By David Wojick
We now know offshore wind sonar surveys are a likely cause of whale deaths. For details, see my prior article.
Simply put, a significant fraction of authorized harassments likely causes whales to be killed.
The question is how should the Federal approval process for offshore wind surveys be restructured to incorporate this new whale-death knowledge? One obvious possibility is to simply ban the practice. That works for me, but may be too extreme to pull off.
If a certain number of whale deaths is deemed allowable, here is the outline of a death allocation procedure. Included are the other protected marine species for which sonar-induced deaths might be established, as well as harassment from other offshore wind activities. This is basically a death budget for the offshore wind program.
There are three offshore zones for which the following six steps should be done — Atlantic, Pacific and Gulf of Mexico.
1. The federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) identifies the existing leases and leases in process or likely to become so. For each lease, they estimate the potential generating capacity of each as well as the likely technologies and life cycles thereof.
2. The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) determines the harassment potential over time for each lease, for each exposed endangered and protected species. All relevant forms of harassment are considered, including noise, wake effects, and physical presence.
3. NMFS determines the mortality impact of the combined harassment for all leases on each species. The new statistical procedure pioneered by Professor Gerasoulis likely plays a major role here.
4. NMFS determines the allowable amount of harassment that will have no adverse effect on the population of each species.
5. NMFS and BOEM jointly develop an administrative procedure for allocating the allowable harassment authorization to the leases. If Step 4 cannot be done, I suggest the allowable amount for all leases combined be limited to ten percent or less of the exposed population for each species. We need a default limit on allowable deaths.
6. NMFS allocates harassment authorizations in accordance with the established procedure. These allocations may be adjusted over time as knowledge and technology changes.
No development that creates harassment can occur without authorization. Note that the numerous planned and in development offshore wind projects are at very different stages of federal development:
- Operational
- Under construction
- Approved for construction
- In the process of approval
- Leased but not yet applied for approval
- Not yet leased
Projects in different stages might get different allocation treatment, especially the advanced projects that already have big authorizations that now have to be restricted.
Of course lots of death research is now needed. This includes for other critters besides whales, especially dolphins, whose harassment numbers are huge. It also includes the other stages of development besides sonar surveys. For example, construction harassment allocation numbers run ten times or more greater than survey numbers. Then, there is operations harassment, which NMFS has yet to recognize.
The Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA) needs to be rethought as well. It clearly was never designed to handle the hundreds of thousands of harassment authorizations that are being doled out to the offshore wind developers. This is painfully true now that we know numerous whales are being killed because of harassment.
The big question is whether unavoidable yet deadly offshore wind harassment is even legal under the MMPA and the Endangered Species Act.
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So 10 authorizations each with a 10% allocation is good?
Seems likely to calculate to extinction.
No 10% is the budget limit for all projects combined. Past authorizations combined exceed 200% of the severely endangered Right Whale population so this is a big constraint.
amount for all leases combined
I missed that. Good catch.
But favoring the subsidy mining wind developers is the highest priority, always, and we never cared about whales anyway? So seems to be the opinion of the Green Blob and the Biden Administration, if there is any practical difference.
Trump has promised to stop this. This budget process might make a good EO.
Trump has promised to bring back coal. His promises are quite worthless.
If Trump can bring back coal, it would be massively beneficial to the USA.
Never going to catch China and India, though.
Yes, and one might ask, why they would value the lives of whales any more than the lives of people?
Yes, the Eco-Nazis are, at their core, anti-human, so expecting them to value the lives of whales, raptors, bats, etc. may be unrealistic.
We should just make sure to strip them of the cloak of being referred to as “environmentists” since they are nothing of the kind.
Whale injury and death was well established by the early 1990s. As a consequence at that time, the Navy restricted operation of Navy sonars in areas write whales lived or traveled.
Surveys do that if whales are seen from the boat and they have spotters onboard but they live underwater so this is almost useless.
I served aboard an ASW craft back in the early 70’s. Lots of cold war gear and
twidgets. One device we had was a towable sonar transducer that looked like a large black rubber
hose hundreds of feet long that when deployed it could do several things.
One of which involved 2 other ships. We would make this thing beep and the other
ships would hear the echo. It was said that we could detect a Russian sub from the
other side of the Pacific on full power. That thing could kill whales, dolphin ect when used full power.
This Navy has known about the sonar impacts on whales for many decades. Thats part
of the reason they invented things like the MAD units and such.
Biased Rules and Regulations, anyone? When I was working with Pegasus Gold, at their gold mine Florida Canyon, in Nevada, here’s what happened if a dead bird, of any kind, was discovered anywhere on the entire operations area: The bird is photographed as it lay dead, then preserved in a refrigerator, then the Nevada Department of Wildlife AND the EPA were notified, then several agents visited the dearly departed, then they toured the potential crime scene, then they took the bird away for autopsy, including chemical analysis for cyanide, then they wrote a report, and asked the mine staff for comments.
“.. then several agents visited…”
___________________________________
Several agents??? I bet it’s pretty easy to make sure
there are dead birds to be found and investigated.
Job security is a powerful motivator.
All that must have been expensive- all for a single dead bird.
I’m betting that all the studies can also point the finger at off shore oil. And if it does, that will be all we her about. The usual activists will be out in their boats with sonar equipment documenting how much noise an oil platform puts out while ignoring all the windmills.
Offshore oil and gas are getting almost no authorizations so they do not make a lot of dangerous noise. Wind surveys are enormous because they include all possible cable routes to land. I objected to one where the wind site area was about 130 sq mi while the survey area was 2,500 sq miles. Ridiculous.
Harassment should also include impact during deconstruction, removal, and restoration. That’s the standard required for the mining industry, so no less should be required from industrial wind operators.
And they should be required to post a bond adequate for DR&R
From what I have seen and heard of wind farm contracts, the best you can expect is removal of the turbine itself. I do not see any way they can remove the foundation which is reinforced concrete which will remain in the ground forever, or at least until geological processes recycle it to limestone.
And that DR&R should be doubled if Democrats have a majority of either the Senate or the House, and quadrupled if they control any two of the Senate, the House and the POTUS to account for added inflation.
So, where are the likes of Attenborough and Packham? Where is ‘save the whale’ Greenpeace?
Answers on a postcard.
It would be nice if all the environmentalists would be consistent with their thought processes.
But it’s no different than vegans who want to starve plants from accessing CO2.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/whales-are-dying-but-not-from-offshore-wind/
https://www.wwf.eu/what_we_do/climate/renewables/offshore_renewable_energy/
https://www.greenpeace.org.au/article/the-low-down-on-whales-and-wind-farms/
Hint: The only whales cfact cares about are exxon & co. And they are, in fact, really endangered by wind.
They are lying as usual. We know wind is killing whales:
https://www.cfact.org/2024/07/22/offshore-wind-serial-whale-deaths-indicated-by-statistical-analysis/
Yet irksome creatures like you want to shut down oil… and go back to whale oil.
Go figure !
“And they are, in fact, really endangered by wind.”
Yep, those offshore wind turbines are going to be a massive danger to whales.
You got that right…. by accident.
Wind is absolutely no danger to Exxon and other real energy providing companies.
Humans, yes that even includes you, will continue to be totally reliant on fossil fuels for many many decades to come.
“Yep, those offshore wind turbines are going to be a massive danger to whales. ”
Especially when there at many thousands of them- tens of thousands which will be necessary to arrive at net zero nirvana.
reply to atrativirus @9:40am… and the post card size is 1″ X “?