to say that polar bears are not dying off of their own volition. They depend on sea ice as a platform for hunting seals and as a pathway to take them to coastal areas. As global warming dramatically shrinks Arctic sea ice, the huge beasts are struggling to find food and to swim the longer distances between ice and land. To put it more bluntly, they're starving and drowning in disturbing numbers.

The Interior Department's move could prove a turning point in the fight against global warming. If the agency decides to formally list the polar bear as threatened, the Endangered Species Act would require the federal government to create a recovery plan and to take the actions necessary to protect the polar bear and its habitat

Perhaps more importantly, a listing would make the iconic and photogenic polar bear the symbol for all species at risk from global warming. That's already happening: Last spring, an edition of Time magazine containing a special report on climate change showed a gaunt-looking polar bear peering out from a melting ice floe next to a headline that read "Be Worried. Be Very Worried."

Perhaps prodded by the haunting image of the new poster bear, the Bush administration and Congress will do what they should have done years ago - impose mandatory limits on greenhouse-gas emissions. There are several promising proposals already pending in Congress to do just that, and the new Democratic majority should move swiftly next year to send one of them to the president for his signature.

The stakes are much higher than polar bears, of course. And the longer this country goes without action, the more difficult and costly will be the reductions necessary to prevent an environmental cataclysm far greater than the one unfolding in the Arctic.