By Michael Markarian

Talk is abundant when it comes to climate change. Displays of political principle and backbone, however, are not so commonplace.

That’s why Americans should pay particular attention to a bill being pushed by U.S. Rep. Paul Broun – a bill that would sacrifice threatened polar bears to a smug and selfish special interest: the big-game trophy hunting lobby. Yep, Rep. Broun is out once again to prove that nothing should get in the way of the fun of shooting animals for trophies, not even if global warming threatens the very survival of his targets.

You see, Rep. Broun and the tycoons he used to work for at Safari Club International can look no further down the road than the range of a big-bore rifle. So what if the northern ice is melting and the bears have no ice floes from which they hunt for their survival. So what if the polar bear has been listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. In the mind of these trophy hunters, there is still room for a bearskin rug in front of the fireplace back home.

Perversely, nothing would please these trophy hunters more than to see the population of bears plunge – that is, just as soon as they get their trophy specimen to mount. The rarer the species, the more prized the trophy. The last man to legally shoot a live polar bear will stand tall in this crowd – one-upping his fraternity members in the world of competitive trophy killing.

Oh, they will talk the phony language of “conservation,” as if paying big bucks to kill bears will fund the management necessary to help the survivors. But that’s the worst kind of political camouflage. The real motive of these trophy hunters is to kill as many rare animals as fast as they can because – well, because it’s a parlor game, and they keep score.

You’d think that Rep. Broun would come to his senses. The image of far-off polar bears huddling on a melting slab of ice in the vast Arctic Ocean has become the crisis emblem of 21st Century Earth. But given a choice whether to save the polar bear or pander to the Safari Club, Rep. Broun is fighting in Congress to keep the bullets flying and the blood flowing.

He is pushing a bill, H.R. 1054, that would allow his Safari Club buddies to import their polar bear trophies from Canada—even though they knew for 16 months that the bear was proposed for listing as a threatened species and the door might be closed to trophy imports under federal law. They gambled with their own money on expensive trophy hunts, trying to bring down one of the dwindling number of majestic bears remaining in the Arctic.

Maybe Rep. Broun hoped no one was looking. Well, we are. And so are millions of Americans who recognize that polar bears are the modern-day canaries in our global mineshaft.

Maybe he thought it would be safe to hide behind the old wheeze that killing animals fosters conservation. No way. Polar bears need ice, room to roam, and every break we can give them. They don’t need hot lead and stale rhetoric from trophy hunters.

Maybe he figured that the propaganda machine of the Safari Club could win the day with the claim that defenders of polar bears represent “extremist” views. Boy, are they ever wrong here. In 2009, only a true extremist would dare to shoot a polar bear for the fun of it.

But these extremists need a complacent Congress too. They just put the trophies in storage and wait for their allies like Paul Broun to give them a congressional fix, hoping to keep the pipeline open for more bearskin rugs.

Join us in asking Paul Broun, please: Given the pressing issues facing our nation, why is he spending his time in Congress on behalf of special interests that want to kill threatened polar bears?

Michael Markarian is president of the Humane Society Legislative Fund, on the web at hslf.org.