The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) published a draft of their strategy to protect the critically endangered North Atlantic Right Whale. The report is a heartbreaking portrayal of the plight of the 336 remaining right whales.

The “stressors” of industrialized ocean noise and dwindling food sources due to climate-driven changes in habitat have resulted in rapidly declining numbers and compromised body condition. According to the report, fishing gear entanglement and vessel strikes have caused the deaths and sub-lethal injuries.

“Human-caused mortality is so high,” BOEM scientists state, “that no adult NARW has been confirmed to have died from natural causes in several decades; for a species that might live a century, most animals have a low probability of surviving past 40.”

Fewer than 70 reproductively able females remain, with their lifetime calving potential having been reduced “from more than a dozen to perhaps just 2-3 calves.” NOAA Fisheries’ survey of the whales’ numbers and health concludes, “the species faces a high risk of extinction,” with “the loss of even one individual a year” reducing any chance of the whales’ future recovery.

The report includes maps showing extensive overlap of offshore wind development areas with right whale migration routes and feeding, breeding, calving, and resting habitat “critical to their survival,” from Maine to the Carolinas. BOEM surprises with its stark admission, “The overlap between offshore wind development (planned, leased, and permitted) and right whale habitat extends to corridors outside the immediate development sites, where vessel traffic between ports and offshore sites [and noise and ecosystem-level changes] would further overlap with the distribution of North Atlantic Right Whales.”

A list of stressors due to OSW development resulting in mortality, serious injury, behavioral disturbances and, ultimately, starvation is provided: 1) exposure to vessel and construction noise and pressure (from extensive sonar mapping of the ocean floor, pile driving and the detonation of unexploded World War II ordinances); 2) entanglement in turbine cables and moorings; 3) increased risk of vessel strikes inherent in offshore win construction, operational and maintenance activities; and 4) changes to habitat affecting zooplankton food sources due to the alteration of ocean circulation and water mixing from operative turbines and “impingement or entrainment of prey in cooling water intakes associated with High Voltage Direct Current cable systems.”

All this exposure results from a single offshore wind project; yet the U.S. plans to develop 22 million acres (8%) of the continental shelf along the eastern seaboard despite “North Atlantic Right Whales migrating along the U.S. Atlantic Coast travel through or nearby every proposed offshore win development.”

This catastrophic news for the right whale leads directly into BOEM’s so-called “Strategy … to protect and promote the recovery of North Atlantic right whales while responsibly developing offshore wind energy.”Apparently, this having-and-eating-the-cake master plan will be accomplished through various untested, unproven, and unfunded “mitigation” efforts purportedly carried out by wind companies with NOAA Fisheries oversight.

Yet, as the report acknowledges: “NOAA and BOEM recognize that the majority of the funding required to support the actions described in this strategy will require support from multiple sources, including government, states, industry and other stakeholders. This funding has not been secured” [italics added].

BOEM’s “Strategy” is cover-your-behind political chicanery in service of the offshore wind industry’s furious rush toward cashing in on enormous amounts of public monies. Most distressingly, it is also the industry’s ticket to the total annihilation of the last of the North Atlantic right whales.

Constance Gee

Westport