Reuters: Right-wing groups sue US over offshore wind impact on whales – Morano: ‘Where are the 1970s Volvo driving save the whale liberals when you need them?’
March 18 (Reuters) – Three right-wing groups sued the Biden administration on Monday over its approval of a wind project off the coast of Virginia, alleging it failed to consider the facility’s impacts on endangered whales. The federal lawsuit filed by the Heartland Institute, Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) and National Legal and Policy Center seeks to stop the construction of Dominion Energy Inc’s Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project pending a new federal analysis of risks to the North Atlantic right whale by the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS).
Climate Depot’s Marc Morano:“I have asked repeatedly: Where are the 1970s Volvo driving save the whale liberals when you need them? The answer is they appear to have gone AWOL. So it is up to conservatives to become the legal champion to save the whales.” As I said on the protest boat off of Martha’s Vineyard in the summer of 2023: “Hear this message: We’re here to save the whales! If you were a fossil fuel project, you would have been shut down long ago.”
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Flashback 2011: Sonar soundwaves ‘drive terrified whales to their death onshore’ – Soundwaves from underwater military sonar are far more distressing for whales than was previously thought and drives some terrified creatures to their death onshore, a new study has show. Scientist say beaked whales may also react with terror to noise from offshore wind turbines and oil and gas exploration.
Lawsuit filed by The Heartland Institute, the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), and the National Legal and Policy Center – Construction of Dominion Energy’s offshore wind project comes as more and more dead whales are washing up on the Atlantic Coast -The North Atlantic right whale is so critically endangered that federal agency says it can endure not even one human-caused death a year –
WASHINGTON, D.C. (March 18, 2024) – A coalition of public interest groups today is filing a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia against Biden administration officials and agencies seeking to overturn their approval of a massive wind turbine project off the shore of Virginia. The intent of the litigation is to stop Dominion Energy’s plans to start construction on May 1 in order to protect the North Atlantic right whales. The lawsuit – which names the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), and others – claims the agencies illegally approved Dominion Energy’s offshore wind project by ignoring glaring and obvious procedural errors that subjects the endangered North Atlantic right whale to further grave harm. … This lawsuit would cause Dominion to halt construction on the project until BOEM has developed a new “biological opinion”, providing verifiable protection against potential harm to the North Atlantic right whale caused by these projects. A total of 55 dead right whales have washed up on the beaches of the East Coast since 2017, causing the federal authorities to declare an “unusual mortality event” and create two areas of “critical habitat” for the whale – one off the coast of Maine and one off the coast Georgia. The North Atlantic right whale is a critically endangered species with only about 70 females capable of producing newborn calves. The North Atlantic right whale is so critically endangered that NMFS has issued a determination for the chances of survival for the species called the Potential Biological Removal Rate (PBR). The PBR for the NARW is 0.7, which means that if the species is to survive, there must be zero human-caused mortalities of the NARW on an annual basis.
LAST JULY (2023), a small group of rabble-rousers boarded a trio of powerboats, banners and bullhorns in hand. They were headed for the massive floating construction site of an offshore wind farm 35 miles from the eastern tip of Long Island, New York. As the boats motored through the swells, the self-styled activists broke into a chorus of pleas for the wind farm construction to cease—chants likely intended less for the still-faraway workers than for the camera there to capture footage. “Hear this message: We’re here to save the whales!” called out a man in a black polo shirt. “If you were a fossil fuel project, you would have been shut down long ago.”
That apparent conservation activist was, in fact, an infamous climate change disinformation artist: Marc Morano, who’s done more than perhaps any other person to manufacture doubt about global warming. From his perch at Climate Depot, the blog he’s run since 2009, Morano has elevated fake climate experts, encouraged the harassment of real climate scientists, and promoted the myth of “global cooling.”
