After 4 Whales Die in 4 Days, NJ GOP Wants 60 Day Ban on Offshore Wind Farm Construction
As with many of today’s problems, the root cause can be traced back to Biden ill-considered green energy policies.
We have been reporting on the spate of whale deaths, which have occurred along the East Coast in significant numbers over the past few months.
This past week, four whales washed ashore within four days, sparking concerns that the offshore wind farms are behind the deaths.
The four-day run of death began in Eastham, on Cape Cod, Mass., on Thursday, with a second minke found at York, Maine, on Friday, and the final corpse at Gloucester, Mass. on Sunday.
At least 36 “large” whales have washed up along the East Coast since Dec. 1, according to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
It tracks the deaths of “large” species in the Atlantic including minke, humpback, bowhead, fin, sei, sperm and blue North Atlantic right whales.
The toll of whale deaths includes 16 humpbacks thus far in 2023, seven of them found along the New Jersey shore.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration declared an “unusual mortality event” among humpbacks in January 2016.
This year’s mortalities are on pace to shatter 2017’s tally of 34, federal data shows.
The overall scale of whale deaths could be even worse: NOAA does not have a public tracker for toothed whales, such as narwhals and beluga whales.
New Jersey Republicans are demanding that construction on offshore wind farm projects be halted for up to 60 days to see if it will reduce the number of whales washing up dead on East Coast beaches.
During a Wednesday hearing, four New Jersey state senators requested that wind farm work be halted for 30 to 60 days, the latest step in a movement started by environmental groups in January to determine whether turbines could be the cause of the scores of recent whale deaths.
…New Jersey has been rapidly clearing way for the development of new wind farm projects of its coasts, with large-scale construction already underway at several sites.
hough skeptics – including federal agencies such as The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) – have been adamant there is no evidence the farms are causing the deaths, federal lawmakers like New Jersey Democratic Senator Cory Booker have requested deeper investigations into what might be causing the deaths.
Republican New Jersey Senator Michael Testa said halting construction on the wind farms was an easy way to test the theory.
‘One thing our side of the aisle gets accused of is not following the science,’ he said, according to CBS News. ‘So what is the harm of waiting 30 or 60 days?’
Federal “experts” assure everyone that offshore wind farms may “adversely affect” whales and other marine mammals, but their construction, operation, and eventual dismantling will not seriously harm or kill them.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued a report Tuesday evaluating an analysis by the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management of the Ocean Wind I project to be built off the southern New Jersey coast.
NOAA’s final biological opinion examined BOEM’s research, and took into account “the best scientific and commercial data available.”
NOAA determined the project by Danish wind power company Orsted “is likely to adversely affect, but is not likely to jeopardize, the continued existence of any species” of endangered whales, sea turtles and other animals. Nor is it likely to “destroy or adversely modify any designated critical habitat.”
As with many of today’s problems, the root cause can be traced back to Biden’s ill-considered green energy policies.
Tax incentives in President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act spurred the immense development on the coast, where more than 3,000 wind turbines and roughly 10,000 miles of cable will be put in place, ProPublica reported.
But Cindy Zipf, executive director of Clean Ocean Action, told lawmakers at the hearing that construction had “gone too far, too fast.”
“We’re only beginning with the pre-construction now, and already, we’ve started seeing whales dying and washing up on our beaches.”
It will be interesting to see which political representatives want to follow science and which will continue to follow pseudoscience.
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Comments
A 60-day ban – to achieve what, exactly?
Keep them from violating FAcebook TOS… 🙂
An then altogether
Worthless, criminal
Follow the science… that says outright observed phenomena “can’t happen.”
The whales probably collide with them when gathering to scoop up the dead birds that they leave.
A forever ban would prove far more valuable.
Fake scientific papers are alarmingly common
But new tools show promise in tackling growing symptom of academia’s “publish or perish” culture:
When neuropsychologist Bernhard Sabel put his new fake-paper detector to work, he was “shocked” by what it found. After screening some 5000 papers, he estimates up to 34% of neuroscience papers published in 2020 were likely made up or plagiarized; in medicine, the figure was 24%. Both numbers, which he and colleagues report in a medRxiv preprint posted on 8 May, are well above levels they calculated for 2010—and far larger than the 2% baseline estimated in a 2022 publishers’ group report.
“It is just too hard to believe” at first, says Sabel of Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg and editor-in-chief of Restorative Neurology and Neuroscience. It’s as if “somebody tells you 30% of what you eat is toxic.”
https://www.science.org/content/article/fake-scientific-papers-are-alarmingly-common
Just like the degenerate plutocratic media.
It is increasingly clear the left was never about the environment. It is all about control and the morons that vote for these pathetic, corrupt creeps are blind to the issue because they are brainwashed cultists.
Let’s not get carried away here. We have not had VP Harris weigh in on the “root causes” yet. Also, who wants to “follow the science”? Following the money is much better. /s
Suggested response from President Harris. Sorry I meant Vice President.
“Today, we gather to mourn the loss of these fish, and to consider that the loss of these fish will prevent us from having more fish like these fish in the future. It is important that as we undertake the mourning of the loss of fish today, and the fish tomorrow, that we celebrate the fish we had yesterday, and live for the promise of fish tomorrow. Although the loss of fish today means less fish tomorrow, we can also applaud the efforts and sacrifice of these fish to pave the future for renewable energy that is safe, clean, and efficient.” (Insert inappropriate and untimely laugh here)
Drilling for oil did away with whaling for oil.
So fossil fuel saved the whales and now “green energy” is killing them.
The circle of life…
If only Captain Ahab had had access to a wind turbine.
It would be much better to go back to protecting the environment as good stewards of the land instead of invoking ‘climate change’ as a boogeyman and pissing away money and time to comply with regulations that in the end won’t materially reduce world temperature. The developing world isn’t going to comply and they shouldn’t. The people there have as much right to develop into a modern society with all the things we have as our Nation.