Darth - Exactly correct. The God Squad provides an exemption to the Federal agency action, not to the listed species. So if the harvest of Chinook salmon in SE AK is exempted from the ESA, the other actions that kill salmon would have to take up the slack (the incidental take) that was exempted by the God Squad. In other words, the 'conservation burden' doesn't go away, it just gets reallocated to other sectors of society (e.g., recreational angling, hydropower, habitat loss, etc).

That's why the God Squad will never be applied to Pacific salmon.