“Trekkies” should recall this pithy exchange about endangered humpback whales from the 1986 feature film, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, between Leonard Nimoy’s famous character and actor Catherine Hicks, who played “Dr. Taylor,” the cetologist.
“Mr. Spock” stated, To hunt a species to extinction is not logical; to which “Dr. Taylor” responded, Whoever said the human race was logical? [emphasis, links added]
As the film’s story goes, humpback whales became extinct in the 21st century. The intrepid crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise (actually, they continued from Star Trek III in a commandeered Klingon starship), led by William Shatner’s “Captain James Kirk,” had to time travel from the 23rd century to the mid-1980s.
The mission was to retrieve humpbacks to repopulate the species to save planet Earth from a powerful alien probe three centuries hence.
Instead of whale hunters, “renewable” energy is threatening a genuine, not fictional, diminution of humpbacks in the 21st century.
Growing evidence suggests sonar waves from wind turbines planted in the ocean off the Atlantic coast are debilitating whales, dolphins, and other marine life, leading to their premature demise.
David Wojick, Ph.D., who taught at Carnegie Mellon University and served in the U.S. Naval Research Lab, writes that sonar harassment is a clear and present danger to whales by “inducing things like deafness and deadly behavior,” including whales incurring infection and fleeing into shipping lanes and fishing entanglements.
At this writing, 13 humpback whales in the calendar year 2023 have washed ashore from Maine to Florida, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which is already approaching last year’s total of 19.
Humpback whales are not the only species dying. Right whales also have washed ashore dead. More than two dozen whales since December have died in the mid-Atlantic region alone.
Since January 2016, when nine offshore lease sales proceeded in the mid-Atlantic with more to follow, NOAA acknowledged that “elevated humpback whale mortalities have occurred along the Atlantic coast” (italics mine), with an annual average death of nearly 30 humpbacks, almost triple the previous yearly norm.
No matter, as the Daily Caller recently reported, the Biden administration is stepping on the gas peddle to fund more offshore wind.
As with the tobacco companies of yesteryear that disputed their product caused cancer, Biden’s NOAA and climate change cohorts are deniers, claiming there is “no evidence” offshore wind sites are harming whales.
Rather, the agency attributes some whale fatalities to “premortem vessel strike,” while conceding “more research is needed.”
Chris Oliver, NOAA Fisheries Assistant Administrator, said, “protection and conservation of these endangered whales [are] especially important given the reduced rate of calving, the rapid decline in population in just a few years, and the evidence of a continued high rate of mortality.”
So, last summer a working group was formed with his counterparts in Canada called the “Atlantic Large Whale Take Reduction Team” to reduce whale “entanglements in trap/pot fisheries.”
A new team of bureaucrats to save the whales! Should we feel better? Mr. Oliver does. He wrote that he is “feeling positive” about the goals of “conserving and restoring this species.”
More whales are still dying unnecessarily since Mr. Oliver and NOAA are missing the [whale] in the room by failing to acknowledge any culpability of offshore wind turbines.
The rub is, if they did, it would be religious heresy in the Biden administration, so they obfuscate.
Federal bureaucrats may have civil service protection, but still, they dare not risk climate-change apostasy by raising concerns about wind turbines mortally injuring whales.
Such could lead to a transfer to the Aleutian Islands, a court-martial, or the guillotine, figuratively speaking.
NOAA is not the only entity in fatuous disbelief. Major media outlets and organizations that fanatically promote climate doom and its corresponding political agenda such as Greenpeace and the New York Times are circling the wagons.
Yahoo News claimed that “scientists and environmental groups say there is no evidence linking the [offshore wind turbines] to the deaths” of whales.
At the very least, there needs to be a moratorium on the construction of offshore wind turbines, which from a climate perspective alone are ineffective and a colossal waste, and are now hazardous to the largest mammals on the planet.
Indeed, U.S. Representatives Chris Smith and Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey and a dozen mayors in that state are demanding just that, along with a growing number of conservation groups, CFACT among them.
The salient question is how can the federal government and professed environmentalists, which for decades bent over backward to deny the construction and development over snails, owls, salmon, and sundry rodents, continue blithely with wind turbines that are demonstrably contributing to “elevated” whale deaths?
“Dr. Taylor,” the cetologist in Star Trek IV, has the response with a present-day twist: “Whoever said the [climate change clergy] was logical?”
Read more at Daily Caller
Wind Turbines are not Healthy for Birds Whales and other living things
Nor are they healthy for the poor rubes who live in the country near these monstrosities. The low-frequency hum they make is not healthy over the long term but since they vote republican they don’t count.
We’ve come full circle.
From “Save the Whales” to “Damn the Whales”
We saved the whales (that’s good) only to sacrifice them to Gaia a generation later.