By David Wojick
A bad idea is emerging in the “renewables” world, namely that projects can buy their way out of destroying natural habitats. The wind and solar projects still destroy the natural habitats they are built on but they fund a magic wand that somehow supposedly creates new compensating habitat someplace else. Not really.
The fallacy here is that every acre in America already has a habitat. You can change an acre’s habitat from one form to another but not create one. It is a zero sum game.
There is a long standing, highly specialized development offset program that helps make the point. This is wetlands protection under section 404 of the Clean Water Act. Wetlands are deemed to be so special that filling one in for development can be offset by creating one someplace else.
But if you convert dry land to wetland you have destroyed the dry land habitat. So the amount of habitat destruction is not reduced, just the amount of wetland destruction.
The supposed renewables habitat destruction offset does nothing like the 404 program. The renewables developer simply pays to have habitat created someplace else which is impossible. For reference these programs are often called Biodiversity Offsetting which sounds nice.
Such a program might create habitat somewhere that matches that destroyed by the renewables project but that requires destroying the present habitat of the offset site. For example creating a woodland by destroying a grassland. Or vice versa, bulldozing a forest to create a grassland. This might even mean destroying farmland.
Clearly this is nonsense. It is a form of indulgences, which means paying for sin, in this case the sin of habitat destruction. Because solar and wind certainly destroy the habitat they are developed on.
It gets even worse with offshore wind, which has actually been proposed. Suppose a 100 square mile offshore wind array destroys a fishery. There is no way to go someplace else and create an equivalent fishery. Fisheries are found not made.
Nor is this offshore wind offset impossibility limited to fisheries. Wind turbines are projected to create wake effects that reduce the productivity of downward marine feeding grounds. This depletion can adversely affect the entire local food chain. We cannot simply go elsewhere and increase productivity.
Note that floating wind is even worse in this regard. An array of giant floating turbines requires an immense underwater web of mooring lines. This web might simply fence out the larger marine animals, rendering their habitat uninhabitable.
Which brings us to what is likely the worst case when it comes to the impossibility of offsetting habitat destruction on land or sea. The case is that of endangered species occupying the renewables development site. If their habitat is destroyed by development one cannot simply move them to some other newly prepared site far away. Nor can one build a distant habitat and expect them to come to it.
Which makes floating wind’s destructive impact on endangered species habitat the worst of the worst case. In particular there is the recent federal leasing of floating wind sites off of Maine and Massachusetts in the Gulf of Maine. The Gulf is designated as critical habitat for the desperately endangered North Atlantic Right Whale. The critical habitat lost from floating wind development cannot be offset, period.
In summary all that supposed habitat destruction offsets for renewables development can do is create the fiction that the destruction is okay. As with indulgences the sin has been paid for but only on paper.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Being from an fishing/lobstering family in Maine I couldn’t agree more. Yet no politician seems to really care. We are being regulated out of business as it is, offshore wind is just another nail in our coffin.
As a fellow Mainer, I wonder what the payoff for Janet Mills will be.
She’s the worst governor in the history of the Pine Tree State.
Expose the fraud.
Yes by coincidence I got onto this issue because Maine has a draft offset bill in process. It repeatedly refers to fisheries but you cannot create a fishery someplace where none exists to replace the fishery destroyed by a hundred square mile floating wind array. It is a cruel joke.
Fire up all fossil fuel and nuclear generators, build new fossil fuel and nuclear generators, remove all wind and solar from the grid. There fixed it for you no indulgences required.
This is relevant.
https://rumble.com/v63c702-trust-the-real-science-about-climate-change.html?e9s=src_v1_upp
“But if you convert dry land to wetland you have destroyed the dry land habitat.”
And that “new” wetland just will never be like a real wetland. The odds are, in my opinion after working half a century in forests, that it may not even survive. The natural forces that create a real wetland are unlikely to be present- maybe some engineer thinks so- but I doubt it.
A tremendous amount of natural wetland in the continental US has been destroyed by draining in order to build upon it or to remove it as a place where mosquitoes or other undesirables live. Thus the idea of creating wetlands where none currently exist is not so esoteric an idea as, for instance, creating a new habitat for the Right Wales. If some conditions are altered on or around former wetlands, that former wetland might reappear with little effort from humans. OF course if the purpose of the indulgence is to help some threatened species whose home is about to be wiped out, it might not be that the recreated wetland is in any way helpful to that threatened species any more than designating some other tract of ocean actually helps the Right Whale.
Important habitat changes are converting desert to crop raising using irrigation, and increasing human population of hot arid land made possible with AC and fresh water exploitation. The combination has resulted in a steady increase in global average water vapor. A sudden increase in the rates around 1965 has contributed to the rapid increase in average global temperature since then. The increase in WV can explain all of the increase in average global temperature attributable to humanity since before 1900. The average global temperature increase since then correlates with CO2 increase and has fooled many into mistakenly assuming that the temperature increase was caused by CO2 increase.
The world increase in fresh water use has been determined and reported by Aquastat, sponsored by the UN, and the WV increase is measured by NASA/RSS using satellite based instrumentation.
The mistake in attribution of climate change has lead to the denunciation of fossil fuels, wasteful and sometimes disastrous applications of so-called renewable energy, and compromising the reliability of electrical power.
Water use and population increase.
Landscape changes are most likely the largest human climate change factors by far but their effects are primarily regional, not global. Of course by choosing a false measure of the globe, such as the markedly adjusted temperature average, it is obviously possible to bamboozle a good many people, and almost all western politicians, into believing something that is just make believe.
“The mistake in attribution of climate change has lead to the denunciation of fossil fuels, wasteful and sometimes disastrous applications of so-called renewable energy, and compromising the reliability of electrical power.”
You’re assuming it’s a mistake.
Don’t know why the down vote (I cancelled it). Unless I’m way off, I don’t think this comment is agreeing with the attribution and denunciation. I think he’s pointing that the “attribution of climate change…” was done on purpose and therefore was not a mistake.
David Wojick,
Eloquently stated, thank you.
Experience is more important than conjecture.
Geoff S
Visual pollution of landscapes on scales and in localities incomparable with traditional energy supply methods is never costed into LCOE constructs for wind & solar.
And yet, “Social Cost Of Manmade CO2 Emissions” is unremittingly pushed in cost of AGW propaganda constructs.
What’s up with that?
Just using the statement about wetlands as an example. The truth applies to any type of habitat. This type of indulgence actually destroys two habitats. Of course the truth is that most human developments destroy a habitat of some kind. The spirit of the law is that critical habitats for special limited in kind populations not lead to the destruction of that population.
And a major if not the major source of methane
Say 3 Hail Marys, my child, and go and sin no more.
Sure, that works.
What the heck is that supposed to mean?
This post reminded me of an Akron girl that went to London and established a music career, namely Chrissie Hynde (The Pretenders). Returning home, she provided a song: My City Was Gone
She said: “This song is about my beautiful home town. Akron, Ohio.”
It seems to me the idiots dreaming up this nonsense have been on the 420 project 😉
It is a form of indulgences, which means paying for sin,
Oh dear, oh dear. I wish that people who referred to Indulgences would actually bother to do some simple research and find out what exactly an Indulgence is and how one can be received.
You know it’s a metaphor right? it’s fine, we get the gist…
I took your advice, and it seems the more proper application of the metaphor would be the abuse of indulgence that Martin Luther condemned, that is when the wealthy paid for absolution with no real contrition attached to it. It was merely virtue-signaling to appease authority and satisfy the public image. Is that correct?
You didn’t pay for absolution. It was in place of doing a good deed once you repented and we’re forgiven. If you had every intention to do it again, you weren’t repentant.
That is exactly my point. The practice was abused by the corrupt. Sound familiar?
Indulgences is not a bribe to be allowed to sin. You confess, ask for forgiveness, it’s given then some sort of act of repentance. Mortal sins that the priest can’t forgive can not be paid for absolution. Pretty sure driving an SUV is a mortal sin.
As always, just follow the money.
Any desecration is justified by those for whom the reward is high enough.