The Gulf's rarest whale was a thorn in Big Oil's side. Now feds are slashing protections

[Zorro]

In recent weeks, the federal government has stripped protections for one of the world’s rarest whales at a rapid pace, threatening the survival of a species that calls the waters off Florida’s Gulf Coast home.

First, national security officials exempted the oil and gas industry from having to follow endangered species protections in the Gulf of Mexico, in the name of needing more offshore drilling.

Then officials proposed revisiting whether the Rice’s whale should be considered endangered at all. Now, a key federal official has even raised doubts about whether the critically endangered Rice’s whales are, in fact, their own species.

“We need to study that, and if it is not (a separate species), we need to stop the nonsense of treating something as if it’s endangered when, of course, it’s plentiful,” said U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick during a congressional hearing last month. He asserted that marine scientists who’d deemed otherwise were biased.

His remarks contradicted scientific findings within his own agency. They also relied on a scientific opinion paper — the author of which told the Tampa Bay Times that Lutnick was drawing the wrong conclusions from his work.

https://www.tampabay.com/news/environment/2026/05/23/florida-trump-rices-whale-oil-drilling-gulf-of-mexico-endangered/

[GiqueCee]

1. Like every Republican...

... Satan ever defecated, Secretary Licknutz is a liar, slavishly devoted to helping the oil industry systematically destroy the environment to benefit a few at the expense of the rest of humanity, and, indeed, all of life on Earth. They're gleefully saddling even their own children with a planet vast areas of which will be uninhabitable within even our lifetimes. And I'm OLD!

[LetMyPeopleVote]

2. MS NOW-Here's why Pete Hegseth's war on the Endangered Species Act is so misguided

The administration argues that it needs exemptions to the Endangered Species Act to extract more oil form the Gulf of Mexico when it’s already extracting record amounts.

Link to tweet

https://www.ms.now/opinion/hegseth-endangered-species-gulf-whale

Nicknamed the “God Squad” for its power to rule whether economic or national security interests outweigh the possibility of wiping out an animal species, the Endangered Species Committee has granted two exemptions to the Endangered Species Act since it was created by Congress in 1978. It is composed of the secretaries of the Interior, Agriculture and the Army, and the heads of the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Council of Economic Advisers.....

Never mind that one of those species is the Rice’s whale, which NOAA itself acknowledges is one of the rarest in the world. The whale exists only in the Gulf, with perhaps 50 or so left.

After 15 whole minutes of discussion, the Endangered Species Committee (100% Trump appointees) decided that oil & gas companies in the Gulf of Mexico don't need to exert any caution anymore to protect endangered whales, turtles, or other wildlife.
www.washingtonpost.com/climate-envi...

— Liz Neeley (@lizneeley.bsky.social) 2026-04-04T03:18:37.088Z

That obviously means nothing to Trump and Hegseth, who are both so maddened that they have become modern Ahabs chasing a Moby Dick. In his right-wing Christian crusade, Hegseth openly prays for every bullet and missile to “find its mark” in war. In the war for oil, he obviously is not interested in hearing about collateral damage, saying: “Disruptions to Gulf oil production doesn’t hurt just us, it benefits our adversaries. We cannot allow our own rules to weaken our standing and strengthen those who wish to harm us. When development in the Gulf is chilled, we are prevented from producing the energy we need as a country and as a department.”

Rice’s whale is hardly the only creature that could be decimated with ramped-up oil production. According to NOAA, the gulf is also a habitat for the endangered sperm whale; the endangered hawksbill, leatherback and Kemp’s ridley sea turtles; and the endangered pillar coral. There is also a host of other animals listed as “threatened,” such as loggerhead and green sea turtles, Nassau grouper, the giant manta ray and queen conch......

There is reason to be optimistic that, like the ultimate withdrawal of the 1992 spotted owl exemption, that this one for the Gulf of Mexico will eventually be blocked by litigation and public protest. The day before Burgum convened the Endangered Species Committee, a federal judge in California invalidated several Endangered Species Act rollbacks concocted during the first Trump administration that allowed agencies to increasingly ignore the harm of projects to wildlife.

The judge, Jon Tigar, said the administration made “serious” errors in an “arbitrary and capricious” effort to gut the Endangered Species Act. Let us hope that the courts continue to find yet more errors with the exemption for the Gulf of Mexico. Fifty whales by themselves don’t stand a chance against the rhetoric of keeping gas under $5 a gallon. The Trump administration is today’s Ahab lunging over its ship with a harpoon. This time, the whale really could be killed in the hunt for oil.

There are only 50 Rice Whales in existence. I hope that these various lawsuits succeed in blocking Hegseth

[Timeflyer]

3. Darn those inconvenient rare endangered marine animals, bothering the poor fossil fuel bloodsuckers and their enablers.