CONTRIBUTOR
- Landmark environmental laws leveraged for decades to challenge infrastructure projects are now being used against offshore wind, a key aspect of President Joe Biden’s green energy agenda.
- A new lawsuit brought by grassroots environmental groups, fishermen and local citizens alleges that the government did not abide by the terms of statutes including the National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act in a rush to permit two massive offshore wind developments off the East Coast.
- “Destroying ocean habitat in the name of climate change prevention is absolutely hypocritical and atrocious,” Dustin Delano, the COO of the New England Fishermen’s Stewardship Association (NEFSA), a plaintiff in the suit, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Environmental rules and regulations that activists have used for years to drown disfavored infrastructure projects in litigation are now threatening a key pillar of President Joe Biden’s massive climate agenda.
A coalition of grassroots environmental groups, local residents and fishermen are suing the Department of the Interior (DOI), National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) and the Army Corps of Engineers, alleging that the agencies cut corners on key environmental policies in order to hasten the buildout of massive offshore wind projects off the East Coast. Environmentalists are now using key policies like the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and the Endangered Species Act (ESA) that have mired other infrastructure projects, including and especially natural gas pipelines, to challenge the legality of Biden administration’s efforts to reach its offshore wind targets. (RELATED: Commercial Fishers Say Biden Admin’s ‘Ocean Justice’ Initiative Totally Ignores Their Concerns)
Environmentalist opponents of offshore wind posit that the construction and operation of the huge turbines disrupt marine ecosystems, including the balance of fisheries and the ability of certain whales to safely navigate the waters. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has declared “unusual mortality events” for humpback and North Atlantic Right Whales, starting in 2016 and 2017, respectively, a timeline which approximately aligns with the beginning of industrial-scale offshore wind development off the East Coast.
For its part, the government maintains that there is no available scientific evidence that clearly proves a causal link between offshore wind development and the large increase in whale deaths, according to NOAA.
“To implement a massive new program to generate electrical energy by constructing thousands of turbine towers offshore on the Atlantic Outer Continental Shelf and laying hundreds of miles of high-tension electrical cables undersea, the United States has shortcut the statutory and regulatory requirements that were enacted to protect our Nation’s environmental and natural resources, its industries and its people,” the lawsuit contends.
The lawsuit takes specific aim at Revolution Wind and South Fork Wind, two massive developments off the Rhode Island coast. Plaintiffs in the suit include the New England Fishermen’s Stewardship Association (NEFSA), Save the Right Whales Coalition and Green Oceans.
The Biden administration is aiming for offshore wind to generate enough electricity to meet the demand of 10 million American homes by 2030, but the subsidized industry is facing considerable financial pressure as inflation, high borrowing costs and logistical issues are weighing on profit margins. Apart from potential legal issues that the projects may face, economic conditions are prompting developers to cancel power purchase agreements or terminate projects altogether, putting Biden’s 2030 goal firmly out of reach, according to Reuters.
The lawsuit, filed Jan. 16 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, alleges that several of the government’s environmental reviews and procedural decisions underlying its approval of the Revolution Wind and South Fork Wind projects are illegal. The plaintiffs contend that the government may “have violated NEPA by impermissibly segmenting the multiple areas of the offshore wind program and ignoring the cumulative environmental impacts of thousands of turbines on millions of acres of ocean that BOEM will approve in the near future,” and that “BOEM violated NEPA by failing to provide complete analyses and disclose the impacts of the projects.”
Climate activists have previously used the laws cited in this lawsuit to gum up projects they oppose, like the Atlantic Coast Pipeline and the Keystone XL pipeline, according to Jesse Richardson, a professor of law at West Virginia University, and Madison Hinkle, an environmental lawyer. The lawsuit focusing on Revolution Wind and South Fork Wind demonstrate that the Biden administration’s plans for offshore wind developments — and potentially other green energy projects — are going to have to beat legal challenges predicated on NEPA, ESA and other statutes that have long been a problem for oil- and gas-related projects.
“NEFSA and the other grassroots groups like Green Oceans have taken the ‘bull by the horns’ alongside the Responsible Offshore Development Alliance in their fierce opposition to the industrialization of our oceans from foreign offshore wind companies. Once again, we’re seeing an example of fishermen, the true environmentalists of the ocean, fighting to preserve and protect it — while environmental groups remain silent or in some cases, endorse this destructive movement of ocean industrialization,” Dustin Delano, NEFSA’s COO, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Destroying ocean habitat in the name of climate change prevention is absolutely hypocritical and atrocious.”
As Delano mentioned, numerous major eco-activism groups — including Greenpeace and the League of Conservation Voters — have defended offshore wind, suggesting that concerns about the technology’s environmental impacts are being amplified by right-wing groups as part of a wider anti-wind “misinformation” campaign.
“Initially, we were inclined to support these renewable energy efforts. Only when we understood the impacts and no empirical evidence supports their ability to help climate change, did we realize just how devastating the projects will be on the ocean’s health and how little, if any, benefit the projects will provide,” Dr. Elizabeth Quattrocki Knight, the co-founder and president of Green Oceans, a plaintiff in the suit, told the DCNF. “No empirical evidence demonstrates that offshore wind will help climate change. Over and over again, the government’s Environmental Impact Statements admit that the effects of climate change will proceed unchecked and unchanged in this region, despite the presence of the projects.”
The NMFS declined to comment, citing the ongoing nature of the litigation. The White House, BOEM, DOI and the Army Corps of Engineers did not respond immediately to requests for comment.
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While I consider that the rules implementing NEPA need reform, using the current procedures against Biden and offshore wind is karma. Or schadenfreude.
Well with all of those regulations enforced, the USA will be remarkably environmentally friendly, and entirely hostile to its’ own population.
Hoist by their own petard! Love it!
Only difference is that offshore wind will have REAL, LASTING environmental impacts; a pipeline, not so much.
Or the law of unintended consequences.
Democrats are exempt from the law. This will not be a problem for the socialist party aka democrats.
I think that the Enviromental groups have had enough of the Democrats and their not so green agenda.
Sad but true, slap together a few hundred pages from some previous EISs and the package will be approved on arrival (after a few months correcting spelling errors and such).
” no empirical evidence supports their ability to help climate change“
I wonder how many times something of this nature has appeared on WUWT and another dozen blogs. I think the wording is crazy even though the meaning is understood.
They might as well expand on that…
There’s no empirical evidence that a warmer climate means worse weather (the opposite is true).
There’s no empirical evidence that CO2 drives the Earth’s temperature.
There’s no empirical evidence that atmospheric CO2 levels are driven by the pittance of “emissions” from human fossil fuel use.
Though I agree there is scant evidence that human emission of CO2 from burning ‘fossil fuels’ has been harmful, I would argue that the quantity is hardly a ‘pittance’. There have been more molecules of CO2 released into the atmosphere since the start of the industrial revolution than were there when it started.
nice strawman … bad math … 400-280 = 120 … we started at about 280 PPM … we haven’t added “more” than 280 …
You’re missing the fact that roughly half of the emitted CO2 has been reabsorbed into the earth and oceans which doubles the number for emitted CO2. That alone makes your number 43%, which is still hardly “a pittance”,
The present CO2 count is actually 421, putting your percentage calculation method which ignores absorbed CO2, at over 50 %. I don’t know many who would call that a “pittance”.
Which is why the warmistas are always so hysterical. They’re merely following the old legal mantra. If you have the law on your side pound the law, if the facts are on your side, pound the facts. If neither is on your side pound the table. Since the facts are not on their side, they must resort to histrionics and censorship.
Nobody will invest a penny in Canada without huge government subsidies because of over regulation.
Hundreds of billions of $$ have left Canada as a result, forcing the government to import millions of foreign nationals to keep the economy afloat. Driving housing prices beyond impossible.
Its even worse than that. They used to somewhat honor contracts and “grandfathering”, that no longer is true. You could have a set of Regulations in one hand, and your compliance and lobbying officers will assure you that the i’s and j’s have been dotted, the grifters and shakedown artists paid, and the final approving document is pending signing once the check has cleared the bureaucrat’s bank account and his worthless spawn has been given her first highly compensated sinecure.
You pass this along to your investors and await the ACH payments to secure contracts with suppliers and laborers, when all of a sudden more grifters parachute down from the skies and threaten the project with all of their demands, bribes and lawsuits.
The courts, being uniformly and utterly corrupt, allow these specious lawsuits and last minute alterations to regulations to move forward and you end up diverting huge sums of money to your lobbyists and legal teams to clear this next hurdle. In the meantime, you are being sued by your suppliers for breech, your reputation is being destroyed, and Leftist “journalists” are taking pot shots at you and your company through social media hoping to score cheap virtue signaling points by “speaking truth to power”.
Investors are now fleeing because of rumors of not being ESG/DEI compliant enough (a truly amorphous mutating “definition”), the bank is calling about the expiration of the loan offer and how rates will nearly double and now your HR team is stirring a mutiny because you aren’t green-lighting enough Diversity Hires.
Wash, Rinse, Repeat.
There is a pipeline from Alberta to Vancouver. After 10+ years of private industry trying to get approval for a $2 billion dollar expansion the Trudeau government bought the pipeline for $4 billion. The project is now at $33 billion and still not finished. Peak oil or peak incompetence?
Peak income for some.
Ferd, get with the gov’t program. $4Bn budget, $33Bn spent, is economic stimulus…not incompetence. You’ve got to learn to think like a gov’t bureaucrat instead of someone with “workin’-at-the-carwash-blues”.
Proof positive that government involvement in the markets is a surefire way to destroy a project.
To generate enough energy from wind to power the US will significantly reduce wind speeds. The idea that this will not affect climate over a vast area is preposterous.
I’ve said this many times. It’s truly ironic that not a moment’s thought has been given to the environmental consequences OF wind and solar ‘power.’
Both in terms of weather patterns and on food chains with the mass slaughter of insects, birds, bats, etc.
a few good cyclones might fix that with luck?
“For its part, the government maintains that there is no available scientific evidence that clearly proves a causal link between offshore wind development and the large increase in whale deaths”
hmmm… so now “no available scientific evidence that clearly proves a causal link” will be a deciding factor? hmmm
Yeah, now all they need to do with that reasoning is apply it to the alleged “climate driving power” of atmospheric CO2!
QED!
the rather recent and high number whale /other deaths, if anywhere else would have people having hysterics ie the rivers being UNdamned due to some insignificant smelt in a tiny area.
the large amount of depth charges and work required to create the bases alone would be a real problem to cetaceans, and the numbers here are volumes higher than for an oil gas rig or pipeline
nice to see them being hoist on their own petard;-))
The law of unexpected consequences in full swing.
Yep.
NEPA lawsuits are also one of the reasons why we don’t have big long electric transmission lines across the US.
China builds giant sets of coal plants near coal mines, then transmits the power to cities. We move the coal to smaller sets of coal plants and transmit power locally.
Every environmental model wants to build giant fleets of wind turbines in the Midwest and transmit it to cities.
The same laws that prevent the clumped coal or the new gas lines prevent the regional wind ambitions.
Neither party can solve the problem because it would help their opponents too much.
Bottom line: What exactly is the optimum temperature of the earth???
the silly thing is the average global temperature is a nonsense measurement …
fun fact … if you sit in a bathtub up to your neck in water maintained at that temperature it will kill you thru hypothermia within 6 hours …
excuse me … but … “high-tension electrical cables undersea” … cables laid on the seabed are not high tension anything … they are by their very nature NOT under tension …