MANILA, Philippines—Even in its lame-duck phase, the George W. Bush administration manages to ruffle the world’s feathers. On Thursday the US government placed the polar bear on its list of endangered species, an obvious victim of global warming. At the same time, Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne issued a word of caution: The listing of the polar bear should not be seen as a template for solving climate change. It would be “wholly inappropriate” to do that, Kempthorne said.

The Endangered Species Act “is not the right tool to set US climate policy,” he said, echoing the view of President Bush. What he means, as environmentalists and Democratic legislators immediately pointed out, was that the listing would have no impact on ongoing oil and gas exploration in the Arctic waters, the polar bear’s increasingly vulnerable habitat.

In announcing the listing, the Cabinet official presented a wealth of data described in the Associated Press report as showing “the dramatic decline in sea ice over the last 30 years and projections that the melting of ice—a key habitat for the bear—would continue and may even quicken.”

But in spite of all that, Kempthorne was driven to say: “This listing will not stop global climate change or prevent any sea ice from melting.” Of course it won’t, because the Bush administration is not prepared to stop, say, power plants from operating or oil exploration companies from drilling in areas at risk.

“They’re trying to make this a threatened listing in name only, with no change in today’s impacts, and that’s not going to fly,” said Jamie Rappaport Clark of Defenders of Wildlife. “It remains to be seen how much this belated listing decision will improve protection for polar bears and their rapidly shrinking habitat,” said Clayton Jernigan of Earthjustice.

The no-fault inclusion of the polar bear on the list of endangered species is doubly ironic because, on the same day of the announcement, a group of reputable scientists published in Nature magazine the results of a comprehensive study confirming that global warming is in fact man-made.

“Humans are influencing climate through increasing greenhouse gas emissions,” said lead author Cynthia Rosenzweig. “The warming world is causing impacts on physical and biological systems attributable at the global scale.”

The science behind the listing of the polar bear is solid; but the ideology that seeks to contain the consequences of this listing in a virtual vacuum is an immovable object. For White House skeptics of the Kyoto Protocol, it is business as usual.

In transit

It was straight out of the movie “Home Alone.” A toddler was left behind in the Vancouver airport last Monday by a harried family of Filipino immigrants to Canada struggling to meet their connecting flight to Winnipeg.

“We had 10 minutes before boarding,” Jun Parreno, the boy’s father, told the media. “We were running for the gate.” He thought his son was with his wife and the boy’s grandparents; they thought the boy was with him. Because they were seated separately on the plane, they did not realize that the 23-month-old boy had been left behind until, much later, the flight crew sought them out and told them.

Good thing that security guards at the Vancouver airport did their job and Air Canada personnel took good care of the boy (they even found a Filipino-speaking employee to look after the non-English-speaking toddler).

It is tempting to reach for generalizations after reading what old-school journalists used to call a human interest story (one circulated worldwide by the Associated Press). But to borrow Tolstoy’s famous opening line, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” That is to say, the circumstances that struck the Parreno family like an unhappy accident are particular to them: to their flight plans, to the make-up of their party, to their personal circumstances. We can only commiserate with them.

At the same time, we also realize that the story is an accidental snapshot, all the more revealing for being candid, of the continuing exodus of the Filipino middle class. In our search for the proverbial greener pasture, we see to it that nobody gets left behind—except of course the land we were born in.