In explaining his landmark decision to use the Endangered Species Act for the first time to protect a species supposedly threatened by the impact of global warming, Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne went out of his way to reassure industry that his polar-bear ruling “should not open the door to use the ESA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from automobiles, power plants, and other sources. That would be a wholly inappropriate use of the Endangered Species Act. ESA is not the right tool to set U.S. climate policy.”

Mr. Kempthorne apparently just fell off the turnip truck. Or maybe he was born yesterday. Or, as M. Reed Hopper of the Pacific Legal Foundation (which has filed to overturn Interior’s decision) diplomatically put it: “He’s engaged in wishful thinking.”

When green activists successfully won threatened status for the Northern and Mexican spotted owl populations in 1993, their intent was to stop industry from engaging in activity that threatened the owl’s habitat. That is, they wanted to ban logging. And in February 2008, a federal judge did just that — designating 8.6 million acres in Arizona, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico as critical habitat for the owl and therefore off limits to logging. The Center for Biological Diversity cheered the ruling, saying: “Having critical habitat will ensure that U.S. Forest Service logging does not limit the bird’s recovery or drive it into extinction.”

If Kempthorne just ruled that global warming is an imminent danger to the polar bear’s habitat, then, how long will it be before greens take the next tactical step and sue to limit industry from producing carbon dioxide?

Inappropriate, you say. Far fetched, you say. But give greens an inch. . . .

Exploiting legal loopholes is Green Activism 101. In the late ‘90s, I covered efforts by President Clinton’s radically green EPA chief Carol Browner to shut down industrial development in urban areas by citing Title VI of the 1965 Civil Rights Act.

Huh? you say.

Joining with the environmental-racism movement and backed by a Clinton executive order, Browner argued that locating industries near black populations created a “disproportionate impact” by exposing them to pollution – therefore violating their civil rights. Naturally, activists found courts willing to uphold this nonsense, and Browner & Co. began to cut a swath of economic destruction across the U.S., shutting down major facilities planned in Louisiana, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and so on, that were located near minority populations.

Eventually, Browner’s job-killing juggernaut was stopped in its tracks by a bipartisan coalition of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, the National Association of Black County Officials, industry, and businesses whose economic development plans were in tatters. House Democrats and Republicans amended an appropriations bill to cut off environmental-racism enforcement until Clinton’s guidance was revised.

Now, thanks to Bush’s naïve Interior secretary, the greens have a much broader mandate to deep-freeze the U.S. economy in the name of the polar bear. And they’ll have a green adminstration, whether McCain’s or Obama’s, cheering them on.

Let the lawsuits begin.

– Henry Payne is a writer and editorial cartoonist for the Detroit News.