Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump took aim at the offshore wind industry during a three-hour interview with Joe Rogan last week. [emphasis, links added]
The former president said “windmills” harm whales, and he said he’d eliminate offshore wind power on the first day of his second term.
“I wanna be a whale psychiatrist. It drives the whales fricking crazy. And something happens with them, but for whatever reason, they’re getting washed up onshore and you know, they’re ignored by these environmentalists. But they don’t talk about it.” Trump said.
Trump claimed that it’s the operational vibrations of the massive structures that drive whales “crazy,” but it’s more the construction and vessel activity that experts say is causing the animals harm.
Unavoidable impacts
The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) concluded as much in a new report on the environmental impacts of six wind lease areas off the coasts of New York and New Jersey.
The report finds that noise could harm fish, marine mammals, sea turtles, and birds, resulting in habitat displacement and disruptions to migratory patterns.
The report includes details on mitigation measures that can be taken, but it concludes that offshore wind development “would result in unavoidable adverse impacts.”
Robert Rand, founder of the acoustics consultancy company Rand Acoustics, has surveyed noise levels from pile driving and sonar survey vessels.
Both of his independent studies found that the incidental harassment authorizations, which are permits that offshore wind developers are required to obtain to conduct activities that might threaten marine animals, don’t impose sufficient mitigation requirements to protect marine animals.
Rand told Just the News that the report shows that federal agencies may be backing away from their insistence that offshore wind isn’t harming marine wildlife.
“Any concession by federal agencies that they are injuring marine species is both a step in the right direction and also damning to the agencies charged with implementing the MMPA [Marine Mammal Protection Act] and ESA [Endangered Species Act],” Rand said.
Installation of offshore wind towers requires that 30-foot wide monopiles be pounded into the seabed floor with special ships.
Rand said his studies showed that even with the full complement of noise controls that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) requires, the pile driving makes a sound as loud as 2000-psi seismic airguns.
The equivalent noise level in the air is a 155 mm Howitzer blasting every two seconds, he said.
Rand said developers have no feasible means of noise control, except maintaining sufficient distance from any marine wildlife.
However, NOAA is permitting the machinery inside endangered whale and marine species habitats, so safe distances can’t be maintained.
Read rest at Just The News
So where is Greenpeace as well as the rest of those Eco-Phonies? Way too busy pushing this Global Warming/Climate Change Scam to be bothered too busy wanting to be on some fake news program
As Lynch and Whitehouse in 2015 tried use RICO laws against all Climate Change activists.