Why Environmentalists May Make This Whale Species Extinct
By Paul Homewood
Since the passage of the 1973 Endangered Species Act, environmentalists have fought for strict protections for endangered species. They have demanded that the government apply what is known as the “precautionary principle,” which states that if there is any risk that a human activity will make a species extinct, it should be illegal.
And yet here we are, on the 50th anniversary of the Endangered Species Act, watching the whole of the environmental movement — from the Audubon Society and the National Wildlife Federation to scientific groups like the Woods Hole Institute, New England Aquarium, and Mystic Aquarium — betray the precautionary principle by risking the extinction of the North Atlantic right whale.
The cause of this environmental betrayal is massive industrial wind energy projects off the East Coast of the U.S. The wind turbine blades are the length of a football field. Sitting atop giant poles they will reach three times higher than the Statue of Liberty. The towers will be directly inside critical ocean habitat for the North Atlantic right whale.
There are only 340 of the whales left, down from 348 just one year earlier. So many North Atlantic right whales are killed by man-made factors that there have been no documented cases of any of them dying of natural causes in decades. Their average life expectancy has declined from a century to 45 years. A single additional unnatural and unnecessary death could risk the loss of the entire species.
Surveying for, building, and operating industrial wind projects could harm or kill whales, according to the U.S. government’s own science.
The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has given the wind industry 11 “incidental harassment authorizations,” or permits to harass hundreds of whales, including 169 critically endangered right whales.
The industry will bring more ships into the areas that could strike and kill whales. Submarine noise pollution from the wind farm’s construction and operation, and entanglements in equipment, also add to the risk. So too could air turbulence generated by the turbines harm or destroy zooplakton feeding grounds.
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“What is going on? How is it that nearly every major conservation and environmental organization is actively championing industrial energy projects that could lead to the extinction of a whale species?”
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And, now, wind developers are demanding higher speed limits for their boats. If they don’t get them, the industry claims, it will need to build hotels for the workers at the sites, right in the middle of right whale habitat.
Defenders of the wind projects say they can reduce and mitigate the noise and ship traffic from the wind farm construction, but a senior scientist with the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) contradicted that claim last spring when he wrote in a letter that “oceanographic impacts from installed and operating [wind] turbines cannot be mitigated for the 30-year lifespan of the project unless they are decommissioned.”
Scientists representing many of the same environmental groups supporting the industrial wind energy projects wrote in a 2021 letter that “the North Atlantic right whale population cannot withstand any additional stressors; any potential interruption of foraging behavior may lead to population-level effects and is of critical concern.”
Industrial wind projects “could have population-level effects on an already endangered and stressed species,” concluded the NOAA scientist, Sean Hayes. What are “population-level effects?” In a word: extinction.
What is going on? How is it that nearly every major conservation and environmental organization is actively championing industrial energy projects that could lead to the extinction of a whale species?
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Rules are for thee . . . .
Because they cannot recognise the horns of a dilemma when impaled on them?
You surprise me. Assuming that the average eco-activist keeps his brain and his eyes in the same part of his anatomy I would have thought that he would be ideally placed to recognise the horns of a dilemma when sitting on it.
I thought that was very little left in the eco-fascist playbook that could drive me to tears, partly at the wanton elimination of a species almost as intelligent in its own way as we are, partly of frustration at the crass stupidity which appears to be an essential characteristic of the average environ-mentalist.
This comes very close.
That’s a mighty big assumption Sir! As they cannot seem to recognise what is in front of their faces I do wonder if there is an optic nerve connecting those two organs
dbb
I was too clever. I assumed that the eyes and the brain were in the same part of the anatomy that they had become impaled by. Their faces don’t come into it!!
“a species almost as intelligent in its own way as we are”
And infinitely more intelligent than the average bedwetting watermelon.
And, birds, bats…… They don’t care.
One example, conservationists are desperately trying to save/reintroduce Griffon Vultures with breeding/release programs, whilst greens are installing windmills all over their ranges that whack them to death by the dozen.
Since when did the industrial scale slaughter of Birds and Bats, by the million, become ‘Clean Green’ energy?
Every year in Spain alone — according to research by the conservation group SEO/Birdlife — between 6 and 18 million, yes million, birds and bats are killed by wind farms. They kill roughly twice as many bats as birds.
The Tasmanian Wedge-tailed Eagle is at the point of extinction due to wind farms. Recent research from around the world indicates horrific bird mortality rates:-
Spain – 330 Birds per turbine per year
Germany – 309 Birds per turbine per year
Sweden – 895 Birds per turbine per year
When will the wind industry be forced tell us the appalling truth?
And before the absurd is mentioned, I’ve never seen an eagle, gannet or fulmar killed by a cat, car windscreen, or kitchen window!
And when it comes to killing raptors and bats, you are killing animals that are at the top of the chain and so breed in small numbers making this even more serious if you want to keep them around.
The issue is never the issue.
They care about the environment to the extent that concern about it can be exploited. They use it because YOU care. They don’t.
I confess I hadn’t quite considered it from that angle before though their hypocrisy (along with that of ER and its assorted offspring) is plain for all to see.
Some definitely, but most are just incoherent in their thinking. They cannot do joined up. Instead they absolutely obsess about one thing (or one victim group) to the exclusion of everything else. At the moment it’s renewables, which we must have no matter what. At some point and for no identifiable reason, that will shift to something else and we will be subject to a new round of madness.
“At some point and for no identifiable reason”
When their pretend issue stops getting traction. They never declare victory and quit. They pivot to some new, critical issue.
When “global warming” was fading, they shifted to “climate change,” OH MY!
As that looses traction, they shift to climate whackyness.
The basically same lot self-righteous lot as the CND and Peace Camp brigade, plying their silly recreational outrage trade for the past fifty years.
And they still don’t realise they’ve backed the wrong horse!
Anyone else getting emails blocked? I have tried 2 different email addresses and after a few days I don’t receive your emails anymore even though I have marked your emails to never be blocked. I have the same problem with another site that specialises in climate change.
What email server do you use?
Many of the big name ones are certainly policed for “subversive” content such as vaccine and climate sceptical posts.
I use Outlook 365 to download emails to my desktop and the servers are imap.gmail.com and imap.tiscali.com. Does that help? Since my original email I have received 2 email messages from Not A Lot Of People etc.
The search engine censorship is becoming very worrying. I recently searched for a paper by Thayer Watkins. I specifically entered (including capitalisation) – “The Molecular Composition of the Atmosphere. ” Despite the exact title of the paper I struggled to locate it. Try it for yourself.
This really is serious and dangerous censorship.
Here it is by the way.
http://applet-magic.com.p11.hostingprod.com/atmosphere0.htm
Difficult…
Outlook and Gmail are Big Tech products, hence suspect for anything remotely controversial, such as CV19 and AGW.
Unfortunately it is difficult to find anything that isn’t, I’m lucky in having my email server with a small local company with full direct access to my account including whitelists and blacklists, this dates back to when I was running an IT company and I’ve managed to retain certain facilities.
I use Applemail on my main machine and Thunderbird and direct access to my on my Windows machine as reference.
Unfortunately, it’s difficult to know what to recommend!
Yes this is a fact.
So why wouldn’t climate sceptics be monitored and censored when vast amounts of money and power are at stake ?
Watch “77th Brigade in the pandemic” on YouTube
Interesting paper Ray.
I can see why it’s difficult to find!
No problem with btinternet.com
No problems with btconnect. com running Outlook on Microsoft 365
My latest on this cruel fiasco:
https://www.cfact.org/2023/01/30/feds-push-ignorance-defense-for-whale-killing-by-offshore-wind-development/
The smaller whale groups have not sold out:
https://www.cfact.org/2022/12/21/ten-whale-groups-slam-atlantic-osw/
NRDC and Sierra Club are environmental industrialists, a living oxymoron.
It’s the whales fault.
They’re not big white furry and cuddly looking.
Unless David Attenborough, Walt Disney and the Sunday supplements back them, they don’t count.
I would of thought Greenpeace would have a ship out there preventing the things being built by now.
Nor does mainstream media want to discuss the ethics of climate change misinformation and how these lies are exploited.
I can hear it already – “Move along now. Nothing to see here”.
The whole “endangered species” concept is rife w/ problems. In the mid-1970’s, I worked as a short-term botanist on the “Endangered Plant Species Project” of the Smithsonian Institution. There were a few major problems in how it was structured:
1. My appointment was at the beginning of the program which was headed by a retired entomologist (that’s bugs), from the Dept. of Agriculture who wanted a nice vacation between his “jobs”. I was brought in to fill the gap for several months.
2. The bug guy had already set up the parameters and it became obvious that he had little/no understanding of how the botanical side worked.
3. He told me that I could get the list of the “valid species” using the Gray Card File. That file had been set up by Asa Gray to be a comprehensive, ongoing list of all the “validly” published genera, species, sub-species, varieties, forms, etc. Just because a name had met the criteria for validly published, does NOT imply that it is currently considered a “valid species, etc.” Those are 2 different things and missed totally by Mr. Bug Guy.
4. Finally, and most importantly, the list of potential “endangered SPECIES” was filled with more than half “sub-species”, “varieties” and “forms”. When dealing w/ plants, this is really shaky ground when you get to the sub-specific level. Many botanists, especially in the day of publish or perish, are what we term “splitters” with every plant being a new entity. For example, when I did a redo of the Phlox family, I found that a single sheet of several plants collected at the same location at the same time, might be later annotated as more than one sub-species or variety. Hmmm.
environmentalists-may-make-this-whale-species-extinct
Good to see that we can use weasel words just like they do.