Re: Offshore wind farms, dead whales and the row that's started a green-on-green civil war

On 14 Nov 2023, "Trump - Inmate Number P01135809"
<[email protected]> posted some news:[email protected]: 

> What happened to save the whales?  Liberals are killing them.

The helpless body of a huge whale washed up on the shoreline is always a 
sombre sight. But the discovery of a dead 52ft fin whale on Newquay’s 
Fistral Beach at dawn last week was particularly depressing for locals, 
who have been spotting a growing number of the majestic animals off their 
coast in recent months. “It’s heartbreaking,” said resident Kathryn 
Fuller.

The increase in whale sightings off Cornwall had been greeted as a sign 
that marine life was thriving. But the whale’s death was a reminder that 
beachings often have a man-made cause, such as fishing, naval sonar 
(which, it is thought, causes whales to surface too quickly, leading to 
decompression sickness) or collisions with ships. “These intelligent 
beings look so sad and helpless out of the water,” says Danny Groves of 
Whale and Dolphin Conservation.

And now there is fierce global debate about whether another factor could 
be at play in such incidents: offshore wind farms – a controversy that has 
set the passionately pursued ‘green’ agendas of renewable energy activists 
and conservationists against one another.

The finger-pointing began in February with a spate of strandings and 
deaths of baleen whales (the name for humpbacks, fin whales and blue 
whales) on America’s east coast, which some blamed on huge turbines off 
the US seaboard.

Research into the deaths found that 40 per cent of them resulted either 
from ship strikes or netting entanglement. Some activists suggested that 
the whales had become confused because their hearing had been damaged by 
drilling during the construction of offshore turbines, making it more 
difficult for them to avoid ships.

More recently, in Australia a separate campaign opposing offshore wind 
farms in New South Wales claimed they pose a risk to whales there too. 
Placards carried by protesters on beaches bore the message ‘Stop these 
monsters’, referring not to the leviathans of the deep but to renewable 
energy turbines whose rotor blades can span more than 250m – more than 10 
times as long as a blue whale.

Such is the divisive nature of the allegations they have even become a 
front in America’s bitter politico-culture wars. Speaking at a rally in 
South Carolina in September, former US president Donald Trump suggested 
that wind turbines off the coast of the US “are causing whales to die in 
numbers never seen before”.

Former Greenpeace Canada president Dr Patrick Moore agrees that wind farms 
are harmful to whales: “The development of these wind farms is interfering 
massively with the actual known habitat of these creatures,” he said in 
May. But Moore left Greenpeace in 1986, and has since become a frequent 
critic of the green movement. Today, the campaign group disavows his 
comments, suggesting that the whale-vs-wind farm controversy may even be a 
conspiracy whipped up to discredit renewables.

“Academics have linked these attempts [at controversy] in the US with oil 
and gas interests,” says Dr Doug Parr, chief scientist for Greenpeace UK. 
Such stories, he adds, “exploit the admirable concern that people have for 
the natural environment.” Yet, he acknowledges, “offshore wind needs to be 
sited where it will least impact wildlife.”

The most obvious problem is noise. Our seas are getting ever louder – a 
2016 estimate of global shipping noise projected a near doubling by 2030. 
“Introducing loud underwater noise pollution from military exercises, or 
seismic surveys for oil and gas has a dramatic effect on [whales’ and 
dolphins’] lives and wellbeing,” explains Groves. “It can cause them 
suffering, change their behaviour and drive them away from the places 
where they breed and feed. In some cases it can cause them to strand and 
die.”

But it’s not just military exercises or seismic surveys that are loud. 
Building huge wind farms is noisy work too. According to Whale and Dolphin 
Conservation, the use of pile drivers in the construction of offshore wind 
farms adversely affects the behaviour of whales, dolphins and porpoises to 
distances of up to 25 miles. They can even be injured or killed if they 
are too close to the source of the sound, they say.

Rob Deaville, from the Zoological Society of London’s Cetacean Strandings 
Investigation Programme, agrees: “If you have porpoises or dolphins living 
in an area and you start driving a pile into the seabed to erect a wind 
turbine, that generates a lot of noise and that definitively has been 
demonstrated to have a dissuasive effect. It drives animals away from an 
area.”

Deaville, who investigates dead animals on the UK coast and studies the 
threats they face, is used to the hubbub that accompanies a high-profile 
stranding: “We’ve never been able to definitively link any of the 
strandings we’ve investigated with wind farm activity,” he says. “That 
said, there’s a huge body of evidence that does demonstrate the impact of 
wind farms on some species of cetacean.”

An analysis published by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering 
and Medicine in the US last month called for greater investigation into 
how offshore wind farms affect water flows and food sources for critically 
endangered whales near the Massachusetts coast.

For Deaville, such work is essential as part of a wider assessment of wind 
farms’ pros and cons. “It’s useful to have that debate as a society,” he 
says. “Nothing is cost-free.”

The question, then, is what happens after a wind farm is built and becomes 
operational, and quieter? It’s a mixed picture.

“In some wind farms animals don’t come back in numbers like before,” says 
Deaville. “In some areas, though, they might come back in greater numbers 
than before.”

The theory is that when fishing in and around wind farms is banned due to 
a risk of entanglement on the piles, that then acts as a reef, which lures 
marine species back into the areas. “You get more fish, and therefore more 
cetaceans to feed on the fish,” says Deaville. “So there’s no easy 
answer.”

At Newquay – which has no offshore wind farm nearby – there is no obvious 
cause behind the fin whale’s death. “We will not know what happened to 
this individual until a necropsy is performed. And even then, the real 
cause may never be known,” says Groves.

Whale and Dolphin Conservation now supports the development of marine 
renewable energy developments – in appropriate locations. However, it 
believes that, until impacts can be fully mitigated, new renewable energy 
programmes should be excluded from important Marine Protected Areas, or 
MPAs. “Buffer zones should be created around MPAs, so as to avoid 
displacing whales, dolphins and porpoises from important feeding and 
breeding areas.” says Groves.

The case against wind farms may be less than clear cut, but, says Groves, 
“What is certain is that these ocean giants help keep the seas healthy. A 
healthy ocean helps us fight climate breakdown.

“They are our allies in this struggle and offer hope, so we need to 
prioritise increasing their numbers, not place them in harm’s way.”

https://news.yahoo.com/whale-death-controversy-pitting-eco-140000190.html