US Bureau of Ocean Management report says whales, dolphins, birds and bats can all be injured by wind turbine construction, and offshore fishing harmed.
Joe Rogan’s interview with President Donald Trump certainly covered a wide-range of topics.
While my colleague Mike LaChance discussed the interview, as the podcast touched upon the subject of whale deaths associated with offshore wind farm construction, I thought I would chime in here.
I have noted the spate of whale deaths recorded along the East Coast. At one point, New Jersey Republicans demanded that construction on offshore wind farm projects be halted for up to 60 days to see if it reduced the number of whales washing up dead.
The moratorium did not go through. In fact, Federal authorities approved the construction of up to 195 wind turbines off New Jersey’s coast in July of this year.
With this in mind, let’s focus on “Donald Trump, Whale Psychiatrist”.
Specifically, here is what Trump said during the interview.
“They say the wind drives them mad. It’s a vibration issue because those structures are as tall as 50-story buildings… The wind is howling, objects are moving, creating vibrations and noise. You know what I want to be? A whale psychiatrist.
The noise drives the whales absolutely nuts. They are being washed up on the beaches, but oddly, the environmentalists remain silent on this.”
Trump has been an advocate for keeping America clean and healthy. He has not advocated for the anti-carbon push based on pseudoscience and the rush into green energy projects put forth by environmentalists.
Trump attacked environmental measures that he says harm the U.S. economy throughout the interview. By claiming that “a cottage industry of environmentalists and lawyers” thrives on fighting enterprises like fracking, he contended that environmental lobbying impedes economic progress.
Trump said, “Clean air and water are important, but U.S. economic vitality is suffering,” when Rogan questioned him about striking a balance between environmental effect and economic development.
Admittedly. the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has officials saying they have found no evidence linking offshore wind turbines to whale deaths. Furthermore, Benjamin Laws from NOAA Fisheries Office of Protected Resources stated, “There is no evidence indicating that any equipment utilized for offshore wind projects could directly cause whale deaths.”
However, a new report from the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) has just released a new report that said whales, dolphins, birds and more can be exposed to “unavoidable adverse impacts” by the construction of offshore wind farms. The BOEM was required to conduct an impact assessment for six wind farm sites that were previously approved off New Jersey/Long Island.
Specifically, in regards to whales, this is what the 620 page report listed as “potential unavoidable harms” during construction:
- Increased risk of injury (TTS [Temporary Threshold Shifts] or PTS [Permanent Threshold Shifts]) to individuals due to underwater noise from pile-driving activities during construction
- Disturbance (behavioral effects) and acoustic masking due to underwater noise from pile-driving, vessel traffic, aircraft, WTG [Wind Turbine Generation] operation, and dredging during construction and operations
- Presence of structures resulting in hydrodynamic effects that influence primary and secondary productivity and availability of prey and forage resources.
- Increased risk of individual injury and mortality due to vessel strikes.
- Increased risk of individual injury and mortality associated with fisheries gear.
The “potential adverse impacts” also include those on bats, birds, sea turtles, as well as commercial and recreational fishing. However, “experts” assure everyone that this effects are only temporary and everything will go back to normal when construction ends.
A BOEM spokesman said the federal agency is required to list all the “potential unavoidable adverse impacts” associated with wind farms off New Jersey. He also said the risks can be mitigated through the measures they listed here.
“Populations are expected to recover completely when stressors are removed,” BOEM wrote. BOEM also said if wind turbine construction is spaced out, and does not happen at all six sites at once, the sound damage from underwater pile driving will be reduced.
I will simply point out that when a whale dies, its impact is not temporary. For an administration that is supposed to be worried about the environment and endangered species, it appears that Team Biden is eager to overlook serious consequences for both if it suits its interests.
If offshore windfarms were the sole energy solution necessary for the safety and security of this country, perhaps certain environmental trade-offs could be justified. However, as we have seen with the Vineyard Wind Farms project, the technology is not perfected, and we are in jeopardy of permanently harming the coastline without substantial gains in either affordable or reliable energy.
It turns out Donald J. Trump, Whale Psychiatrist, is at least directionally correct in his diagnosis.
If he prevails in the election, I hope that pseudoscience used to generate destructive policies will be replaced by real science and eco-activist bureaucrats will be replaced with real scientists and honest researchers.
I fear it is going to take the country decades to recover from the green energy push that has been allowed to go unchecked.
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If stopping offshore wind saves one whale, it would be worth it.
The US Navy agreed to limit SONAR activities to save whales in court after being sued by environmentalists.
The State of California just banned crabbing for the 6th straight year because a whale “might” get entangled in fishing gear.
Why the pass for offshore wind? Because it’s subsidized. Follow the money.
Do the crabbers want to work, or they still getting subsidies?
Trump often gets the primary diagnosis right on bigger issues despite his rather confusing use of language on the detail.
No he doesn’t.
Do you have aguments ?
He doesn’t- being a cultist.
Then it should be easy for you to provide a counter-example or two.
Produce the pee pee tape
I’m imagining your head exploding next Tuesday.
I prefer to think of Trump as the whale “whisperer.”
What does a psychatrists do? Answer: He helps people to get through a crisis.
Trump wants to help the Whales get through the Net Zero crisis.
Benjamin Laws from NOAA Fisheries Office of Protected Resources stated, “There is no evidence indicating that any equipment utilized for offshore wind projects could directly cause whale deaths.”
There’s also no evidence that CO2 can directly, or even indirectly, cause CAGW.
However, the idea that continuous, loud, low frequency reverberations in a medium where sounds travel for thousands of miles, could potentially impact a species that relies on sound for communication and possibly navigation, is a whole lot more likely.
Note too the weasel word “directly.” These people talk about autopsy results when the issue is stress causing deadly behavior. Stress is mental.
Here is an analogy. You throw exploding firecrackers at a dog. It flees into the street and is hitby a car. The car killed the dog but you caused the death. Sonar surveys and pile driving are very much like firecrackers.
Low frequency operational vibration can also be maddening.
ESA doesnt care about direct. Indirect is enough.
This asshat knows that and for some reason doesnt care.
If i do something to my ditch that may impact incects that may impact non endangered fish that may impact threatened fish the NMFS hacks will gladly crawl up my ass to make me repent.
WILL “impact a species that relies on sound for communication and possibly navigation, is a whole lot more likely.”
No question about it. Conditions such as “continuous, loud, low frequency reverberations, where sounds travel for thousands of miles”. Observe any human, or animal, or those in the category ‘Aves’, when there is a loud sound. “Continuous”? Devastating.
The froth of Khan
Transport for London plans to set up dedicated solar farms to power Tube network https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/transport-for-london-plans-to-set-up-dedicated-solar-farms-to-power-tube-network/ar-AA1thhzp
Where is the money coming from?
The pockets of Londoners.
Too late, we just had the budget… ruinous stuff
from that link
“The purpose-built solar farms could provide up to 64 megawatts of clean energy, which is around 5% of the electricity needed to run the London Underground network, it said.”
Wow, 5%! And how many acres will that take- maybe 500? At this rate there will be no more “green space” in the UK.
Who needs food anyway.
Go read The Population Bomb.
Argh stuff every time
The Great North Road Solar Park proposed for development near Newark, Nottingham, UK has a potential capacity of 800MW and will cover an area of 7,166 acres (more than 11 square miles)
The London array would therefore be about 573 acres all things being equal.
Gone are all the peaceful country lanes.
It is cloudy today, no trains!!
Exactly
Is he planning to build it in Hyde Park? 🙂
It has been known for decades that wind turbines cause ‘noise’ at audible and inaudible frequencies, a harm that has been connected to human suffering and fatality. It follows that creatures with hearing at least as sensitive as human hearing would also suffer. How much suffering our turbines cause other creatures is not on the list of things to do among the nasty pieces of work who claim to be green since they are, apparently, better than gods when it comes to cleanliness.
The hypocrisy of the greens knows no boundaries especially brain dead idiots like Miliband who really hasn’t a clue.
In the question period of this talk, Mariana Alvez Pereira claimed that, unlike sunken ships and oil platforms, offshore wind turbines are a biological desert. This needs to be investigated because, if true, it would support those who claim infrasound is biologically harmful.
The picture on the right- I see Trump with the next EPA administrator. 🙂
If it weren’t the Right whale in danger, alarmists would have a different opinion. The fact that wind energy is unreliable, expensive and not needed should be enough.
They’d worry more for the Left Whale. 🙂
Exactly.
When you kill the right whales, whatever survives obviously is left.
😎
I would have thought the Sperm whale.😎
Forty percent of all shipping cargo consists of fossil fuels
https://qz.com/2113243/forty-percent-of-all-shipping-cargo-consists-of-fossil-fuels
Ship strikes are one of the leading causes of human-induced mortality for several whale populations around the globe.
https://wwfwhales.org/ship-strikes-underwater-noise
I wonder what could reduce the amount of ship traffic…
Pipelines.
Have nothing and be happy.
Whales were being hunted to extinction before fossil fuels came along.
Fossil Fuels saved the whales.
So true.
Great point! Will it be ‘noted’?
Offshore wind causes whale killing ship strikes.
https://www.cfact.org/2022/09/27/how-to-kill-whales-with-offshore-wind/
Written over two years ago and sent to a dozen top NOAA people. No response.
We need shipping but offshore wind is worse than useless.
It is amusing that I have posted this reply to MUN several times but he, like NOAA, just ignores the facts and keeps saying the same stupid stuff.
Then stop using fossil fuel, or things obtained from fossil fuels, every second of your life. !!
Break your complete reliance on fossil fuels.
Except you won’t, because you are a mindless hypocrite.
Terrorism (inclusive of economic…); Reduction of demand through reduction of population; Govt edict. Not necessary to be in that order, but all are related.
All that aside, what else have you got to justify your hypocracy?
We can detect ships, leaving San Fransisco bay, in the Hawaiian islands,and tell you the name of the ship. There is a SOFAR layer in the ocean that greatly enhances transmission of sound. It varies in depth dependent on temp, pressure, and salinity from 600 to 1200 meters with the shallowest numbers in high latitudes.
There is no reason to think that whales, who make their living in that environment, using sound to find prey, are immune to the windmills intrusion.
We are led by stupid people, who get what little they know from stupid media, who get their ‘facts’ from stove piped ‘experts’ that know less than the whales.
One thought, grist for the mill as it were:
Assume for discussion that we can design and construct an off shore wind turbine that generates perfect acoustic noise, that perfection being defined as absolutely having no effect on any, any marine fauna.
The windmill, in operation, will have wear and tear introduced. Normal, of course, but it alters the frequency spectrum of the acoustics generated.
So, the question is, given we can design and build a perfect wind turbine, is it possible to design it to remain perfect for 5, 10, 20, 50 years?
If the answer is no, then what monitors, etc., and maintenance and repair schedule, and costs of course, are needed to recalibrate the acoustic generation back to perfect?
BTW, perfection is unobtainium. Perhaps one could be perfect, but maintaining that level of quality control and tolerance precision over thousands of turbines produced by dozens of manufacturers and assembled by dozens of construction crews is impossible.
A lot like humans?
The difference between one of Trump’s “conspiracy theories” and the truth is about six months to a year, sometimes more. Like the voting fraud that he is still being attacked for. Proof of fraud in the 2020 election keeps coming out, including videos, and the consistent answer is “not enough fraud to swing the election” but since they have done nothing but recount the same ballots over and over as “proof” they really don’t know.
Like this?
Ex-county clerk jailed for tampering with voting machines
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cr75mpkm7nro
Fact Check: Trump’s Georgia Call to Raffensperger
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/fact-check-trumps-georgia-call-raffensperger
The big nit is there is a vast difference between voter fraud and election fraud.
The media conflated voter fraud, which happens at an acceptably low level and election fraud.
When an election official (it happened) waives the requirement to verify signatures, that is election fraud. This does not mean the ballots were invalid and it also does not mean the ballots were legitimate. If means the verification, which is necessary, was not performed.
There were many identified discrepancies and a whole lot of conspiracy theories that were never properly investigated and if they were, not reported with sufficient clarity to dismiss concerns.
Two I personally investigated occurred in Michigan. One was the upstate district that had a problem and Wayne Co. Unfortunately for the first, the Trump lawyers blasted the Dominion machines. That turned out to be a human error. 2 weeks before the election the ballot was changed. The wrong configuration thumb drive was used meaning the scanner was programmed for the wrong ballot. The election official saw unrealistic results. Investigated, reported, corrected the tally, then did proof tests that the wrong configuration would give the initial results.
Wayne Co. was subject to a spread sheet analysis of the total voting versus mail in. On first glance it looked concerning. An election official said the person who did the analyses did not understand how elections in Wayne Co. were conducted, but did not clarify how that was. I broke the data into Detroit and the rest of Wayne Co. Detroit was a different process. With that, I was able to confirm nothing wrong.
I have not had the time or the means to go through the more than 5 dozen reported discrepancies.
I find it interesting that Pelosi in a Congressional review in 2018 determined Dominion machines were not good enough for an election, but in 2020 they were perfect. I find it interesting that the review committee that announced 2020 was the most secure election in history had, as a voting member, a Dominion representative. That report did not define what secure meant.
End of rant.
My understanding is that most of the mal
practice complaints were lodged with courts which had no jurisdiction to hear complaints of that nature.
So evidence and witness statements were never taken up.
they have found no evidence linking offshore wind turbines to whale deaths.
========
it is hard to find something when your job depends on not finding it.
“…without substantial gains in either affordable or reliable energy.” and zero impact on global temperature. The wake downwind is harmful to ocean biota.