Large Numbers of Endangered Whales Spotted in West Coast Planned Offshore Wind Energy Zones
Large numbers of whales have been spotted in planned offshore wind power development zones off northern California and southern Oregon. I have been fighting fossil fuels and global warming for decades now, but increasingly am spending my time whistleblowing about so-called green energy technologies which are expanding human industrial impacts on the planet, biodiversity, water, etc.
There was a time when environmentalists understood we need to dramatically scale back the size of the human system as a starting point (degrowth), but now many technotopians believe technology will enable endless growth and transform this consumeristic capitalist society into sustainability, when the evidence overwhelmingly points in the opposite direction (see my book Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It for an in-depth exploration of this topic).
We who love nature need to be prepared to fight industrial destruction of our planet, no matter how much a project pretends to be good for the planet via greenwashing. In other words: we need to stop the fossil fuels, stop the pipelines, stop the solar arrays, stop the new highways, stop the urban sprawl, stop the factories, stop the transmission lines, stop it all.
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Excerpt from the article:
“There are quite a lot of large whales out there, quite a number,” said Lisa Ballance, the director of Oregon State’s Marine Mammal Institute and the principal investigator on the project. “Humpbacks are quite abundant. Increasingly, blue whales are quite abundant. We also see a whale that is less familiar to most people called a sei whale. It looks a lot like a blue whale, not quite as big but a very large animal.”
Blue whales, sei whales and some sub-populations of humpbacks are federally-listed as endangered species. As for birds, researchers have spotted threatened marble murrelets, as well as long-distance travelers like black-footed albatrosses and Laysan albatrosses.
https://calcoastnews.com/2022/12/researchers-spot-whales-near-california-wind-farm-zones/
Photo: Sei whale mother and baby, public domain photo from NOAA.