Feds must rethink authorizing harassment of whales by offshore wind – Watts Up With That?

From CFACT

By David Wojick

We now know offshore wind sonar surveys are a likely cause of whale deaths. For details, see my prior article.

Simply put, a significant fraction of authorized harassments likely causes whales to be killed.

The question is how should the Federal approval process for offshore wind surveys be restructured to incorporate this new whale-death knowledge? One obvious possibility is to simply ban the practice. That works for me, but may be too extreme to pull off.

If a certain number of whale deaths is deemed allowable, here is the outline of a death allocation procedure. Included are the other protected marine species for which sonar-induced deaths might be established, as well as harassment from other offshore wind activities. This is basically a death budget for the offshore wind program.

There are three offshore zones for which the following six steps should be done — Atlantic, Pacific and Gulf of Mexico.

1. The federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) identifies the existing leases and leases in process or likely to become so. For each lease, they estimate the potential generating capacity of each as well as the likely technologies and life cycles thereof.

2. The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) determines the harassment potential over time for each lease, for each exposed endangered and protected species. All relevant forms of harassment are considered, including noise, wake effects, and physical presence.

3. NMFS determines the mortality impact of the combined harassment for all leases on each species. The new statistical procedure pioneered by Professor Gerasoulis likely plays a major role here.

4. NMFS determines the allowable amount of harassment that will have no adverse effect on the population of each species.

5. NMFS and BOEM jointly develop an administrative procedure for allocating the allowable harassment authorization to the leases. If Step 4 cannot be done, I suggest the allowable amount for all leases combined be limited to ten percent or less of the exposed population for each species. We need a default limit on allowable deaths.

6. NMFS allocates harassment authorizations in accordance with the established procedure. These allocations may be adjusted over time as knowledge and technology changes.

No development that creates harassment can occur without authorization. Note that the numerous planned and in development offshore wind projects are at very different stages of federal development:

• Operational
• Under construction
• Approved for construction
• In the process of approval
• Leased but not yet applied for approval
• Not yet leased

Projects in different stages might get different allocation treatment, especially the advanced projects that already have big authorizations that now have to be restricted.

Of course lots of death research is now needed. This includes for other critters besides whales, especially dolphins, whose harassment numbers are huge. It also includes the other stages of development besides sonar surveys. For example, construction harassment allocation numbers run ten times or more greater than survey numbers. Then, there is operations harassment, which NMFS has yet to recognize.

The Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA) needs to be rethought as well. It clearly was never designed to handle the hundreds of thousands of harassment authorizations that are being doled out to the offshore wind developers. This is painfully true now that we know numerous whales are being killed because of harassment.

The big question is whether unavoidable yet deadly offshore wind harassment is even legal under the MMPA and the Endangered Species Act.