Science: 2, Sarah Palin: 0

For the past two years, Sarah Palin has proposed the incredible argument that declining beluga populations in Cook Inlet are not, in fact, a bad thing. Not surprisingly, Cook Inlet — located south of Palin’s hometown of Wasilla — happens to be the site for the proposed Knik Arm Bridge (the “other Bridge to Nowhere”) as well as an Anchorage and Port MacKenzie port expansion projects, and the Chuitna coal mine. Over the years, it’s served as a massive toilet for oil and gas producers, with sewage discharges, industrial runoff and toxic spills making the watershed into one of the more polluted regions of the state. Palin supports continued rapid development in the region as well as new off-shore drilling projects in the inlet.

Today, the jig is up:

WASHINGTON (AP) — The federal government has declared that the beluga whale in Alaska’s Cook Inlet is endangered and will require additional protection to survive.The findings by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration conflict with claims by Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who has questioned scientific evidence that the beluga whale population in the waters near Anchorage is still declining, despite a decade-long recovery effort.

But NOAA, in putting the whale under the protection of the federal Endangered Species Act, said Friday the whale population declined by 50 percent between 1994 and 1998 and “is still not recovering.”