Can you imagine the outcry if an oil and gas company was given legal permission to injure hundreds of whales and thousands of other marine mammals such as dolphins in pursuit of offshore drilling? For maximum Greta-inspired wailing, the oil field could be located in the middle of territory where the last 300 North Atlantic right whales congregate, and a permit is in place to potentially harm 20 members. In May, Vineyard Wind will begin building a massive offshore wind farm numbering 62 giant turbines, 15 miles off the coast of Massachusetts. Permits to harass sea creatures have been secured – not a squeak of concern from green activists and mainstream media.
The Vineyard Wind project is only a small part of the planned industrialisation of America’s eastern coastal waters, as the Biden Administration ramps up a commitment to so-called green energy. Of course it is not green, and many now argue that it is becoming increasingly clear that the most valuable economic transfers gained from wind are the subsidies it attracts from electricity consumers.
The Vineyard Wind project will take about a year to complete and will include sonar surveying, massive pile-driving and considerable disturbance of the sea bed. All these activities are likely to harm or injure marine life. Dr. Patrick Moore helped found Greenpeace around 50 years ago and was heavily involved in the campaign to ban commercial whaling. Since 2016, he notes, when sonar surveying started for a planned 1,500 wind turbines on the U.S. Atlantic coast, 174 humpback whales have washed up dead on the shore, an increase of 400% from previous years. He quotes Greenpeace as stating: “At this time, due to lack of evidence suggesting harm from offshore wind development, Greenpeace’s position remains that the best way to protect whales is to create ocean sanctuaries, eliminate single use plastic and stop our dependency on oil and gas.”
If there is no evidence of harm to sea mammals from offshore wind, it is not immediately clear why Vineyard Wind found it necessary to secure a permit to injure thousands of animals during construction of its industrial complex. The permit was issued by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The table below details the species that can be injured up to “Level B harassment” and is titled, “Authorised Numbers of Take, by Species”.
Threats to animals leading to possible injury and death are likely to occur from many causes in what is a huge construction site. Many such casualties are unlikely to be recorded. Heavy traffic on the surface is likely to lead to collisions, while pile-driving poles up to 30 feet in diameter hundreds of feet into the ground will create deafening noise. Engineers working on industrial sites can wear ear protections. Whales and dolphins cannot.
According to Tethys, the U.S. Department of Energy marine renewables database, sound propagates farther and faster in water than in air, which can result in greater consequences for the marine environment. It goes on to note:
Noise may interfere with marine organisms’ communication, navigation, detection of prey, and ability to interact with the environment, as well as causing attraction to or avoidance of devices. Additionally, some marine organisms may be physically harmed from excessive noise exposure (e.g., tissue and nerve damage).
Not a squeak from green activists, as noted, and a deafening silence from mainstream media. According to a Google search, the only mention of Vineyard Wind in the Guardian was in 2021, when it reported approval for the construction. Space was given to the comment from Biden’s Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, that the project, “was an important step towards advancing the Administration’s goals to create good-paying union jobs, while combatting climate change and powering our nation”. Around the same time, HuffPost contented itself with the headline: “Climate Deniers Exploit Endangered Whales in Bid to Kill Offshore Wind”.
Charles Mayo is the Director of the Right Whale Ecology Programme at the Center for Coastal Studies (CCS) in Provincetown. He notes the danger for right whales around human industrial traffic, since they can dive for 15 minutes and be difficult to spot. But Mayo is able to rationalise any concerns, stating: “The future of right whales and these ecosystems is dependent on climate change. We have to change our use of fossil fuels and from what I know, the only solution that has the economic power to actually work at the scale of the problem is offshore wind.” Interestingly, the Save Right Whales Coalition notes that Vineyard Wind was listed as a CCS corporate donor in 2018, and was a corporate sponsor in 2020 and 2021.
Of course, it has long been obvious that green industrialists get a free pass when it comes to assessing the impact of their technologies on the natural world. Batteries to store the power of intermittent wind and solar rely on cobalt mined by children in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Oil and gas is likely to last hundreds of years, but there aren’t enough critical minerals in the world to make lithium ion batteries much past 2050. If offshore wind turbines are an ecological disaster, so are those located onshore. There is growing evidence that millions of bats are being slaughtered every year by them, and numbers are likely to grow as more turbines are built. In addition, large birds such as eagles, kites and owls that rely on wind currents are often caught out by the enormous air fluctuations of windmills, and few live to tell the tale after encountering blade tips that can fly around at 150mph.
Meanwhile, fracking for gas on land is effectively banned in many countries. In the U.K., local fracked gas could replace the country’s large imports and bring considerable economic benefit to deprived areas in the North of England. Pressure to ban has been enormous from both green activists such as Friends of the Earth and mainstream media. No endangered whales would be harmed by fracking, but a few ground-level insects might be inconvenienced. There is also is a danger that micro earth tremors, equivalent to someone falling off a chair, might result.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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Whale extinction was prevented by hydrocarbon usage. Diseases were eradicated largely by the same + sanitation and modern systems. Wind + solar destroy Gaia, and derange the fauna, and by definition are unreliable. ‘The science’ will moan that correlation of such disasters with the bird-choppers/whale killers does not prove causation, their only defense of the stabbinations:
sonar surveying started for a planned 1,500 wind turbines on the U.S. Atlantic coast, 174 humpback whales have washed up dead on the shore, an increase of 400% from previous years.
Wind is the dumbest energy you can have, but the proponents of wind are not really dumb. They are complicit in the deliberate lowering of living standards all over the western world, for political purposes. Yet huge portions of the population still fall for the pretend to save the planet propaganda. —-OK I get it. —–People are very busy with work and family life and they don’t have time to investigate every issue thoroughly. They think the mainstream media News is doing that for them. ———NOPE . It Isn’t. ——But people better wake up soon before their prosperity and freedom is GONE
Agreed. I bloody hate them. They’re an eye sore, kill birds and sea life and I read from time to time of them, or bits of them, collapsing. One recent story where a blade landed on a house. No wonder people are up in arms about them being built, especially near where they live, but here, in a rather windy Netherlands, they just want to build more of the damn things.
https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2022/02/a-lot-of-hot-air-controversy-grows-about-wind-turbines-impact-on-health/
Agree, Varmint. Although solar energy here at 54 °N latitude producing electricity only when least needed must be a close contender for most stupid.
They can’t really make solar pay in the Nevada desert.
Of course, lots of people LOVE the subsidies and possibly the thought that the subsidies are funded largely by stealing money from the poorest and most disadvantaged.
Follow the money, as usual. Or, can be summed up as ‘consequences for the whales and dolphins? Who cares? they don’t vote.
Well, a quick look at this: https://www.bgs.ac.uk/geology-projects/shale-gas/shale-gas-in-the-uk/ and roughly comparing it with the Parliamentary constituencies may provide an answer as to why not develop fracking for methane?
The other idea that is going nowhere at present is tidal power production. Quite a few ideas on the back burner, such as a Swansea lagoon one, an equivalent near Cardiff, or the big boy – the Severn Barrage. Of course, the latter would not be popular with the “greens”, or the wildlife enthusiasts. Nevertheless, the Bristol Channel has one of the highest tidal range variations anywhere in the world.
As someone else BTL said, whale oil has a long history and fell out of favour after the development of the oil trade/ hydrocarbon industry.
Tidal is one of the few ‘alternative’ energy technologies that does work. After a fashion. Look up the Rance Barrier in France. Still going, although almost antique now. Many other schemes, internationally.
I remember one of the two ‘Professors’ in the Civil and Structural Engineering Department at Sheffield University in the mid 1960s giving a lecture about the then latest scheme for a Severn Barrier which would also provide the needed Second Severn Road Crossing. The scheme was scuppered because the Treasury decreed it wouldn’t pay for itself sufficiently quickly.
Considering the brilliance of HMG’s Get Rich Quick wheezes then and now, who knows if the Treasury saved us from the usual bullet, or perhaps missed a great opportunity?
It was also at the time when GangGreen was just starting and there was some wailing and teeth gnashing about the fate of ducks and other wading birds.
Anyway, other schemes like the Swansea barrier, have been proposed since. The fact that our chum Lord Deben (Selwyn Gummer) who headed up the “Independent” Committee on Climate Change, was a great enthusiast (=had direct financial interests) in the scheme gives you a very good idea about how big the bill was going to be for a derisory amount of energy only available only for part of the day.
Chris, some people are pretty large. I would not want to be in the vicinity if they fell off their chairs. What if they all fell at the same time? Apocalypse.
Meanwhile the WWF bleats about 41,000 species threatened with extinction.
300 Right Whales, soon to be decimated, looks like a clear case of deliberate extermination by the Eco Nutters who are pushing the climate change propaganda.
Don’t forget that many of the “species threatened with extinction” have actually not yet been discovered.
I kid you not.
“Can you imagine the outcry…in pursuit of off-shore drilling?”
It’s already started…
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-64943603
2 days ago….US President Joe Biden has approved a major oil and gas drilling project in Alaska that faced strong opposition from environmental activists.
The company behind the Willow project, ConocoPhillips, says it will create local investment and thousands of jobs.
But the $8bn (£6.6bn) proposal faced a torrent of online activism in recent weeks, particularly among youth activists on TikTok.
So it would seem it’s ok with the Greenies to kill animals as long as it’s in the pursuit of the green agenda? In upside down world it doesn’t come as much of a shock or surprise anymore ……
Solar and wind generated electricity was first conceived about 1884(ish) and although there has been some improvement with the generation outputs this has been obtained by improvements in other technologies. The solar and wind generation is still costly, financially, environmentally and intermittent, and cannot be justified by any sensible cost benefit analysis. However, when sense is at a premium, nonsense is in abundance.
Excellent article, love the last two sentences!
I had a very brief flirtation with the general Green thing when it suddenly became very popular in the mid to late 1980s.
It’s now obvious that the whole thing was being orchestrated by a Government committed to destroying Britain’s mining and industrial base, this eco propaganda culminating in Margaret Thatcher’s 1988 speech launching the pseudo-scientific ‘Climate Change’ agenda onto the world’s stage.
One of the many things that turned me resolutely away from the environmentalist ideology and movement was a realisation that Greenpeace was using completely fraudulent propaganda. Its literature would included endless sentimental pictures of cute creatures – polar bears, seals, whales etc – coupled with an apparent determination to prevent their cruel and exploitative treatment by human beings.
When you dug deeper, however it turned out that this protection was only to extend to what they deemed to be modern technological forms of hunting.
The often much crueller and more prolonged killing practices using primitive weapons carried out ‘as part of their traditional way of life by native indigenous peoples’ were not only to be permitted but positively extolled.
So I see nothing has changed in terms of these inherent eco contradictions and hypocrisies.
It’s not earth-tremors or “insect inconvenience” that are the mainstay of the environmental impacts of fracking. It’s the fact that our wastewater treatment infrastructure can’t possibly deal with the vast volume of toxic sludge that results from the chemicals that are pumped into the ground and spewed back out again. This is likely to also affect our water supply, by the way.
However I am in complete agreement that their is neither an environmental OR economic case to be made for large wind farms. The only potential benefactors of such projects are the wind industry and its investors (and perhaps not even them, ever-more reliant as they are on government hand-outs). You and I, the average energy consumer, will inevitably lose out, as will all the massacred wildlife and the desecrated countryside.
According to the EPA, the fracturing fluid, comprising of water, sand and between 0.5-2% chemicals to enhance viscosity, ascetic / formic / boric acid that returns to the surface as ‘flowback’ is stored on site and either treated in situ or recycled. Fracturing is done well below the water table (protected from the borehole by a concrete lining), and where contamination has occurred in the past it has been through negligence.
Given the scrutiny they would receive, it’s likely any companies performing fracking in the UK would be careful not to lose their licenses. Any contamination caused by fracking from small vertical fractures or corroded lining is likely no worse than other forms of mineral extraction and industrial activity.
https://www.epa.gov/uog/process-unconventional-natural-gas-production
Absolutely.
Over a million fracked wells in USA.
Number of problems identified and not resolved to the full satisfaction of the EPA?
Zero.
Sorry, the ‘water pollution’ agit-prop is just the usual 100% GangGreen bullshit.
Easily dealt with in the real world.
We have a Yellow Board for this
Stand in the Park Make friends & keep sane
Sundays 10.30am to 11.30am
Elms Field
near Everyman Cinema & play area
Wokingham RG40 2FE
Yellow Board
Nature and the environment are nothing more a cartoon in the minds of green activists.
Another good piece, Chris, but “someone falling off a chair” overstates the “earthquake” terror that must be avoided according to Potato Ed Davey who imposed the 0.1 magnitude tremor limit to fracking seismicity. (And it was Ed who boasted of having been the Genius who banned fracking, whilst trousering £18,000 a year for his ‘advice’ to a Solar Energy outfit).
O.1 magnitude is something like the sheer terror someone might experience of dropping a large book (only a Bible, certainly not a Book whose scuffing amounts to desecration).
Thankfully at worst endangering only a bruised toe rather than a bruised bum from falling off a chair.
Time to end this ridiculous tree-huggers vs. petrol heads feud that’s being going on for decades. All it has done is leave us nationally dependent on foreign powers and multi-national oil & gas cartels for our energy needs. Britain’s prosperity was based on coal and renewables. It’s only in the last 50 to 100 years that oil and gas have come into the picture, frequently bringing many horrific conflicts (such as the Gulf Wars and Ukrainian War) and brutal regimes (such as in Iran, Saudi Arabia and Angola) to dominate supplies by some seriously dodgy people (Rockefeller, Bush, etc.). Wind, coal, solar, fracking, hydro-electric, North Sea oil & natural gas, nuclear – conduct proper environmental and safety risk assessments with due public consultations and bring them all on!