Tag Archives: Save the whales

PRESS RELEASE: Whales die while Dominion Energy hides crucial information

From CFACT

Right Whale Female Died Last Week 50 Miles Off Virginia Coast

Dominion Energy Claims Its Whale Protection Information is ‘Confidential and Proprietary’

Three Public Interest Groups File Request Under Freedom Of Information Act To Obtain Dominion Energy’s Plan To Protect Endangered Whales

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

A coalition of three public interest groups— CFACT (The Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow), The Heartland Institute, and the National Legal and Policy Center filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to compel Dominion Energy to reveal the methods it intends to use to protect the critically endangered Right Whale from extinction. Dominion has hidden its species protection plan from public view.

The FOIA request, filed April 2, seeks to compel the Bureau of Energy Management (BOEM) to release two documents that Dominion Energy has filed with BOEM, which explain the procedures the energy giant will use to ensure that its construction of a wind facility off the coast of Virginia will not result in harm to whales and other protected marine species. Dominion has marked these documents as “Proprietary and Confidential Business Information Exempt from Public Disclosure.”

This request is after the reported death March 30 of a critically endangered North Atlantic right whale near Virginia Beach—a female that was accompanied by a newborn calf. This marks the fourth documented North Atlantic Right Whale death in US waters this year. Researchers say there are as few as 350 right whales left in the North Atlantic, with only 70 of those animals being females capable of weaning a calf.

This latest right whale fatality was named “Catalogue No. 1950” by the New England Aquarium. She was at least 35 years old and was last seen alive with her calf off Amelia Island, Florida, on February 16. Experts do not expect the calf to survive without the support of its mother. According to the Clearwater Marine Aquarium’s aerial survey, the mother had successfully raised five prior calves.

On March 24, Heartland, CFACT, and NLPC filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia seeking a preliminary injunction to stop Dominion Energy’s massive wind turbine project off the shore of Virginia. Now, this coalition is asking BOEM for expedited treatment of this request for documents on the grounds that it is “a matter of urgent and compelling public interest.” The group has requested a response to their demand for information in 10 business days rather than the usual 20 business days for less urgent requests.

Dominion Energy has stated in documents filed with BOEM that it intends to begin offshore construction activities no later than May 1. The project, if completed, will consist of 176 turbines, each with blades longer than a football field. The turbines will be manufactured by the Siemens Co. Earlier this year, Siemens took a financial write-down of $4.7 billion due to warranty payments caused by faulty turbine components.

The following statements may be used with attribution. For more information or to speak to any of the principals of this effort, please contact Jim Lakely, Director of Communications at The Heartland Institute, at jlakely@heartland.org or call/text 312-731-9364.

Craig Rucker, President of CFACT, has criticized Dominion’s project as a “get rich quick boondoggle”. He adds: “This is just one more indication of Dominion’s bad faith and attempted cover-up by sidestepping regulations that would not only protect the right whale but also help save many other marine species whose lives will be put in jeopardy by this unwanted and unnecessary project.”

H. Sterling Burnett, Director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center for Climate and Environmental Policy at The Heartland Institute, said: “There is nothing commercially proprietary about the impact of Dominion’s offshore activities on the North Atlantic Right Whale or other protected marine mammals and sea life. And there is nothing proprietary about their efforts to mitigate any impact. Such information is critical to the public’s ability to critically assess the impacts and its ability to comment on them with full knowledge.

“On this issue of fundamental importance, transparency is critical, yet Dominion has made it opaque, and the government, outrageously, has allowed it. Dominion and the government’s position appears to be: ‘Trust us, we are doing nothing wrong.’ But that is simply not good enough. Unless and until Dominion or the government releases the information in Dominion’s Appendices R and FF, and the public is allowed time to digest and comment on it, this project should be stayed by the courts, and all permitting ceased”.

Paul Kamenar, lead counsel for NLPC, said: “Federal regulations prohibit even one human-caused death per year if the right whale is to survive as a species. Robust review of the means by which Dominion intends to achieve that goal is the only way the public will accept the claim by Dominion that their protection of the Right Whale is adequate.”

James Taylor, President of the Heartland Institute, said: “I am totally perplexed why Dominion Energy believes it can obtain public approval of its wind factory by concealing its plan for protection of the right whale. How can protection of the right whale qualify as ‘confidential business information’ when at the same time Dominion is granted monopoly protection and a guaranteed rate of return on its assets?”

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Time To Save the Right Whales From the Green Left?

*Editor’s note: While, as Climate Realism has pointed out previously, here, whales are not threatened by climate change, right whales are confronted with more boat traffic, and are being driven into boat traffic by offshore wind development, especially via sonar testing.

From ClimateRealism

By Craig Rucker

There was a time back in the 1960’s and 70’s when a cause like “Save the Whales” was the exclusive domain of the political left.

But as Bob Dylan might say, “the times they are a changing”.

Three major “conservative” organizations – the National Legal Policy Center, Heartland Institute, and my organization, the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow – recently filed a major lawsuit in a Washington, D.C. federal court to save the Right Whale from facing potential oblivion.

Why aren’t the larger Green groups, unlike the grassroots ones, rallying around the efforts of these organizations to save Right whales?  Good question.  Perhaps it’s because the threat to the remaining 350 of them doesn’t come from Russian, Norwegian, or Japanese whaling vessels, as it did back in the 70’s.  Rather, it is from so-called “Green energy” in the form of offshore wind.  Right whales are being threatened by the Biden Administration’s fast-track plans to hurriedly place 30,000 MW of wind power generation off the Eastern coast, and doing so without the proper sort of environmental impact assessment they might otherwise perform for, say, offshore oil.

The collective decision by our outfits to take the issue of whale protection to Court came after two years of futile attempts to get the Biden Administration to listen. Offshore wind development threatens the nearly extinct North Atlantic Right Whale in various ways, and the government refuses to investigate.

The two agencies which share responsibility for making sure wind development does not harm whales include the Interior Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), which oversees building wind facilities, and the Commerce Department’s National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS or NOAA Fisheries), which enforces the various laws to protect whales. Neither seems intent on doing their job.

In issuing its “biological opinion” last September, for instance, NMFS only examined the impact that each of these projects individually and in isolation would have on the North Atlantic right whale. The agency did not, as it should have, issue a comprehensive and cumulative analysis examining the combined harm which all the projects, together, would inflict on the whales during their annual migration path.

If it had done so, it would have uncovered that dangerous noises generated from several projects combine to create much louder and more dangerous circumstances for marine mammals than noises coming from just a single project. In fact, impacts can combine over time as well, such as when migrating Right Whales are repeatedly forced to go around a dozen wind facilities into heavily trafficked shipping lanes. The risk of being struck by a ship then becomes ten times greater than for a single project.

It’s likely for such reasons the Endangered Species Act specifically calls for assessment of cumulative impacts such as these, but the Biden Administration has ignored this requirement.

BOEM and NMFS say there is no evidence of a threat to whales. But this is just a coverup. The Right Whale population began its rapid decline in 2017, the year offshore wind development began in earnest. The Humpback Whale death rate tripled that very year and has remained abnormally high.

NMFS actually provides some of the strongest evidence. For every wind project they estimate the number of marine mammals by species that will be adversely affected by construction noise, something which they call “Level B Harassment”. For Right Whales the cumulative total of predicted Level B Harassments the government projects, and allows for, is already roughly twice the total population of the mammal … and growing.

Why is this a big deal?  Because such harassment can easily lead to a whale death. This can happen, for example, when the noise level of an operating turbine disrupts the navigation of a marine mammal, driving it into heavy ship traffic or fishing nets. BOEM and NMFS have refused to consider this deadly possibility, even for a single project like Dominion Energy’s windfarm off Virginia Beach, much less cumulatively. Meanwhile more and more whales are dying from ship strikes and fishing net entanglements as offshore wind development recklessly accelerates.

Harassment-caused death is merely one of many potentially deadly threats that BOEM and NMFS refuse to assess.  There are others we have cited, including loss of habitat, reduced food supply, and concentrated ship traffic.  This is why we are asking the Court to require that the government undertake such an investigation, as they are required to do so under the ESA, on all offshore wind projects cumulatively.

“Save the whales” is more than a slogan. It should be a directive our federal agencies are eager to carry out.  But if they won’t do it, then they shouldn’t be surprised to see lawsuits headed their way from every corner of the public interest – including from those of us on the right.

Craig Rucker is co-founder and president of the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow

Originally posted at RealClearPolicy, reposted with permission.

Save the Whales, Kill the Turbines – The Climate Realism Show #104

On episode 104 of The Climate Realism Show, we explain that to save the whales we need to kill these growing large-scale offshore wind projects. These so-called “wind farms” are much larger and do much more environmental damage than most people realize. Covering an area the size of Connecticut and Rhode Island combined, one project off the Mid-Atlantic poses an existential risk to the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale. That is just one of many ocean mammals harassed and killed by these projects that will, at best, provide unreliable and expensive energy. Remember when “save the whales” was the cry of the environmentalists? Now they are fine with a spike in dead whales washing up on our Atlantic beaches as long as the “green energy” agenda continues apace.

The Heartland Institute is part of a lawsuit to stop to a major wind project in the Atlantic and save the right whale. We will talk about that effort with Craig Rucker and Terry Johnson of CFACT, who are also part of the suit. Join them and host Anthony Watts, H. Sterling Burnett, and Linnea Lueken to talk about that, plus the Crazy Climate News of the Week.

Join us LIVE at 1 p.m. ET (12 p.m. CT) for the kind of climate realism you can’t find anywhere else, and join the chat to get your questions answered, too.

Time to save the Right Whale from the Green-Left

From CFACT

By Craig Rucker

Back in the sixties and seventies “Save the Whales” was the exclusive domain of the political left.

As Bob Dylan might say, “the times they are a changin.”

Three major “conservative” organizations – the National Legal Policy Center, Heartland Institute, and my organization, the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow – recently filed a major lawsuit in a Washington, D.C. federal court to save the Right Whale from facing potential oblivion.

Why aren’t the larger Green groups, unlike the grassroots ones, rallying around the efforts of these organizations to save Right whales?  Good question.  Perhaps it’s because the threat to the remaining 350 of them doesn’t come from Russian, Norwegian, or Japanese whaling vessels, as it did back in the 70’s.  Rather, it is from so-called “Green energy” in the form of offshore wind.  Right whales are being threatened by the Biden Administration’s fast-track plans to hurriedly place 30,000 MW of wind power generation off the Eastern coast, and doing so without the proper sort of environmental impact assessment they might otherwise perform for, say, offshore oil.

The collective decision by our outfits to take the issue of whale protection to Court came after two years of futile attempts to get the Biden Administration to listen. Offshore wind development threatens the nearly extinct North Atlantic Right Whale in various ways, and the government refuses to investigate.

The two agencies which share responsibility for making sure wind development does not harm whales include the Interior Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), which oversees building wind facilities, and the Commerce Department’s National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS or NOAA Fisheries), which enforces the various laws to protect whales. Neither seems intent on doing their job.

In issuing its “biological opinion” last September, for instance, NMFS only examined the impact that each of these projects individually and in isolation would have on the North Atlantic right whale. The agency did not, as it should have, issue a comprehensive and cumulative analysis examining the combined harm which all the projects, together, would inflict on the whales during their annual migration path.

If it had done so, it would have uncovered that dangerous noises generated from several projects combine to create much louder and more dangerous circumstances for marine mammals than noises coming from just a single project. In fact, impacts can combine over time as well, such as when migrating Right Whales are repeatedly forced to go around a dozen wind facilities into heavily trafficked shipping lanes. The risk of being struck by a ship then becomes ten times greater than for a single project.

It’s likely for such reasons the Endangered Species Act specifically calls for assessment of cumulative impacts such as these, but the Biden Administration has ignored this requirement.

BOEM and NMFS say there is no evidence of a threat to whales. But this is just a coverup. The Right Whale population began its rapid decline in 2017, the year offshore wind development began in earnest. The Humpback Whale death rate tripled that very year and has remained abnormally high.

NMFS actually provides some of the strongest evidence. For every wind project they estimate the number of marine mammals by species that will be adversely affected by construction noise, something which they call “Level B Harassment”. For Right Whales the cumulative total of predicted Level B Harassments the government projects, and allows for, is already roughly twice the total population of the mammal … and growing.

Why is this a big deal?  Because such harassment can easily lead to a whale death. This can happen, for example, when the noise level of an operating turbine disrupts the navigation of a marine mammal, driving it into heavy ship traffic or fishing nets. BOEM and NMFS have refused to consider this deadly possibility, even for a single project like Dominion Energy’s windfarm off Virginia Beach, much less cumulatively. Meanwhile more and more whales are dying from ship strikes and fishing net entanglements as offshore wind development recklessly accelerates.

Harassment-caused death is merely one of many potentially deadly threats that BOEM and NMFS refuse to assess.  There are others we have cited, including loss of habitat, reduced food supply, and concentrated ship traffic.  This is why we are asking the Court to require that the government undertake such an investigation, as they are required to do so under the ESA, on all offshore wind projects cumulatively.

“Save the whales” is more than a slogan. It should be a directive our federal agencies are eager to carry out.  But if they won’t do it, then they shouldn’t be surprised to see lawsuits headed their way from every corner of the public interest – including from those of us on the right.

This article originally appeared at Real Clear Policy.

CFACT calls for banning offshore wind monopiles in favor of suction buckets to save whales

From CFACT

By David Wojick

Okay, this is not about sucking whales into giant buckets to take them away from offshore wind harm. Would that it were, but whales are way too big for that.

Instead, it is about a technology that can go a long way in reducing the harm to whales and other protected marine species. Simply put, suction buckets are a wind turbine foundation design that eliminates the need for those incredibly loud giant monopiles. Of all the ways that offshore wind threatens whales monopiles are the worst, while suction buckets are benign.

CFACT is calling for the banning of monopiles in favor of suction buckets. Mind you CFACT has made clear that they oppose offshore wind as destructive, ridiculously expensive, and completely unneeded. But if the Feds insist on having offshore wind it should sit on suction buckets, not monopiles.

To begin its call for banning monopiles CFACT recently posted comments to BOEM and NOAA via a proposal from the Beacon Wind project. Beacon is considering using suction buckets and wants to run some test cases. CFACT not only endorses these tests, it calls on this to be standard procedure on all offshore wind projects.

Suction bucket technology is simple and elegant. The bucket, less colorfully called a suction caisson, is a simple cylinder that is closed on one end. Installation is in two steps. First, the cylinder is set on the ocean floor with the open end down so it settles into the ocean floor a little way, thus sealing off the interior.

Then some of the water in the cylinder is pumped (or sucked) out. This reduces the internal pressure such that the external water pressure presses the cylinder into the sea floor. Pumping continues until the cylinder is fully embedded, where it can then be used as a structural foundation.

Instead of manually driving a pile, the ocean itself supplies the force. Three or four buckets are typically used to support a framework that then holds up the turbine tower.

The suction bucket technology has been around for many years, often used for anchoring offshore oil rigs. Using it for offshore wind is relatively new but Ørsted, the world’s biggest developer, has a 900 MW project underway off Taiwan so it is clearly feasible at the scale of US offshore projects.

Here is their description of suction bucket technology:

 

Bucket-Jacket_long-versionHerunterladen

Here are some central excerpts from the CFACT comments calling for a ban on monopiles in favor of suction bucket technology:

“Suction buckets are the perfect acoustic mitigation technology as installing them makes very little noise while installing monopiles is incredibly loud. Using them instead of monopiles will avoid the acoustic harassment of many thousands of marine mammals and other protected species.”

“This profound mitigation effect includes protecting the severely endangered North Atlantic Right Whale.”

“BOEM and NMFS should mandate that suction bucket technology be used for all fixed foundation offshore wind development, instead of piles, except where it is completely infeasible, which may be nowhere. At present, it appears that all of the proposed and in-process BOEM offshore wind projects with fixed foundations use deadly noisy monopiles. This use of monopiles must be replaced with suction bucket technology which is very quiet to install.”

“As part of this mandate, NMFS should cease authorizing thousands of marine mammal acoustic harassments per project from monopolies. It should also rescind all those authorizations where construction is not largely completed. Projects under construction using monopiles can switch to suction bucket foundations for their remaining turbines and substations.”

I hope others will join CFACT in calling for the banning of dangerously loud monopiles in favor of suction bucket technology. Surely the Marine Mammal Protection Act requires this switch.

Read CFACT’s full submission here

CFACT-Comments-on-Beacon-Wind-suction-buckets-on-Lease-OCS-A-0520Herunterladen

VIDEO: Save the whales from ocean industrialization

From CFACT

By Gabriella Hoffman

In Episode 15 of “Conservation Nation,” host @GabriellaHoffman travels to New England and the Jersey Shore to find out if ocean industrialization – namely offshore wind energy development – is imperiling marine life including endangered North Atlantic right whales. Filmed and edited by @itsmadisonhughes.

Thank you to @TexasPublicPolicyFoundation for letting us use footage from your documentary: